The White Peril 白禍

One of the guys at worked asked why, given how willing I am to spout off about politics, I wasn't watching the pageantry at the DNC. This from Kerry's acceptance speech is part of the reason:

Before wrapping themselves in the flag and shutting their eyes and ears to the truth, they should remember what America is really all about.

Please tell me he didn't actually say that?

Meaty Fly (who's commented on a few posts below and will presumably be another reader who can tell me when I mangle my translations from Japanese) has this post about Sino-Japanese relations and how their development affects US interests. He (I assume) quotes several Japanese news sources to make the following point, specifically with regard to a proposed natural gas pipeline but also with wider implications. I've left out the links in his original post:

The United States is the world's biggest oil consumer; China is in second place and rising. Japan depends on the Middle East for 90% of its oil. Thus, the stakes are high in all directions. The pipeline to Japan may also serve U.S. interests, because it "would also be a strategic asset for Russia, allowing it to export to other Asian countries and perhaps the US west coast."

Tensions between China and Japan over energy don't stop there. Japan is embroiled in a dispute with China over offshore natural gas fields.

Since US businesses and MBA programs stopped thinking of Japan's management and bureaucratic practices as sexy, and there are no more human interest features to write about how Japan, Inc., is going to leave the hard-working American family impoverished, events in Japan don't seem to make the news as much in the States anymore. Even here, little incidents between Japan and Korea, or Japan and China, over disputed islands and ships passing in the night are so frequent that they can obscure potentially big stories like these. One hopes that the US government is giving them due attention.

I don't really expect things to spiral out of control soon, given present conditions. Still, resentments run old and deep in this part of the world, even if you just think back as far as World War II. The generation that actually lived through the War is dying off, but in the last decade, several high-profile controversies--the proposed reparations suit by Korean comfort women, the dismissive trashing of Iris Chang's book The Rape of Nanking by Japanese historians, the whitewashing of Japanese aggression in its public school history textbooks--have kept the ill-feeling simmering. As far as strategic allies in the Pacific Rim go, China has a regime we flat-out can't trust; Korea and Taiwan (the latter of which could be forgiven for not trusting us entirely) have their own very immediate defense problems to worry about and won't have the ability to project much force for the foreseeable future. Japan is still basically the only game in town, no matter how fast the Chinese economy is growing.

The DPJ's Katsuya Okada has been busy since arriving in Boston. After meeting with Ezra Vogel and Joseph Nye, he seems to have met with Walter Mondale, telling him that the US needs to stay in Iraq until it's stabilized (actually, the phrasing is the usual "we must humbly receive the favor of your staying...," the we presumably referring to Japan and the rest of the world) but that Japan itself, despite the end of combat, cannot keep the SDF there because of constitutional strictures. None of that is surprising.

He also said that US-Japan relations have been relying too much on Armitage personally and that he wonders whether we would still be bestest buddies if Kerry were elected (well, he said "the administration changed to a Democratic one," but he's presumably talking about the upcoming election). I was surprised at myself, at first, for not having given that issue much thought. But I think my assumption was that since Japan has socialized medicine, federal initiatives for anything and everything, and a general tradition of ecstatic individual self-abnegation for the good of the collective...sheesh, what's for the Democrats, all the way to the left fringe, not to love? It's also a non-white society that always talks about how it loves nature, despite its actual records on ethnic diversity and environmental protection. Also, the people use less energy and throw away less trash per capita than Americans, so even if you have socialist tendencies, you can kind of justify how staggeringly rich the country is.

In any case, while my experience is that the States-side Democrats/liberals/leftists I know think of Japan as a beacon of the "Third Way," it's hard to predict how a Kerry administration might set its Japan policy because we don't seem to have much indication of who could be his ranking foreign policy advisors. Of course, that policy strategists are kindly disposed toward Japan may not mean that they know how to deal with it effectively; but East Asia specialists tend to study countries they're attracted to somehow.

The reactions to Andrew Sullivan's current pledge drive have been snarkily cute, but I have to say they seem to jump the gun a bit. When I first read his post saying he was starting this year's pledge drive, I saw the part about the bandwidth and interpreted it completely differently, it appears, from everyone else I read. I didn't get the impression that he was asking for a few thousand dollars all to cover bandwidth. My understanding was that the money that was left over from last year's pledge drive had dipped below the point at which he could afford his new bandwidth charges without using his own money--not the same thing.

Sullivan's site was never run like most people's blogs. From the beginning, he had backers who were helping him to set it up as a way to make his archived writings available and make him a web presence as a commentator--remember, he's been around longer than almost anyone else. The Daily Dish was originally just one element of the whole. Perhaps it still is in conception, though I'd bet that the Dish is the only page that most of his readers look at, except when he has a new article of his linked. From the beginning, andrewsullivan.com was presented almost as a foundation. It had different membership levels for different donated amounts, like a museum or the opera. He made it clear that donations were going to go to wages for his webmaster and editor and...an intern, I think?...and whoever else he was going to hire to help with it. He has also always said, up front, that he does quite a bit of research to keep the Dish up and didn't feel embarrassed about being modestly compensated personally for it. Looked at that way, I can see how he could go through nearly $100000 in a year; it's not easy to imagine, but it's not impossible, either.

You can say it's pompous of him to act as if he were PBS. You can say that having a staff for his website is excessive and that it's cheeky of him to expect people to shell out for it. I've sometimes felt that way myself and have never contributed as much to andrewsullivan.com as I have to some other people who were just folks taking time out of their lives to build, for the hell of it, a site people would enjoy and learn from and maybe want to discuss things on. I'm not...well, I was going to say that I'm not very self-aggrandizing, but there's someone who knows me in person who reads this site, so that won't fly. I'm not the Gold Circle Donor type--let's put it that way.

But if others are, I don't see why Sullivan is necessarily being dishonest in asking them to kick in. It's not as if they don't know what they're contributing to.

Ooh. This I hadn't heard about the reunion of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins:

Jenkins told them that he had been set to take Soga to North Korea if they had met in Beijing, according to Japanese sources.

North Korea authorities had promised a car with a driver and increased food rations if he managed to take Soga to Pyongyang, the sources said.

But Jenkins didn't reveal how he planned to take Soga to Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoya said on Tuesday that Jenkins had agreed to meet with a U.S. defense counsel to discuss a possible court martial to settle changes against him.

That Jenkins was prepared for court martial, as conveyed to a relative who visited Japan last week, was on the news yesterday. What hadn't been confirmed that was Soga's instincts had been right about the meeting in Beijing. Good call. (And remind me again why a country that has to ration food is superior to anything?)

***

And speaking of betrayals, yesterday, the Tokyo district court ordered a suspension of merger talks between Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and the UFJ Group (Japanese, English). The merger would involve reneging on an agreement between UFJ and Sumitomo Trust and Banking (why not get all the behemoth financial institutions to join in the fun while we're at it, huh?) for Sumitomo to buy UFJ's trust bank. Sumitomo, justifiably unhappy, is suing.

While everyone's busy wishing Bill Clinton could run for President again, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been a quiet attendee at the Democratic Convention and has been making a few interesting contacts. Katsuya Okada, leader of the DPJ, has apparently met with Joseph Nye, one of Clinton's Assistant Secretaries of Defense now back at Harvard, and Ezra Vogel, the Harvard professor emeritus who's one of the few people to specialize equally in China and Japan. Naturally, they (the Nikkei article is very brief and doesn't say whether the three met together or Okada met the others individually) talked about security issues and US-Japan relations. No report of what they specifically discussed.

This is a few days old, and I didn't know what to make of it because I couldn't find any quotation of what Armitage had actually said to Nakagawa. The English versions of the Japanese papers are now writing about it, but they still don't say what his words were:

Officials in the ruling coalition as well as the opposition camp clearly were caught off-guard by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's remark last week that war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution is becoming an obstacle to strengthening the Japan-U.S. alliance.

Since it was uttered by a senior Bush administration official known for his deep understanding of Japan, they fear it may negatively affect Japan-U.S. relations and ongoing debate in Japan on revisions to the Constitution.

Opposition members also were critical of Armitage for pressing Japan to revise the Constitution.

Hidenao Nakagawa, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party's Diet Affairs Committee, shook up lawmakers after he relayed the gist of a meeting with Armitage in Washington last Wednesday.

Armitage also told Nakagawa that while Washington supported Tokyo's moves to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, any nation with that status must be ready to deploy military force in the interests of the international community. Unless it is prepared to do that, Armitage said it would be difficult for Japan to become a permanent member.

The revision being discussed would appear to be a rather modest one; it just makes it possible for the SDF to provide combat assistance in defense of an ally. As written, the constitution doesn't allow Japan to go into combat for anything but defense of Japan itself. 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.

The "means of settling international disputes" is the part that's interpreted conservatively right now. I haven't seen anything to indicate what verbal formulation would be used for the amendment, so it may not have been put together yet, but everything the Koizumi administration (which is proposing it) says indicates that it would apply only to common defense agreements with allies. In the course of arguing for such an amendment, he has, naturally, pointed out that US armed forces personnel already defend Japan.

The PRC has been little mentioned in the most recent discussions on this point--at least, that I've seen--but as you may surmise, Beijing isn't exactly champing at the bit for an opportunity to welcome a Japan with the constitutional permission to project force as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

So yet again, the War on Terrorism is putting predictable stress on all kinds of tensely-balanced relationships in the Asia-Pacific region. If the push to amend the Japanese constitution remains front and center, we'll have long-time animosities surfacing in a snaky line from Australia and the Philippines northward through Japan and Russia. It ain't just vulcanism and plate tectonics making the Pacific Rim hot and frictive anymore.

Not that it ever was.

Occasionally, friends from back home will ask me, "So, is Japan really as expensive as they say?" I'm usually guffawing too hard to answer. Of course, there are qualifications to be made: Tokyo is uncommonly expensive for Japan, just as New York is uncommonly expensive for America. I've heard people say that the regional cities are more reasonable--Atsushi says so about the mid-sized city he lives in now, and I visited ex-boyfriends in their hometowns of Sendai and Sapporo and saw a noticeable difference. Anyway, Connie and I have been having a back-and-forth about what sorts of behavior are "Pennsylvanian," and it reminded me of my trip to the grocery store yesterday. Every week, I splurge on something even more overpriced than normal--maybe a little carton of fresh raspberries, or a mango from the Philippines (as soft and sweet as its government's position on terrorists--don't let anyone give you that "the Mexican ones are better" jazz), or whatever's in season--along with the stuff I base my meals on.

Well, the first rhubarb of the season is coming into the stores, so I decided to go for it. This image tells you a lot about Tokyo life (for the people who do the grocery shopping, that is):







The large, visible "331" is the tax-included price. It converts to US $2.84.

A single, slender zucchini will be attentively wrapped the same way and costs about the same--well, it's usually closer to 310 yen, but same difference. Of course, having grown up in a part of PA that was slowly going from rural to suburban/edge-city, I spent the first twenty years of my life thinking of zucchini and rhubarb as things you paid other people to take off your hands. You know, late summer and early fall are when bags of zucchini play Chinese fire drill. Everyone with a vegetable garden has too many, all the kids in the county are threatening to run away from home if Mom forces one more slice of zucchini bread on them, everyone eats more spaghetti than usual because you can cut the tomato sauce with a lot of zucchini puree before anyone notices. The rhubarb situation is never quite as bad, but every household seems to have at least one resident who flat-out refuses to eat anything with rhubarb, and most people don't want to eat stewed fruit that often, so it still takes a while to eat down the surplus.

All of which is to say, I'm sitting here with my rhubarb on household chore day and thinking, Sheesh! $7.50/lb. This had better be a damned good pie...I mean, largish tart, which is what I have enough for.

And the summer fruits here, while good, don't measure up to the nectarines, peaches, and plums we got at the farmers' market when I was little. That doesn't make the quality worse, necessarily; I just find Japanese peaches a bit on the perfumy side in taste.

Of course, living in Japan has its compensating pleasures. Figs don't seem to have caught on much in America, but in season, they're available at every supermarket and fruit stand here. And Japanese persimmons, while a shock to the palate if you bite into one expecting it to taste like the persimmons of the American South, are one of the joys of fall once your tastes adjust. You see them ripening on the trees, and the wind suddenly feels a bit cooler and lonelier, and you know summer's ending.

Given the kiln that is Tokyo during July and August, I'd welcome that feeling right about now, actually. Well, after I thoroughly enjoy my rhubarb.

Added at 17:40: Of course, you can't always be sure where your broccoli came from, among other potential pitfalls of produce-buying.

CNN's Atika Schubert is now doing a feature on Democrats Abroad Japan, which appears to be making big-time recruiting efforts among us resident US citizens here. I guess no one told me because I'm already a registered Democrat from a swing state...although, come to think of it, you'd imagine that would make them pretty eager for me to get an absentee ballot and actually vote on party lines. Not that I'm eager for anyone to come after me, or anything.

Anyway, Terry McMillan (to whom I know I, like you I'm sure, turn for expert political and moral authority whenever feasible) is here and espousing people power. Some upwardly mobile-looking guy says Bush is going down. Not surprising at a recruiting session for Democrats.

But all this makes me wonder what the distribution of political affiliations among expats here really is. And then there's the question of what the Japanese think of the War on Terrorism. My acquaintances are not a scientific sample of the population, and I don't necessarily see every poll, but I do know that the Japanese I know are divided over the morality of the war in Iraq and, especially, over whether Japan should have sent SDF troops even in a non-combat capacity. However, "divided" means "divided," not "uniformly outraged at America's blatant and hubristical empire-building." In the days after 9/11, I got dozens of messages from Japanese friends expressing deep, formal sympathy for America and saying things like, "You must be ready to kill! I hope your government takes revenge quickly." Many of those same people are now skeptical of whether the US government is managing the occupation well and preventing abuses of authority in its own ranks. But I know of very few (except some with degrees from major American universities) who take the full-on "America has squandered the goodwill of the world" line.

In the meantime, the GOP is also, according to CNN, going to be stepping up its recruitment efforts. Wonder which best-selling novelist they'll bring to rouse interest!

Someone at work mailed me this story with the subject line "WE'RE STILL NUMBER 1!" (Actually, I'm pretty sure Finland and maybe one of the other Scandinavian countries still have higher rates of suicide, but 34000+ out of 125 million people is still plenty high. The US has around 30000 suicides per year, but of course, we have double Japan's population.) The AP article touches on some of the reasons for the anomalies in the way suicide is distributed here.

Like everywhere else, the rate is highest among old people with failing health. But there's also been a major upswing, since the 1990-ish collapse of the economic bubble, of suicides among people who are hopelessly in debt. Lender liability law is effectively non-existent here, and a lot of people go to retail loan companies that lend at rates to which usury doesn't do justice. Unless the laws have changed when I wasn't looking, 40% (that's not a typo) is the highest legal rate lenders can charge. But, this being Japan, it's possible to add on courtesy fees, processing fees, and in-out-around-through fees that make the interest rate effectively 100% for the most desperate borrowers. And of course, being the most desperate borrowers, those are the people with the greatest difficulty paying the money back.

People in such situations who don't want to end their troubles and save their honor by committing suicide have another option: They can disappear. Through the '90's, the number of people who did 夜逃げ (yonige, "overnight escape") and took new identities in distant cities to escape the gangster collection agents who were harassing them was increasing by a good 50% per year. In each of the last several years, I think the figure has hovered at between 100000 and 150000.

The recent reforms of the National Pension and Social Insurance may not, to put it mildly, make debt and health issues easier to deal with. Plans to increase premiums and cut back on benefits (including both pension money and health care) will make things more difficult for the elderly and for cash-strapped workers--exactly the adult groups whose suicide rates are causing all the alarm.

Of course, suicide is not considered an honorable option unless it's the only way to make amends or discharge one's responsibilities. Otherwise--this is one of the most inspiring things about the Japanese--they have an amazing ability to persevere stoically through desperate circumstances. By this point, no one entertains the fantasy that the Japanese government is going to undertake the kinds of real reforms that will speed up economic recovery (as, say, South Korea did after the Asian financial crisis in 1997). So what we're in for, probably for several more decades, is more of the slow, painful, not-quite-catastrophic same. Suicide is unlikely to become epidemic, but there's little reason to expect rates to drop very quickly.

Added at 17:25, 26 July: Just so people don't think it's a total free-for-all here, I might point out that punishment is meted out to those who run outright scams in the moneylending business. Sometimes. If you click on the link, you have to promise you'll read to the end to see how the officer of one of the loan companies justifies himself. Unreal.

Ten minutes ago, I was in a great mood, I swear.

I know I need to stop sniping at Andrew Sullivan. An obscure person who keeps ragging in public on a prominent person is inviting accusations of envy. He wouldn't know me if he fell over me in the street. I'm being petty. I suck.

Having acknowledged that, I will humbly receive the permission of my dozen readers to say, I don't think I can keep reading him much longer. I really don't. One of his posts from today (your time over there...as in, it's tomorrow here, but still today for you...oh, whatever) contains this one-two punch of ninnyism that made me want to scream:

HE SAID IT! The Washington Blade has found a reference by the president to the word "gay." He said the phrase "gay marriage" in Pennsylvania, referring to someone else's question. He knows that gay people exist! Now if he could only apply to adjective to actual human beings. But it's a start. And don't give me the pablum abhout not treating people as members of a group. Today, at the Urban League, Bush asked: "Is it a good thing for the African-American community to be represented mainly by one political party? Have the traditional solutions of the Democrat Party truly served the African-American people?" That's the difference between a group of people you respect and want to win over and a group of people you marginalize for political gain.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: "Your blog links to an inaccurate statement in a Fox report which claims that wives should be subservient to their husbands, when the word Judge Holmes used was subordinate. Subservient implies obsequiousness or servility while subordinate implies submitting to the authority of another (which can arguably be considered a sign of strength). You use the incorrect word in your blog." The strength to be subordinate! And this comes from a religious tradition that began with a man who defied almost every social convention of his time and treated women - even single women - as his equals; who never married and broke up the families and marriages of his disciples; who told his own parents as a teenager that they had no final control over him; and whose best friends were a single woman and a single man who is described in the Gospels as resting his head on Jesus' breast in an act of profound intimacy. How you get the subordination of women and the persecution of homosexuals from all that is beyond me.

This is what one of our most literate, urbane, even-handed, generous-minded advocates is reduced to? Wagging his tail at the mention of the word gay, once, by the President? I mean, all right, to an extent I get it. Bush probably is dodging the issue as much as he can, and of course he's probably doing so for the sake of political expediency. We are not--no surprise here--the constituency he needs to court most urgently.

If the President really thinks homosexuals should be as free to live our private lives and make private contracts as everyone else, but that marriage shouldn't be redefined just to make us happy, and that as a Christian he can't approve of that aspect of our lives, I wish he'd just flat-out say it. I know all the reasons it's not a good idea for him as a politician up for election, but I, for one, would be grateful. Yeah, he'd give some people on both sides of the argument fits of apoplexy, but they'd be well-earned fits of apoplexy.

In fact, Andrew Sullivan, 2004 version, would be having the biggest fit of all, because apparently the US government is the arbiter of our dignity as citizens (yes, I'm going off on this again--feel free to go read Instapundit if you're sick of hearing about it), and anything but approval, using the g word, with concrete examples, affronts it. You have to wonder what exactly would satisfy people who think like this. We're 3% of the population, so does that mean we need to be mentioned in 3% of Bush's speeches? Or should we constitute 3% of the individuals he refers to by name? Does "relationships between people of the same gender" count for, say, 0.375 times as many points as the actual use of "gay"? And how is anyone supposed to live a full, rich, satisfying life but still have time to obsess over these things?

I doubt President Bush cares any more than Andrew Sullivan what Sean Kinsell, actual gay human being and voter, thinks. But for the record, there are two important entities I think he should consider while on the job:

(1) The United States, in which I include its citizens, infrastructure, territory, and interests
(2) Well-connected industries that are getting clobbered by the competition, and the identity-politicking PAC's that imitate them in the seeking of entitlements

President Bush, it's your sworn duty to do everything you can to protect one of the above. But only one. Do it, already.

NO, THE OTHER ONE!

*******

As for the second entry, Andrew Sullivan is entitled to reconcile his Christian faith with his sexuality however he likes...in his own life. If in public he's going to make cockamamie-ass equivalences between "a single man who is described in the Gospels as resting his head on Jesus' breast in an act of profound intimacy" and homosexuality, he needs to be answered, lest people think all of us open homosexuals are that obtuse.

I have no idea what happens chez Sullivan, but I can assure you that in this household, sex involves more than the resting of one partner's head on the other's chest, honeychile. Conversely, I have friends from college who, when we're all gathered for someone's wedding and catching up or talking politics, think nothing of leaning on me while I play absently with their hair; but I know they'd be confused and repelled if I ever actually came on to them. For that matter, straight men in most places outside America are permitted more physical contact with each other, but that doesn't make them homosexual, or even gay-friendly.

All of this is my characteristically roundabout way of saying, any dope knows that matey intimacy (however the local culture defines it) is different from having sex. And while Andrew Sullivan's not a dope, he's an incredibly smart person with an increasingly bad case of tunnel vision. He's been so honest about his sexuality and his HIV status, given the political circles he moves in, that I still haven't reached the point at which I can just write him off. But lately, for the first time, I've felt as if I'm getting there. And there's no other commentator who's as all-around good, in the sense of being an advocate for gays without excluding other political and social issues, as he used to be. It's sad.

[Added at 16:00: Spoons wonders whether Sullivan is implying that he thinks Jesus was a homosexual. I don't think that was the point, actually. He seems to be more saying that Jesus hung out in a merry, tolerant bunch of bohemians that included independent women and companionable piles of male buddies, and that therefore we can deduce that he was, you know, mellow about alternative lifestyles and stuff. It's still malarkey.]

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On a not-entirely-unrelated note: Agenda Bender's been up for two years. Tom's one of those people who can post two lines of tossed-off pervy humor and make me giggle for the rest of the day; though he hasn't written many lately, he can also do those rants that look as if they're about to careen out of control any second but never do (a talent I manifestly lack; see this site, passim). And he's been just incredibly kind to me. I have no idea whether he checks in here, but just in case: Happy 2nd...well, I won't use the word and spoil your Google joy, but the entire staff of the former East Asia office sends regards.

Several times a year, people in Japan die from eating home-prepared fugu, the blowfish prized as a delicacy here. Its neurotoxin, which causes tingling in the limbs, shortness of breath, paralysis (while you're still alert and helpless), and finally coma and death, is concentrated in the skin, ovaries, and liver. Guess which part of the fish is considered the greatest epicurean treat? The latest case happened last night in Fukuoka. The story is by the book: a man caught a fugu and brought it home to four friends. They added the liver and flesh to the miso soup with which they started dinner; the symptoms began two hours later. The two men (including the fisherman) are in serious condition and, though the article doesn't say in so many words, will die. The women, who I imagine left most of the liver for the men, are expected to recover. I wonder, though, not having read up on it much, whether people who recover from fugu poisoning suffer necrosis of the flesh the way a lot of people who recover from snakebites do.

In case you're wondering how it's possible to make the liver edible at all, the answer is: you can purge the poison so there's just enough left to give the mouth a stimulating little tingle if you hold the cleaned organ under running water for a very long time before serving. No, I'm not kidding. One wonders how many people through the centuries died agonized deaths along the trial-and-error path to that discovery.

By the way, the character compound for fugu is 河豚: "river" + "pig." The dolphin is called iruka, and written (if you're being stuffy) as 海豚: "sea" + "pig." Somewhat more recognizable, to us native speakers of English who were made to memorize Latin and Greek word roots as schoolchildren, is the compound for hippopotamus: 河馬, pronounced kaba and literally meaning, of course, "river" + "horse."

Since I was brought up on the Levitical health laws, my parents reared me not to eat pork because pigs were God's natural vacuum cleaners and were bad for the body, even though people who ate pork often seemed as healthy as everyone else. Clearly, the river pig of Japan makes its deleterious effects known rather more quickly, as one member of last night's unfortunate dinner party apparently knew: she ate none of the fugu miso soup, and she's fine.

Stephen Miller at the Independent Gay Forum links to this article in the Windy City Times by Bob Roehr. Miller quotes this segment:

Most Democrats harped on the fact that, gasp, the Republicans were playing politics with the issue; all the while promoting their own set of political priorities. There was not a lot of defense of the gay community�one of its most loyal constituencies in terms of votes, workers, and dollars�which may signal a rocky future for that relationship.

A rocky future? Doubt it. I never cease to be amazed at how guys who have been out urban gay men for ten or twenty years longer than I have, who know how to deal socially with the entire range from trade to f**k buddy to boyfriend material without getting the shaft worked over taken for a ride duped, can fail to understand the why-buy-the-cow-when-you-can-get-the-milk-for-free principle in the political arena. The lesbians I know are mostly the same way...in terms of politics, I mean. Everyone wants to do something politically, and that means supporting the Democratic Party come hell or high water. It's understandable why people feel that way, but it's hard to keep from bitchslapping them when the DNC takes their votes for granted. You get what you pay (and pay and pay and pay) for, after all.

Tangential note: It's possible that some of the Dems in Congress were, in saying that they believe in the traditional definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, simply telling the truth, exotic as such conduct may sound among national politicians during an election year. Their set of positions on the broad range of gay-related issues might serve as a better measure of whether they're being hypocritical or craven or whatever.

Wow. That's funny. A few of my friends are flight attendants (you didn't think I only hung out with lumberjacks, did you?), and I'm sure the ability to get more ripped than the passengers would make the work go by a lot faster:

Two crew members on a domestic Aeroflot flight beat up a passenger who had complained that the flight attendants were drunk, airline spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said.

The passenger, identified only as A. Chernopup, was aboard a recent flight from Moscow to the Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk, Dannenberg said. She said the crew belonged to another airline, Aviaenergo.

Seeing that the crew were intoxicated and were not fulfilling their duties, Chernopup asked to be served by a sober and competent flight attendant, Dannenberg said. He was then beaten up by crew members.

You have to wonder why they didn't just offer him hits from the bottle until he forgot what he'd been complaining about.

Linda Ronstadt was not, unfortunately, arrested for assaulting Elvis Costello songs or fraudulently marketing herself as (gag) an "interpretive singer." Maybe the statute of limitations has run out, which is a pity. However, her praise of Michael Moore did get her booed and thrown out of the Aladdin casino in Las Vegas.

I do wish the owner had been more up-front than to say that the problem was with her "[espousing] political views." It's hard to believe that if she'd dedicated a song to President Bush, the owner would have had her escorted out on principle. It would have been more enjoyable for me, at any rate, if he'd simply expressed deep concern over her physical safety, given her obvious distance from and incomprehension of her audience. But maybe he was thinking that potential visitors to the casino will want a firmer guarantee that the same sort of thing won't happen at future performances.

Now that there are a few people reading this who didn't know me before I started the site, I think I should warn you all about something: I'm a total idiot. This was borne in upon me forcefully yet again today when.... Well, see, we were watching Columbo, and one of the episodes on the DVD involved murder by locking someone in a safe and letting him suffocate. And there's this Columbo ripoff here in Japan that started as the usual Japanese series of ten-odd episodes. But it proved so popular that it's become sort of an institution. It doesn't run every season, but there's often, you know, a special movie-length episode over a holiday weekend, or whatever. It's called 古畑任三郎 (Furuhata Ninzaburo, the name of the protagonist).

Anyway, I started thinking about some of the better episodes, and remembered one from a few years back. A woman's lover struck her with a water pitcher she'd used as a makeshift vase for a rose from an admirer. He was caught because, when he looked at the container as evidence later, he called it a "vase." The idea was that anyone who hadn't seen it with the rose thrust into it at the victim's apartment would have just thought of it as a regular old "water pitcher." It was a fiendishly clever episode, because the whole solution to the thing was right in front of you the whole time...there was none of that cheating where the detective faxes the DMV to ask for information and you don't find out until he confronts the killer. And since (as you would on Columbo) you saw the murder, you were tempted not to notice how odd it was that the murderer referred to it as a vase, either. You associated it with the rose. The scriptwriter was very shrewd or worked from a great source. It all used your perspective as a viewer against you, beautifully.

If you're still reading, you're probably wondering what the point is right about now. Well, it's not that I'm an idiot because I didn't notice the difference between a vase and a water pitcher. It's that thinking about that episode suddenly made me realize how trackbacks work and why people get huffy about them. Until April, I just read blogs. I didn't have one. So I'd read a popular site, and there would be trackbacks attached to a post, and I'd think, Oh, some blogger wanted to let this person know he'd referred to this particular post, so he left a trail back to this here site I'm reading now. How thoughtful. And then sometimes, I'd see people get steamed up and be like, "I hate when people track back without linking my post on their site!" and I had no idea what they meant or what could be bad about it.

I swear, it was thinking about that Furuhata episode, with the smug murderer suddenly realizing how he'd incriminated himself by saying the word 花瓶 (kabin, "vase"), that made me suddenly realize my perspective was wrong. You use trackbacks to get people from the site you've pinged to come back to you. As sure as I'm sitting here, I just figured this out thinking about a rose in a water pitcher on a television show. Because I'm stupid.

And now I feel as if I've been blogging without a license, or something. Since trackbacks seemed to get people so burned up--for reasons I couldn't fathom, remember--I made a practice of only putting one in if I'd corresponded with the person I was linking. A few times, I linked a post of someone's and deleted the URL from the "Ping these sites" box, figuring that using a trackback on a stranger put me in danger of committing a rudeness without knowing...like some kind of excessive intimacy, you know? But every so often, MT would ping the linked site anyway, even after I deleted the URL. And then I'd spaz and hope I hadn't somehow offended the site owner. I guess it's okay, though, because I've always linked whenever I've sent a trackback.

Um, right? That's okay? I'm not trying to...what would you be trying to do by tracking back without linking? stealing readers, or something? I'm clearly too much of an airhead to figure this stuff out myself.

And I haven't dyed my hair blond for a good three years, even.

Those following the five-way diplomatic tug-of-war over the family of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins probably know already that they're...well, I was going to say "back in Japan, " but only Soga herself had been to Japan before. What Jenkins feared, and the Japanese government tried to avoid, has happened: the US government has at least preliminarily made moves to have him extradited so he can be charged as an armed forces deserter. The initial family reunion took place in Indonesia--Soga flew from here, and Jenkins and their two daughters from the DPRK--because Washington and Jakarta don't have a mutual extradition treaty (if that's what it's called).

But Jenkins has serious health problems and needs surgery that he had to come to Japan for, so he, Soga, and their two daughters flew in yesterday. NNN (the Japanese equivalent of CNN, sort of) followed their bus from the airport to one of Tokyo's research hospitals as if it were OJ's van. Atsushi, who's home for the bank holiday weekend, glanced up at a close-up of the family's caravan and deadpanned, "The government put them on a Mitsubishi Fuso bus? Great. At least they're headed for the hospital already."

The two daughters are 18 and 21, and much of the news coverage has focused on speculating what life will be like for them here. Me, I speculate that whatever happened to them would scramble their circuits. They grew up, after all, half-Japanese and half-American in an affluent family in North Korea. So both their parents were of intensely hated enemy peoples; their mother had been snatched from her home country when she was their age now. They were among the select families well-positioned enough to live relatively affluent lives in Pyongyang, and who knows whether they know what's been going on in the countryside for the last decade or so. The people they meet in Japan may know more about the famines than they do. At least for now, the whole family is here. Now we just need to find out what happened to the half-dozen abductees the DPRK has coolly failed to account for.

Virginia Postrel points to an expansive article by Bruce Bawer, which gives side-by-side reviews of a half-dozen books written by American and European authors about the US and its role in the world. It starts to be a bit of a slog toward the end, but it's great stuff, all of it. The first book he filets is by one Mark Hertsgaard, whose excerpts read like Amritas's Kevin Kusoyama, only more cartoonishly leftist. Here's Bawer's response to a spiel I've heard more times than Carter's has pills (the first sentence is his summary of Hertsgaard's argument, not his own opinion):

America, in short, is a mess�a cultural wasteland, an economic nightmare, a political abomination, an international misfit, outlaw, parasite, and pariah. If Americans don�t know this already, it is, in Hertsgaard�s view, precisely because they are Americans: �Foreigners,� he proposes, �can see things about America that natives cannot. . . . Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to.� What he fails to acknowledge, however, is that most foreigners never set foot in the United States, and that the things they think they know about it are consequently based not on first-hand experience but on school textbooks, books by people like Michael Moore, movies about spies and gangsters, �Ricki Lake,� �C.S.I.,� and, above all, the daily news reports in their own national media. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? What aren�t they telling them? And what are the agendas of those doing the telling? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. Citing a South African restaurateur�s assertion that non-Americans �have an advantage over [Americans], because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us,� Hertsgaard tells us that this is a good point, but it�s not: non-Americans are always saying this to Americans, but when you poke around a bit, you almost invariably discover that what they �know� about America is very wide of the mark.

Honey, the stories I could tell! Lectures about how oppressive America is are especially comical coming from gay men visiting Tokyo from countries where homosexuality is illegal. (And I can't count how many times such guys have broken off in the middle of fulminating about America's spiritual emptiness to shriek, "I love this song! Don't you love this song?" when some Britney video came on over the bar.)

Later, Bawer cites a book by Jedediah Purdy, who has a more sensible approach to assessing how foreigners view us and what it means:

Plainly, Purdy has no delusion that the foundations of anti-Americanism are noble; and he finds it ridiculous to speak of an �imperial America.� Yet he can still see why even highly Americanized foreigners refer to the U.S. as an empire. Why? Because as they struggle to learn and speak English and to find a comfortable meeting place between America�s culture and their own, these foreigners are acutely aware that Americans don�t have to make a comparable effort. English is our language; American culture, our culture. It is our exemption from this otherwise global burden of adaptation, Purdy suggests, that makes us seem �imperial.�

I would only add that it really is true that Americans abroad--which is the only place foreigners who don't come to America will meet us--are frequently not on their best behavior. That's not unique to us, of course. Everyone feels unrestricted by the usual rules when away from home. But in combination with our political and cultural dominance, bad behavior from Americans feels like an extra affront to a lot of foreigners.

Added after the strongest earthquake we've had in weeks: Amritas noticed the Kevin Kusoyama remark above, so I'd just like to point out that I think the Professor's job is secure. Being a good writer and empathetic person, Amritas has managed, in creating him, to give Kusoyama a multi-dimensional personality. He annoys you the way a real person would.

Hertsgaard, however, writes like a computer-generated composite of the last ten years of Mother Jones and The Nation (and yes, I still read them frequently enough to feel qualified to make such a slam). Here's the excerpt that dumbfounded me most:

Our foreign policy is often arrogant and cruel and threatens to �blow back� against us in terrible ways. Our consumerist definition of prosperity is killing us, and perhaps the planet. Our democracy is an embarrassment to the word, a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery. Our media are a disgrace to the hallowed concept of freedom of the press. Our precious civil liberties are under siege, our economy is dividing us into rich and poor, our signature cultural activities are shopping and watching television. To top it off, our business and political elites are insisting that our model should also be the world�s model, through the glories of corporate-led globalization.

Actually, I guess he could be Pat Buchanan as easily as he could be the NPR commentator he actually is; those extremes met a long time ago. But anyway, what frustrates me about his type is that most of their policy criticisms have an important kernel of truth to them. I, too, am worried about our foreign policy, the creeping power of amoral and unaccountable bureaucrats, cronyism, and journalistic travesties--though probably not in the ways Hertsgaard has in mind.

The thing that's obscene is that he's saying these things in a book whose overall objective is to put America in the context of the rest of the world. I found myself staring at that "a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery" and wondering, Runaway bureaucracy and kickbacks? Dude, ever heard of France? Germany? Singapore? Japan? As Bawer says (he focuses more on the journalism and human rights angles than on political structures), Hertsgaard and so many of his fellow travelers have no sense of proportion. They can't articulate how the ability of the people to check excesses of government and corporate power varies from system to system, so even their accurate criticisms aren't very useful.

Added the next morning at 11-ish: Agenda Bender does a brief but deadly number on meaningless moves toward bureaucratic transparency and efficiency. He refers specifically to the Palestinians and the UN, but he could be talking about lots of countries in Europe and Asia, too.

LaShawn Barber graciously gave me permission to reproduce this e-mail, in response to a question of mine about her recent posts on the FMA:

I don't think homosexual "civil rights" and black civil rights are similar at all, in practical terms or otherwise. People who practice homosexuality do so because they choose to. They have the freedom to do so or not. Even if people believe they are "born" a certain way, the same still holds: you can choose not to sleep with men. Americans who choose to do so are still Americans protected by our Constitution. No one can infringe on your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without the basic protections afforded you.

White homosexuals walked through the front doors of hotels and stores, sat wherever they wanted on buses and trains, and were not relegated to second class citizenship. To equate sexual behavior and lifestyle choices with the subjugation, degradation, human bondage of Americans of African decent is a dishonest attempt to manufacture emotion over a perceived "right." I can't choose not to be black; however, that lack of choice isn't what determines my basic rights; the Constitution does. And as I said (I repeat myself often), you already have rights guaranteed you under the Constitution. There is no "right" to be married.

In the message that brought the above tirade on, I probably wasn't clear enough on why I thought the "movements" are similar in "practical terms," but what I meant was restricted to how our publicly recognized representatives relate to their constituencies. Which is to say, when Barney Frank shows up on television, a lot of us glance up from making dinner and mutter, "For Pete's sake, girl, shut up!" And my understanding is that a lot of black people react similarly when they hear Maxine Waters's talking head. For that matter--to make sure we hit as many lefty sacred cows as possible--my mother practically put her fist through the picture tube whenever Gloria Steinem showed up on the nightly news when I was little. The people who say they represent the interests of "minorities" of whatever stripe do not always know, or even care, what people at the grass-roots level think and experience. That was all I was saying.

The issues surrounding gay rights and black rights are not the same, as Ms. Barber articulates. There are particular points at which they intersect, sure, but they cannot be equated overall. I hesitate to link Classical Values again, lest its proprieter think I'm stalking him, or something, but he mirrors my thoughts exactly with this:

Putting aside the states' rights and tariff issues for the sake of this discussion, the modern idea that human beings should not be property was on a collision course with the institution of slavery. Something had to give, but the moral high ground claimed by each side simply would not allow it. To me, it's simple logic that the abolition of slavery destroyed what had previously been private property. Rather than wage war over the idea, wouldn't it have been more sensible to pay slaveholders to free their slaves, declare slavery over and spare the nation the war?

Slavery was abolished by constitutional amendment, but not until after the war.

Inflammatory as it is, can the idea of same sex marriage be as noxious as slavery? Some people think so, but I doubt there are enough of them to start another Civil War. But the analogy is problematic, because marriage cannot normally be said to be as coercive as slavery. (Although I have expressed reservations that it might become involuntary.) Remember that in the case of slavery, it was abolition of slavery that was seen as invasive; slavery was the status quo. Here, the status quo is opposite sex marriage only, so the analogous question becomes whether or not allowing same sex marriage amounts to abolition of marriage. I don't see how it does, because no one would lose the right to marry.

Clearly, a significant number of people feel that their marriages will be weakened if same sex marriage is allowed. I have not yet seen a logically convincing argument as to how this might happen, and, despite my reservations about same sex marriage, I don't understand the "dilution" argument, much less the "destruction" one. It strikes me as based largely on emotion.

Yet the other side's position is also quite emotional. A piece of paper and a definitional change (neither of which are needed for two people to live together, share or bequeath property, care for or visit each other in hospitals, or even in many cases to obtain insurance benefits) does not strike me as going to the heart of citizenship in the same way as voting, free speech, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, to bear arms, to sit on juries, etc. Maybe I just don't care about marriage as much as the people who yell and scream, but the institution strikes me as primarily a legal way to protect children in cases where parents break up. Perhaps it would be more fair to allow marriage only as a child protection institution; childless couples would be legally regarded only as domestic partners and subject to whatever partnership laws existed in a state.

In any case, I am in favor of states' rights, and for what it's worth, I remain implacably opposed to the apparently doomed Federal Marriage Amendment.

I'm not fond of the "states' rights" phrasing, but otherwise, I concur. My parents have been together since before I was born, and they didn't move out of the house my brother and I grew up in until I was out of college and he was 18--and even then, they moved to a place three miles down the road so they'd have more room to entertain. My childhood was the very picture of stability, and I don't think I'm incapable of seeing the value of marriage.

But I just don't get worked up over the fact that it doesn't include a relationship such as mine. I say this as someone who lives abroad on a work visa that has to be renewed every few years, conducts his relationship in a foreign language, and can't bring his partner back to the States as a spouse. I am not unaware of the dangers inherent in my own circumstances, and I'd love if they could be legislated away. Sometimes I'm scared when I think about them. But at the same time, I know I'm one of the freest people in history: I chose to live here. And I decided three years ago, without coercion, that taking care of Atsushi was my job from then on. The rest flows from there.

The most articulate and reasonable gay rights advocates have done a great job of teasing out the meanings and mechanics of marriage in contemporary America. Their conclusions about the weight it bears in signaling the assumption of adult responsibility are correct. But one cannot, from there, summarily argue that marriage rights must be bestowed on homosexuals; the possibility that the way marriage is currently delineated is, itself, flawed must be addressed first. There's a difference between saying that the government should treat us with dignity, as responsible citizens in full possession of our faculties, and saying that the government can confer dignity on us. Until we get that straight, this whole conversation will be useless.

I'm not sure whether anyone in these parts cares about the financial news--Japan is so '80's to pay attention to, anyway. But the Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and the UFJ Group just announced that they will merge into the largest financial institution in the universe by the end of the week, surpassing the globe-buggeringly huge Mizuho Group. Lip service is, naturally, being payed to their complementary strengths, kind of. UFJ is based in Kansai (Osaka-Tokyo-Kobe) and Nagoya and has a lot of small-business clients and individual accounts. MTFG is based here in Tokyo and has dealings with a lot of mammoth corporations (especially in guess which conglomerate), though it also has a retail bank, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

A major reason for the merger, you will doubtless be shocked to hear, is that UFJ is carrying a lot of bad debt. (Not that MTFG still isn't, I'm sure, but in Japan, these things must be considered relative if you want to avoid a heart attack.) Whether this will actually streamline the operations of their trust banks, retail banks, and holding companies, which are all set to merge over the next few years, is anyone's guess. In Japan, companies often seem to merge just for the sake of getting bigger; but then, so do the federal ministries that are in bed with them.

Ooh, ooh...I've figured out something else I want everyone to shoot me for!

Er, maybe I should rephrase that. It's just that I'm all giddy now that I know it's super-cool to be all involved in the 2004 Presidential election. We know this because (1) the celebrities we all emulate are wearing T-shirts encouraging us to vote and (2) the author of a book called Frumpy to Foxy in 15 Minutes Flat has a quotable opinion on how emotionally-charged the whole contretemps will be.

Now, you're probably thinking I'm about to say, "If I ever use the fact that I've written a book called Frumpy to Foxy in 15 Minutes Flat to get an airing for my political opinions on an election in the middle of a war, please shoot me." But you'd be wrong...not because you probably shouldn't, but because that's not the worst thing in the FOXNews.com article. No, really:

While many celebs aren't shy about letting the world know their political leanings, others are more interested in simply encouraging people to get involved in the process.

Field said Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are among the stars who have gotten decked out in her �Let�s Vote!� shirts. Yoko Ono also purchased one, according to Field.

�Many celebrities have come in and bought them,� she said. �And since they�re celebrities, they�re seen. Maybe they�ve decided they want to be a billboard.�

So here it is: If I ever engage in political activity of any kind ever at all ever that gets publicly glommed on to by Paris AND Britney AND Yoko, please...

...oh, you know what? Never mind. Because if that ever happens, I'll be desperately trying to save my honor by committing seppuku with the nearest plastic picnic knife before you can get your weapons out and loaded.

In fact, thinking about the sort of people who might be moved to go out and vote by a message across Paris Hilton's breasts may drive me to do it anyway.

The expected is happening to the FMA. Obviously, I'm glad as someone who doesn't think the Constitution should be amended lightly, and relieved as a gay man.

However, some days I hope I'll never hear the words gay and marriage in the same sentence again. I still care about our having the legal means to provide for those we've chosen to spend our lives with, and I still care about equal treatment. But I don't see what is productive about this particular argument at this point. The marriage-or-bust mentality can't distinguish between a dignified life and a life supplemented by tax breaks and other entitlements. It treats compromises (such as civil unions and domestic partner benefits) as unacceptable, even in the short term. The debate has become more picky and detailed and, at the same time, more coarse. At least this round is more or less over, for now. There's still time for people to learn to listen to each other. Yeah, I know, not likely. But I live in hope.

* To be subsequently retitled "Kylie Minogues."

You gotta love stories like this. The USDA is thinking of redesigning its food pyramid, which tells you the recommended number of daily servings from the various food groups. The reasoning is...well, you can see here (note the assumptions packed into the use of but in the second paragraph):

The [United States Department of Agriculture] is asking for public comment on whether to replace the pyramid or update it, Hentges said. He was taking no stand on that choice. "We do not have a preconceived notion," he said.

Federal officials say about 80 percent of Americans recognize the pyramid, but about 66 percent are overweight or obese.

And clearly this is because the federally-approved graphic representing the ideal diet is the wrong shape. The entire article paints a pathetically humorous picture of a nation of affluent, literate, free citizens--with more dietary choices than most of history's emperors--who have no prayer of figuring out how to eat well without the USDA. No joke. This is the second paragraph from the article:

Too many are confused by the recommendations and can't figure out how to implement them. The proof, Agriculture Department officials say, is that two out of three Americans are fat.

I doubt any higher-ups from the USDA are reading this, but just in case, here is my public comment: No one gives a flying f**k about the food pyramid. Go think about something else.

Surely somewhere in America, there's a pig with trichinosis or a slaughterhouse with substandard sanitation to keep you occupied. As far as nutrition goes, we wouldn't exist if thousands of years of our ancestors hadn't known how to combine foods for a healthy diet without the assistance of a food pyramid. Granted, the problems nowadays are somewhat different. It used to be that, say, knowledge of the Three Sisters (a garden stand combining beans, squash, and maize) was precious to Native Americans because it made sure no nutrients were missing from the diet. Today, we're so decadently rich we want to avoid getting too much nutrition.

Still and all, everyone in America knows that you need fresh fruit and vegetables, starchy foods, and (because most of us can afford them regularly) meats, in moderate portions, for a balanced diet. Unless you're insane, you know that you can't expect to eat nothing but Entenmann's pound cake and be healthy. Whether you think enriched wheat flour and high-fructose corn syrup are the foods of Satan, or think meat and carbohydrates shouldn't be eaten at one sitting, or never eat anything but organically grown plant foods, or whatever, doesn't change the list of essential nutrient-rich foods much. Those who prefer to eat yummy products with low food value will not be enlightened or guilt-tripped by a revised food pyramid into changing their eating habits. The taxpayers, however, will be out yet more money, and an office-full of busybodies in an industrial park will have something to do for the next few years. And we all know that's what's really important.

I keep not commenting on things Alice in Texas says because it's fun to go to the site of someone you have no communication with and occasionally see yourself linked. (Seeing yourself upstaged by having your ideas fleshed out with more point and humor than you yourself managed is not fun, though it is instructive.) Unfortunately, homeschooling four children appears to make it difficult for her to hang around in gay bars where we might meet, so our mutual introduction will have to be on-line. So, taking her links as an offer of a handshake, let me say, Welcome to America, Alice...uh...from a guy who lives in Japan.

Anyway, she's almost always right on, as when she says this:

But then, liberals have always had a problem with boundaries. They would like all walls taken down, giving everyone free access to everyone else's possessions and property, allowing us to be one big happy family all together. Because if only people would simply hand over everything they most treasure to complete strangers, the world would be a nicer place. Oh yeah. You see, it's all about stuff.

What most bewilders me about such people is their ability to act, on the one hand, as if our kind of social order were so natural to the human organism that you can meddle with it at will without making it collapse...and then to display, on the other hand, a tendency toward control-freak micro-planning when they get their hands on actual institutions. But as Alice encapsulates here, there's a whole skein of other, equally nasty assumptions involved: that there's a fixed amount of good fortune to go around, that therefore envy is the natural and proper reaction to others' good fortune, and that it's better to make everyone equally miserable than to allow unequal outcomes of any kind.

The morning edition of the Nikkei says the LDP + Komei Party coalition won 59 seats, eight more than it was shooting for. There were still, when the dead-tree version was going to press, two seats that hadn't been decided. The chief opposition group (the Democratic, Communist, and Social Democratic Parties of Japan--no jokes from the peanut gallery, okay?) won 55 seats, so the result is, not surprisingly, an uneasy split. Voter turnout seems not to have been all that high, considering how it was hammered into us that this was a referendum on social welfare policy and the Iraq occupation.

Polls are closed, and vote counting has started. We'll see what happens.

Asymmetrical Information, in the process of debating gay marriage, points to a post of Myria's that's few months old and, like most of what she writes, good. Her main point (later in the post) is about the Presidential election and people who would vote for John Wayne Gacy if it meant defeating Bush, but she leads up to it by talking about other issues:

To my way of thinking only an idiot, or an immature child, defines their sexuality by what sex they don�t like. One should define one�s sexuality by who one is attracted to, not who one is not attracted to.

Well, I think that's true if you have to choose what's most important to focus on in living your life. But it's also true that marking off what we're not is a necessary part of figuring out what we are. It's one of the reasons that the obsession with eradicating "homophobia" is so pointless. Men are fascinated and daunted by women, and if straight boys are going to mature into decent straight men, there's a way in which they have to flow away from other boys and towards girls. There's a complex filigree of hormones and social structures involved, but the trajectory is fairly obvious. It shouldn't be that hard to distinguish between people with a genuinely unhealthy fixation on homosexuality and people who are just put off by it because they're heterosexual.

Of course, if you're defining yourself exclusively by opposition, then there's no difference--which as Myria says is one of the reasons that some disaffected teenagers declare they're gay when they just mean they're confused and want to distance themselves from the people they think are trying to run their lives. It's also why, when you meet people who really are gay but have never developed beyond the not-hetero part, they always give you the eerie feeling that you're talking to a fourteen-year-old.

Parliamentary elections here in Japan today. (Actually, unless you're Amritas, you probably want this link). There are 120-odd Diet seats up for election. The magic number for Koizumi's LDP base to stay solid is 51 seats won. CNN says:

Now he is struggling and his ratings have plunged to just 40 percent after he decided to keep Japanese troops in Iraq and pushed through an unpopular bill to reform the country's pension system.

The beleaguered system is unable to pay for its aging population and Koizumi's answer was to introduce legislation that increases payments and cuts payouts.

They were necessary reforms, Koizumi says, but it was not a popular policy.

On Iraq, the public is deeply divided over the wisdom of Koizumi's ambitious deployment -- Japan's riskiest mission since WWII.

When Koizumi announced that troops would be staying on after the Iraqi handover -- without consulting lawmakers -- the public was not pleased.

"The government is abusing its power. Since they represent the people of Japan, they should stand by us," voter Hiroko Furuya says.

The Japanese are clearly unhappy with Koizumi, but few are impressed with the opposition either. The result is that a chunk of former Koizumi supporters are now undecided.

The problem is that Japanese voters are like voters everywhere. At the bunting-and-motivational-speech stage, it's easy for 80% of them to approve of a candidate that represents change. When he's in office and actually wants to, you know, change things, it's a different story. That's not to say that I'm necessarily all that hot on the way the National Pension scheme is being reformed. It's just that there's no way to fix the damned thing without taking goodies away from some constituency or other, and most Japanese people (especially the appointed, unaccountable bureaucrats who actually run the place) would drop dead at the merest hint of privatizing it. Maybe they could just invest the whole thing in Mitsubishi Motors stock; then the whole problem, along with all the money, would disappear and we could start over. In any case, at least making contributors kick in more money and beneficiaries take less has the equal-treatment virtue of screwing everyone over.

Another thing to bear in mind is that, through the post-Nakasone '80's and '90's, Japan went through Prime Ministers faster than Madonna went through shades of Clairol. A lot of Japanese people don't feel that Koizumi fixed everything he talked about fixing and were opposed to the deployment of SDF troops in Iraq, but they're used to him, they're suspicious of the old guard of the LDP, and the economy has been pretty okay. It'll be interesting to see what the final count is.

Added at 20:00-ish: I'm apparently much too used to CNN's airbrush-everything style. When I cut and pasted from the article above, I didn't even notice that the SDF Iraq deployment was referred to as "Japan's riskiest mission since WWII." World War II was a...risky...mission...for the...Japanese? My sainted aunt.

I can't tell whether Eric Scheie is seriously stumped or playing up the naive tone for effect, but all the questions he raises about some current definitions of rape are good ones. Not for the first time, a woman college student who got drunk and went back to a dorm room with two college guys is accusing them of rape.

In an accompanying article, a "mutual" standard is announced, and the reason I'm putting it in my blog is that I am having conceptual difficulty understanding it:

"The good that can come out of this is that more people will see the problem for what it is," Bath said. "We have to educate young women about this issue, and we also have to educate young men. Don't put yourself in position to be a victim or a perpetrator.

"Young men, including athletes, have to be made to understand: You're not entitled to sex. And if the woman is drunk, you're even less entitled to sex. It's a crime."

OK, let's parse that.

I think I have a pretty good idea how to avoid being a victim. But how do I avoid putting myself "in position" to be "a perpetrator"? Any idea what that means? I mean, usually, the way I manage not to perpetrate crimes is simply by not perpetrating them.

Position? Do they mean sexual positions? Or merely in any tempting locations? There are sexually attractive people in many locations; does this mean that there should be no dating? No kissing? No heavy necking?

Analogizing to other forms of crime, does that mean that people shouldn't work near money lest they put themselves "in position" to be a perpetrator?

Then there's the entitlement issue. Certainly, I am not entitled to sex. Agree completely. I never thought I was. The statement makes me wonder whether there is an entire new class of people out there who believe in sexual entitlement as a matter of right. Is that true? What have I been missing?

Then there's this:

if the woman is drunk, you're even less entitled to sex. It's a crime.

Only if the woman is drunk? Isn't that sexist? Or is all drunken sex a crime?

(The article he links to is here.)

Part of the problem may be a generation gap. When we arrived at college in 1991, there was a sexual assault session as part of freshmen orientation. It was one of those that we were herded to--you didn't just show up and have the ability to skip out on it. In it, we were given to understand that, basically, a woman was permitted to say no at any point between "Hi, can I buy you a drink?" and orgasm. If the man didn't stop, he was a rapist. (Yes, they kept the language scrupulously gender-neutral, but we all knew they weren't trying to prevent crew guys from being mounted and pinioned by sorority girls.)

This was before the infamous Antioch College behavior code, which required explicit verbal consent at every step along the way. Still, the undisguised intention was to let men know that they could be considered rapists if they did anything to displease the women they slept with. So even though I think such a definition of rape is inequitable, infantilizes women, treats straight men like lowest-common-denominator barbarians, and prevents everyone from assuming adult responsibility--though I think all those things, I've been hearing people talk that way since I was 19. It repels but doesn't faze me.

Along those lines, I was most interested by this: "The statement makes me wonder whether there is an entire new class of people out there who believe in sexual entitlement as a matter of right. Is that true?" I don't think it's true specifically. What I think is that the leftish nannies in charge of student life programs can't resolve a certain conflict in their thinking. (Well, there are many conflicts they can't resolve, but I'm speaking of just one here.) Their overarching message is that all choices are equal and that individualism means feeling free to act on whatever impulse wafts into your pretty little head.

Naturally, 18-year-olds living away from home are going to take this to mean free sex, as part of a more general sense of entitlement. Then student life dean-types have no choice but to back and fill and point out that, well, no, dear, you aren't really entitled to sex with anyone and everyone just because you want it. Desires must be refereed, and since academic feminism is the highest priority among such people, the woman gets to make all the choices and the man gets to make none of them.

One of the most darkly hilarious aspects of our freshmen orientation about sexual assault came at the end. The perky graduate student had led our group of ten or so students through discussions about why you were a rapist if you had sex with a partner who was drunk, a partner who was high, a partner who said no but didn't stop you later when you fumbled with her bra again, or a partner who tried to push you away when you'd already been copulating for ten minutes. She wrapped things up by saying, "Well, I'd just like to point out that, while it's okay to say no, it's okay to say yes, too." Really? Well, there you go. That makes it all clear. It isn't surprising that, after four years in the charge of such people, a lot of college kids end up more confused about sex and sexuality than when they arrived as teenagers.

Added 5 seconds later: I would just like to point out that I'm aware of the ambiguity in "there was a sexual assault session as part of freshmen orientation" and decided to leave it in because I got a giggle out of it. Rest assured that the only things actually being assaulted during the session were morality, ethics, logic, and common sense. This is why we go to college, right?

Japanese abductee Hitomi Soga has arrived at her hotel in Jakarta after meeting her husband and daughters. They've been apart for a year and nine months. I wonder whether the girls have ever been outside North Korea--probably not, but I haven't read anything about it one way or another. The Nikkei says that the younger daughter addressed her as "Mommy" in Korean when they met, which reminds you of how much adjusting they're all going to have to do if they settle in Japan. I imagine their life in the DPRK was pretty privileged; the girls will probably miss home for quite a while before settling in if they come to Japan or settle elsewhere. BTW, it looks as if CNN is covering the reunion and has a nice summary of most of what led up to it.

Only twelve hours left in this week. Good. Last Saturday, I got a message from a church friend of my parents--like an older sister to me growing up--that another friend of ours--like a little sister to me growing up--had died. So I wrote back asking what had happened, of course. I'm thinking, Oh, no, leukemia. Or a car accident. Well, that wasn't it. I don't want to name her or give details, but suffice it to say that I was listening to Zen Arcade this week, and "Pink Turns to Blue" hit me like a sledgehammer. I've lost touch with most of the people I knew at home--I can't blame anyone, since I'm the one that was eager to leave--but (I know this sounds dumb) I just kind of assume that the friends I went to church with are okay, you know? Sure, there were a few who had scarily repressive parents and ended up rebelling and getting pregnant at sixteen. But most of us turned out okay, even those who didn't stay in the church. And C. was so sweet. She was neurotic, she dressed in black, she listened to the Cure--I hated the Cure and was always pushing New Order on her, go figure--but unlike me, she wasn't a neurotic and brittle and mean teenager. She was disaffected, but she didn't resent other people who were ordinary and happy. Knowing she's not around anymore has made me feel hollow all week. She's buried in my hometown, so it'll be easy to make time to visit when I'm home i