The White Peril 白禍

Japanese language and culture, as you've probably heard many times, are full of nuances as impossible to grasp as the wisps of smoke that curl toward heaven from a bowl of incense in a darkened room. Therefore, it may interest you to know that some concepts translate into and from English with no loss of meaning at all.

Consider, as an example, the reform of government programs undertaken by the Koizumi adminstration and the ruling coalition that supports it. The idea is to deregulate and even privatize certain operations in certain spheres--Japan Post reform has gotten the most attention, but the health-care behemoth is on the list, too:

Ministers attending a Cabinet meeting Tuesday agreed to give the report, presented Friday by the Council for Promotion of Regulatory Reform, an advisory body to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, serious consideration.

In another gesture supporting easing government regulations, one of the prime minister's key structural reform initiatives, the Cabinet approved a plan to revise in March the three-year deregulation promotion program that has been in force since April.

...

In line with Koizumi's public pledge to push forward with deregulation as an integral part of his reform agenda, in May the government established the Headquarters for Promotion of Regulatory Reform, made up of all Cabinet members.

One of the top discussions in the regulatory reform council was on the idea of lifting the ban on providing mixed medical services, enabling patients to receive a combination of medical treatment covered by government-backed health insurance plans and medical treatment not so covered.

The mixed medical service system currently is limited to hospitals designated by the government as medical institutions with specially advanced medical technology.

The ban, of course, prevents some patients from having access to the best combination of treatments for whatever ails them. Westerners who have swallowed the entire media diet of stories about the self-abnegating Japanese, and thus think of the place as populated by 125 million potential kamikaze pilots, seem to imagine that everything federal employees do is attuned to the greater good. If you're one such trusting soul, it may interest you to know that Japanese bureaucrats act like...well, bureaucrats:

Objecting strongly to the council's argument was the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, bureaucrats of which were anxious about a decline in the role of government-backed health insurance plans that come under the ministry's jurisdiction.

In defending its position, the ministry claimed that a mixed medical service system would deprive patients of the right to equal treatment.

Major university hospitals, including those attached to Tokyo University and Kyoto University, meanwhile, pushed for a complete lifting of the ban, arguing that progress in advanced medical technology was being hindered by too many regulations around the government-backed health insurance plans.

...

This resulted in a compromise being hammered out that ensured the ban remained, in return for a ministry promise to expand the current system to extend government-backed insurance coverage to exceptional cases currently not covered, such as heart transplants from brain-dead donors.

It's the sort of thing that belongs in a textbook, huh? Unelected officials find their authority (and thus their source of influence) threatened, and they justify their opposition by claiming that what they're worried about is, of course, that reforms will infringe on the rights of citizens. Being career civil servants, they're much better at strategy than their opponents, who, as the people who have to deal with the day-to-day problem being addressed, don't make their livelihoods by maneuvering. Then, somehow, their territory is actually expanded by the plan ultimately extruded by the chain of committees, compromise proposals, and negotiations.

I think it's fair to say that most of the people who go into civil service here are as patriotic and idealistic as their counterparts. The problem isn't really that Japanese bureaucrats are worse than bureaucrats elsewhere; it's that the system disproportionately favors them. They get used to having their way as a matter of course, but they still get to see themselves as sacrificing personal gain because of the revolving-door system (that is, you take lower-than-private-sector pay through your normal working life, then get a cushy job in a private or semi-public company on retirement so you can spend the next 20 years making good on the connections you've built up). The recent economic troubles have made that system shakier, and the various bureaucracies have, understandably, therefore been clinging all the more to the power they've got. Reform is, needless to say, difficult in such an environment. Even a slight loosening of restrictions on treatments people can get is a good thing, though.

I'm glad to see, finally, a news report that mentions that this may not be the deadliest disaster to hit Asia in recent memory:

Rescue workers pressed on into isolated villages devastated by a disaster that could yet eclipse a cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1991, killing 138,000 people.

I tried looking it up a few days ago, but "bangladesh '100,000 deaths'" produces a string of links to general infant mortality rates, so I wasn't entirely sure my memory was serving me well. (BTW, the cyclone there is the word used for the Indian Ocean equivalent of a hurricane; it's not like the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz.)

It's not surprising that people wouldn't make the connection, of course. We can sincerely believe that all men are created equal, but that doesn't stop us from identifying more with those whose particulars we share. And there are lots of particulars. Video cameras have become better and cheaper, and the tsunamis struck in many places where tourists (who tend to have their cameras handy when they leave their hotels) were plentiful. The sheer number of people who were able to film the waves as they hit is astonishing.

Speaking of numbers, it may seem odd to read that there could be 1000 Swedish nationals--just Swedish nationals--killed. But it makes more sense when you consider not just people traveling directly from home but also the expats in Asia. It takes much less time (about 7 hours from Japan, Korea, or northern China) to fly to Southeast Asia than it does to fly home; costs are also low; and, if further incentive is needed, it's wet and cold up here.

Fortunately for surviving tourists, vacation spots tend to be easy to get in and out of--if not because they're that way naturally, then because governments that know the value of tourist income have taken pains to furnish them with superhighways and airports. The places least accessible to transportation are where the populations of locals with the poorest infrastructure in other ways is, too. Hearteningly, those omnipresent video cameras are now being used during flyovers to assess damage and find lone survivors. The scope of the damage is horrifying, but it's beginning to look as if it could have been a lot worse.

Interestingly, if predictably, the major problem that's being reported with getting aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami involves distribution. Part of that is no one's fault: while they're obliterating villages, earthquakes and tidal waves aren't gallant enough to leave passable roads and runways behind for the survivors after all.

At the same time, it's not just the physical infrastructure for the transportation of goods that's a problem. It's also information coordination, though even tenuously-unified countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka seem to be making amazing efforts. Developed countries would clearly have the infrastructure to do a lot better, but this sort of issue is not unknown to us, either. It affected the Kobe earthquake and Hurricane Andrew relief efforts. And even in business, which has time for the trial-and-error development of information management systems without thousands of dehydrating people to worry about, ruthlessly efficient distribution models of the WalMart style are...well, only as old as WalMart.

I only wonder aloud about this because the talk has now, naturally, turned from how we could have warned people to how we could be getting supplies where they're needed more quickly. There are clearly improvements that could be made, but there's a huge amount of information to process on the fly, and much of it to be shared among groups that, shall we say, are not used to cooperating. Attention needs to be focused on helping people in exigent circumstances right now, but it will be interesting to see what we eventually learn that helps make our responses more resilient in the future.

A long-running story in Japan this year has been the so-called "It's me" scam. It's become such a fixture of the news, in fact, that its Wikipedia entry is already posted; the latest victim surfaced last week.

It works like this:

A large number of people, especially the elderly, have fallen victim to the so-called "It's me, send money" scam in which swindlers posing as the victims' children or grandchildren call and ask them to send money.

Such swindlers typically call victims posing as their children saying, "It's me." They then lie that they had been abducted or caused a traffic accident, and ask the victims to remit money into designated accounts as ransom or compensation.

The victims believe that they are actually talking to their children or grandchildren and remit the money. After contacting their children or grandchildren, they realize they had been tricked. By the time they contact the financial institutions or police, the money has been withdrawn from the account.

The more sophisticated criminals will play recordings of sirens in the background to simulate an accident scene. If they know the cell number of the person they're impersonating, they'll repeat dial the number until the phone goes dead; that way they can explain to the victim that they'll be out of contact until the money is remitted. In one of the more recent cases, a man was swindled out of the equivalent of over US $400,000. Yes, I checked the number of zeros.

To American (and many other foreign) observers, this whole thing is incomprehensible. And by this point in time, the scam has been so incessantly publicized that it's hard to believe people are still being taken in by it. While it's true that criminals have changed their MO somewhat--often impersonating lawyers, police officers, or bank employees "on behalf" of close relatives--it boggles the mind that anyone is still remitting money to a strange bank account at the request of someone whose identity has not been confirmed.

The initial mistakes were, however, understandable. I suspect that many of the victims were hard-of-hearing and didn't talk to their children and grandchildren all that frequently, and strangeness of voice and idiolect could have been put down to agitation over the alleged emergency.

Additionally, it just isn't hard to believe in today's Japan that a relative has taken out a loan and is about to get into big trouble for being unable to pay it back, which is the story frequently used. Many of us Americans can still imagine our parents' or grandparents' demanding to know, "Just how did you get yourself into this jam in the first place? And why on earth didn't you tell me sooner?" Japan still teaches youngsters to depend on their elders a lot more than most Western countries do, though; in turn, it encourages those elders to see themselves as stewards of the family honor. Both of these are fine things that it would be nice to see America relearn. But Japan can take them to an extreme that can all but exclude personal responsibility, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were part of the reason that people have been squelching their native caution--in the most recent case, even after a helpful taxi driver got the police to warn the victim before she made the deposit--and forking over the money.

One of the nasty things about a natural disaster such as this weekend's earthquake + tsunami is that the danger doesn't disappear with the waves. Sanitation and hygiene aren't at the highest levels in South and Southeast Asia at the best of times; with decaying organic matter lying around all over the place and iffy access to food, water, and shelter, people in afflicted areas are at much greater-than-normal risk of serious infections. According to WHO projections, the number of deaths from malaria and Dengue fever, among other stock tropical menaces, could be twice as high as normal in the aftermath of the tidal wave. In some places, the figure could rival the death toll from the tsunami itself.

Of course, these are projections. If the immediate effect of this sort of disaster is to show how physically fragile civilization is in the face of nature, the long-term effect is often to demonstrate how resilient people can be in the most appalling circumstances. At the same time, as the Nikkei report notes, Aceh Province in Indonesia was already famous for its recent violent infighting. That's not the sort of environment in which efficient, need-based distribution of aid is going to be easy. In comparison, Sri Lanka, itself known until very recently as the site of one of the fiercest civil wars going, looks like a cakewalk. Fortunately, the greatest risks are right now, in the first few weeks after the tsunami, when the situation will still have the world's attention.

Ooh, Tokyo is getting its yearly day of schnee. Of course, it's just fluffy, wet stuff that disappears on contact with the (non-frozen) ground. The nice thing about a third-floor apartment, though, is that if you stand back a bit from the window, you just see the snow falling, not meeting its premature end. Atsushi comes in tomorrow. Unlike me, he hasn't just gotten back from 2.5 weeks of lolling at the homes of parents and various friends; and banks are, of course, the sorts of environments in which the end-of-year crunch is especially intense. He apparently hasn't even had time to write his New Year's cards.

The New Year is a big deal in Japan, in a way that sort of combines the meanings of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's celebrations at home. You're supposed to pay your debts (a dark joke in this economy of massive household debt, but charming as a traditional ideal nonetheless), right wrongs you've committed and seek forgiveness, and reflect on your good fortune. To my very American palate, the festival foods--a select group of crustaceans, mollusks, and piles of fish eggs--are somewhat less yummy than Thanksgiving dinner; but the symbolism of good fortune and longevity is nice. And I like the oranges and glutinous rice.

Ornate expressions of gratitude are woven through all Japanese social forms; but around this time of year, things get positively orgiastic, with gifts of beer and tea and cakes and other goodies to be sent to and received from clients and suppliers. The Japanese have not forgotten that their country's staggering riches are of recent vintage, and the last 15 years of economic shake-up have reminded them that prosperity is fragile; the formal expressions of goodwill that can feel merely dutiful at other times of the year have extra power now.

This is a good time to thank everyone once again for visiting here. When I asked Dean to set this site up in the spring, I was primarily looking for something to play with as a distraction from self-pity over Atsushi's being transferred to Kyushu. I'd enjoyed commenting on other people's blogs--yes, I'm aware that this is getting to be an old story--but frankly, I wasn't eager to set up my own because of trolls. The decline in American civility gets me down enough so as it is. 200 visitors a day is a very modest amount of traffic, but it's certainly enough to be trolled. The courtesy people have shown in their comments here and e-mails to me has reassured me a lot. I mean it. Thank you. And once again, Happy New Year.

Apparently jealous of all the attention those fault lines in the Indian Ocean are getting, the ground below Niigata decided to twitch at its beleaguered inhabitants this evening. It wasn't really all that dangerous: 4.9 M, and a weak 5 on the JMA scale. But that's the kind of shaking you definitely feel, and the disaster a few months ago involved multiple strong quakes and weeks of aftershocks. This morning's quake was also strong enough to cause delays in the bullet train schedule, not because there were accidents but in order to conduct inspections. Just the sort of thing to get everyone back on edge just as things were returning to normal.

I was disappointed by Jonathan Rauch's book Gay Marriage, which I thought made uncharacteristically spotty arguments. (Uncharacteristically for him, I mean--not, more's the pity, for gay marriage advocates.) Being a sensible person, he knows how to confront reality, though; and with his new op-ed, he ends the year much better than he began it. Well, you have to roll yours eyes and move quickly past the loan shark analogy near the beginning. Part of his main point is this:

The consensus has shifted rapidly, meanwhile, toward civil unions. The 2004 exit polls showed 35% of voters supporting them (and another 25% for same-sex marriage). Particularly after the Nov. 2 debacle, civil unions look to many gay-rights advocates like the more attainable goal. It is not lost on them that Vermont's civil-unions law and California's partnership program have proved surprisingly uncontroversial. For their part, social conservatives increasingly, if grudgingly, accept civil unions as deflecting what they regard as an attack on marriage. John Kerry endorsed civil unions, and in October Mr. Bush accepted them, saying, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do."

This year may be remembered as the time when civil unions established themselves as the compromise of choice. For an indicator, watch whether there is an outcry if state courts narrow the scope of the new amendments to allow civil unions and other partner programs. My guess is that few people will fuss.

It's been put to me that even civil unions wouldn't be possible if activists hadn't first gone the whole way and demanded "marriage rights" and then fallen back to what would then look like a more reasonable position. Maybe. It's not possible to know. I myself think the collateral damage, as it were, has to be factored in: the fixing in the minds of Americans of an image of gay public figures as, yet again, screechy single-issue activists who think of nothing but themselves. It's not fair to lay an equal share of the blame on moderate thinkers such as Rauch, but neither is it unfair to acknowledge that his influence was not always as salutary as it might have been. He's still one of the best advocates we have, especially with Andrew Sullivan still off in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, and it's a holiday treat (no one's going to jump down my throat for not explicitly calling it "Christmas" now that it's 28 December, yeah?) to see him coming around.

(Via IGF)

I didn't know this: the use of organs from brain-dead infants for transplants is not legal (I can only assume that's what "not approved" effectively means). A Japanese national who works in Chile therefore had to send his 10-month-old son to Miami to get a multiple-organ transplant. It looks as if the surgery was successful.

I'd prefer to keep my plans for self-improvement in the New Year private, but I'm perfectly happy to share the things I'd like you all to resolve to do for me. Since I like people with interesting vices, I'm not going to tell you to stop overeating, drinking, or smoking. What I would like everyone to stop over-indulging in are words--just three little ones that have rapidly become a public menace through their overuse by gays and our sympathizers.

hate (used as n.) Oh, children, when your dotty gay Uncle Sean was in college ten years ago, we had many, many ways to accuse people of being intolerant. You could call someone "misogynist" or "sexist" if you thought he was keeping women down, "racist" if he questioned affirmative action, or "heterosexist" if he expressed any discomfort with homosexuality. If you wanted to imply that he was not only intolerant but pathological, you could call him "homophobic." These pronouncements were shrieky and sententious, but rotating through the different charges at least preserved some variety of phrasing and subject matter.

But, being busy people, we've dispensed with all that. Now hate is the word that slices, dices, peels, juliennes, and transforms ordinary radishes into professional-looking rose garnishes at the touch of a button. Just designate someone as "motivated by hate" and move on. The problem, of course, is that calling moral opposition (however misplaced we believe it is) an emotional reaction doesn't make it one; Right Side of the Rainbow explained this beautifully.

Fascinatingly, the venerable noun hatred is not abused this way. When you see someone mention "hatred of gays" or "hatred of women" or the like, you can normally trust him to confine his characterizations to people who really do want to infringe on our rights to self-determination without giving rational reasons. It's a rare instance of more syllables = less airy pretension.

second-class citizen (compound n., usually plu.) My objection to this one is less fundamental than my objections to the other two, so I have less to say about it. If second-class citizens were actually used in the process of making a thorough argument that marriage to the partner of one's choosing is a basic human right, I wouldn't mind so much; and occasionally, very occasionally, it is. Most of the time, though, it comes off as shorthand for, "Why don't you love me?" It also tends to accompany coarse, overarching comparisons to the Civil Rights movement that, in my opinion, only hold up in very limited ways. The term has mutated into a buzzword rather than a concept useful for explicating one's logic.

self-respecting (adj., used esp. in negative construction "no self-respecting gay could possibly...") I used to think I'd be overjoyed when the locution self-loathing dropped out of the queer public discourse. What a naif I was. The wording is gone, but it's been replaced by a longer, more convoluted construction that is, if anything, more annoying. If I had a nickel for every time I read or heard the sentence, "No self-respecting gay could possibly vote for George Bush this year," I'd be retired to a château with guys in loincloths dropping peeled, seeded grapes into my mouth by now.

It was always obnoxious for one gay to call another "self-loathing" for deviating from the activist-approved list of political positions and life choices, but it was almost touching, in a weird way, in its suggestion that the addressee was just stuck in that denial stage on the way through coming out and it was making him behave like a jerk. Accusing someone of not being "self-respecting" goes the whole way and asserts that he's a willful, reasoned-out jerk--in addition to implying that his sense of dignity is properly arbitrated by others.

If I wanted to dwell on things that annoy me, I have no doubt that I could lengthen the above list without much exertion. If our commentators can start avoiding these terms, however--or at least being certain they're using them to build and not substitute for argumentation--it will be a good thing for gay issues and for civility in general, neither of which has benefited from many of this year's installments in the public discourse.

Happy New Year.

I'd like to use this morning's Nikkei to illustrate a point a lot of people seem to have trouble with:





If I weren't so lazy, I'd PhotoShop it, but the main headline (vertical, in reverse type at top right) says, "津波で邦人10人不明." That translates to "10 Japanese citizens missing in tsunamis." The subhead does say, "Over 8600 dead in 8.9 M quake," and the story naturally makes it clear that the events happened thousands of miles away and killed mostly Southeast Asians, but because this is a Japanese newspaper, the main story is believed by the editors to be how the event affected Japanese people.

My point is that, while people are constantly complaining about how provincial American media are, it never seems to occur to them that if they just spent, literally, a single day of the news cycle in another country, they'd see that the focus on local interest is universal. On 9/11 also, as well I remember, NHK and the other Japanese stations focused at least half of their coverage on the Japanese firms in the WTC complex and on whether all their personnel were accounted for.

It's been a day and a few hours since the first quake hit. The estimated number of deaths will probably keep climbing for a week or so; the busy winter holiday season has begun, and the resort islands and shores that were slammed were probably close to full. Luckily, on the other hand, there seem to have been a fair number of people who were on the beach, noticed the sea being sucked outward, and knew what was coming. On Phuket--a major, major, major tourist destination in this part of the world--there also seems to have been a convenient ridge behind which people could flee to safety. The awe-inspiringly efficient distribution network we enjoy means that aid is already coming into devastated areas, but it looks as if Colombo, Sri Lanka, is seeing unusually high tides right now; as always happens after an earthquake or tidal wave, people in the affected areas will be on edge for the next week or two.

Added at 13:10: I should probably clarify something here, since this post and the one I put up yesterday may seem to contradict each other. What I was talking about last night was what stories get covered at all; what I'm talking about above is what's emphasized in stories that do get covered.

And what would Christmas in 2004 be without a million and one attempts to bend it in pretzels to suit current ideological wish-lists? Larry King decided that the best panel to discuss the profundities of Christ's legend and legacy included Deepak Chopra. I regard the fact that he and his studio weren't zapped into ash on the spot as final proof that there is no God.

Later, Atsushi and I watched part of another vile CNN special called The Two Marys. (Don't bother with the jokes about how well audience and subject matter suited each other--way, way too easy.) This was narrated by theological eminence Sigourney Weaver, and it included a lot of talk about how Mary the mother of Christ and Mary Magdalene could have had roles in the early church that were much more official than the Old Boy Network currently dominating Christianity lets on. Oh, yeah, and in case no one's told you, Christ was gay.

Now, obviously, as an atheist and believer in the disinterested pursuit of historical truth, I have no objection to the good-faith efforts by skeptics to do what they must with any genuine scholarly lead. Sometimes new knowledge, or improved theories that fit the evidence better than the previous ones did, will indeed prove disillusioning. When that happens, we have to be strong-minded enough to abandon our old beliefs.

I do find it worth noting, though, that those who cast Mary Magdalene as the lost first disciple always seem to be feminists by conviction. Those who say Jesus had one or a string of queer relationships (always the icky-sensitivo kind, too--as long as we're embroidering history, couldn't we put those rough-tough carpenter muscles to better use? I'm just asking) turn out to be--ta-dah!--gay advocates. And in presenting their findings in soundbites of the form, "I've discovered X, and therefore Christian sects will have to stop mistreating group Y, " these researchers don't seem to make much effort to hide that ideology is driving their efforts.

None of this is a new problem, no; and the point could be made that it's none of my affair. You could come up with demonstrable proof that Jesus was a real historical character who had more sex partners than a Falcon Video actor, and it wouldn't change my life one bit. Nevertheless, religion used to show people how to take the good with the bad and to do their best with the proportion of the two that circumstances had dealt them. Now a lot of it makes the chirpy pretense that it's all good. Something is lost for all of us when people push the line that reality has to be altered to show us in the most approving light before we can live meaningful lives.

Just saw Atsushi off. He did the dishes after dinner yesterday, so there's not much cleaning up to do. Of course, the inside of my refrigerator looks like most people's hall closets--leftover everything wedged in wherever there was still space. I'm going to be having sauerbraten sandwiches and fried potato dumplings for days, but it's always worth cooking for Atsushi. Like all Japanese boys, he was brought up to believe that he'd live at home or in a company dormitory until about age 25. After that he'd marry and have someone to take care of him.

The mouthy, hairy, oversexed American man he finally found to take care of him at 32 is not exactly what his acculturators had in mind, but, while he learned to do laundry and brew coffee while passing through his twenties, he fortunately remained innocent of cooking know-how of any kind. Thus, he still gets that priceless look of delighted surprise whenever I put food on the table: Wow, hon. How'd you turn those three bags of groceries into this?

The only close call I had was with the dumplings. I didn't try to cut corners by paring them before boiling, but I did kind of start making the batter before they'd been chilled really thoroughly. And we all know what happens when you don't chill your potatoes thoroughly before you make your dumpling batter, don't we? Your dumplings fail to hold their shape, that's what. Luckily, they don't taste any different as cumulus-cloud-like oblongs from what they would as perfect spheres, and with the breadcrumbs and butter mixed in and the meat and gravy and vegetables joining them, shapeliness was beside the point.

With dessert we had coffee made in the coffeemaker that was half of Atsushi's Christmas present to me. The other half is the much-needed vacuum cleaner I've been doing without. Yeah, I know, it sounds a little Fred-and-Ethel, but we've gotten into the habit of giving each other something practical for Christmas and something more romantic for our birthdays. Today is the last housecleaning day I'll be faking my way to clean with a push mop between washings.

This was a bad weekend for weather and other natural forces in multiple parts of the world, so I hope everyone was able to stay safe. Only three or four more workdays until Atsushi comes home for the New Year's holiday, which is when life really stops for family-and-friends time in Japan. Best to everyone else who still has a few more days of the grind to go.

The earthquakes in Sumatra demonstrate how bad things can get when a natural disaster strikes at the perfect place to maximize damage: a central location in a Third World country, surrounded by other Third World countries, in the middle of tourist season. Tidals waves have radiated out in several directions, hitting Thailand and Sri Lanka and Maldives hard. The Indian mainland has seen damage in the southeast also. Of course, all of these places are either coastal countries or islands, so they're not unprepared for maritime disaster; but the scope of damage is obviously immense. Additionally, developing countries are developing countries, and general medical and transportation infrastructure may accordingly not be up to coping with multiple emergencies.

I know that weather has interfered with travel for a lot of Americans this Christmas, and the broadcasts from the States appear, understandably, to be devoted mostly to that, to the holiday itself, and to the most recent attack in Iraq. Problems in Southeast Asia--from the Bali bombing to Thailand's hitman-style drug war to just about everything else--seem to get very little play in the American media even on a slow day, though. I hope the scope of the damage, which is still undetermined and likely to keep growing over the next week, isn't downplayed.

I was going to wait to post the picture at left until after the year changed, but since I sent out my New Year's cards today, I figured I may as well do it now. This is the same rooster Atsushi bought for my parents) when I went home last month. I mean, it's the same design, only this one is ours. While I'm not addressing my parents here, I figure I may as well still call it the Year of the Rooster, since heaven knows it's always the year of that other thing around here.

To those who are traveling home for the holidays, stay safe.

There's an expression in Japanese--have I maybe discussed it before?--that combines two first-year words into an exponentially more complex and useful idea: ありがた迷惑. Those who remember Styx know ありがとう (arigato, usually rendered "thank you" but more literally a classical form of an adjective that means "it is a thing to be grateful for"). 迷惑 (meiwaku, "pain in the ass," "annoyance") is a word you use a lot in a country of such frictive crowding. An arigata-meiwaku is what you get when someone meddles out of a sincere desire to be helpful but ends up making things worse. The sister role played by Laurie Metcalf on Roseanne is a good example.

So is France's new hate crimes law:

The French Senate Wednesday night gave final approval to legislation making it a criminal offense to speak or publish homophobia.

The bill adds sexuality to an existing law banning hate speech against other minorities.

Under the legislation, anyone who provokes hatred or violence on the basis of sex or sexual orientation could be fined up to $60,000 and be subject to one year in jail.

The bill was fought by the Roman Catholic church which claimed it could be used against priests who speak out against homosexuality or to censor the Bible. [Enh...never happen!--SRK]

Despite the concerns of the Church, the legislation had little difficulty in the conservative dominated Senate.

The bill which had been pushed by President Jacques Chirac gives France the toughest hate-crime law in the European Union.

French gay rights group Inter-LGBT hailed the vote as as a decisive step to combat growing homophobia.

The government drafted the law after a young gay man was brutally attacked. After he was beaten his assailants poured gasoline on him and set him on fire leaving him severely burned.

Stories like that make me want to punch a hole in the wall. Once that feeling subsides, though, we're left with all the usual questions about hate crimes legislation. They've been articulated before, but since these bills keep passing, it's obvious that we need to keep repeating them: For one thing, isn't dousing someone with gasoline and torching him already punishable under French law, or has everyone been busy making sure the produce meets EU shape and color specifications? For another, is it really possible that people still harbor the delusion that forcing people not to talk about deeply-held beliefs will simply make their potential ill-effects vanish? Do those who sympathize with gays really think we need the deck stacked for us this way? If they don't think we can meet the opposition with persuasive arguments in our own favor, why do they themselves side with us in the first place?

And the issue that saddens me most to contemplate: Are there really gays who think we can only function well in society if we're subjected to nothing but compliments and Nerf-ball questions? If they're that lacking in conviction about their own moral choices, why don't they, indeed, just convert to Christianity and off-load the responsibility onto someone else?

This flood of rhetorical questions is going to start sounding hysterical, so I'll knock it off. I can only marvel anew that the most basic life lesson--(1) not everyone is going to love you + (2) there's nothing you can do about it, so deal--is being so ineptly handed down to so many people.

Added on 24 December: Amritas is a dear as always to link me, especially with the compliment that I've acquitted myself well at the sociology-by-way-of-linguistics posts he specializes in. I have to say, though, that if I were really as good at that sort of thing as he is, I'd have given you the words for "thanks but no thanks" in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, with due explanation of which parts were native and which borrowings.

Since he has another post up related to the perceived religion-evasion of holiday greetings, this is as good a time as any to clarify something I discussed here. That is, I think that forcing a greeting such as "Happy holidays" on people is ridiculous. So is forcing Nativity scenes and such out of the public square.

I just don't think that "Happy holidays" is in and of itself a denatured substitute. A lot of people do use it that way, yes, but to me it's a nicely economical way of conveying, "I hope you had a good Thanksgiving" + "Merry Christmas" + "Happy Hanukkah, if you're Jewish" + "Happy Kwanzaa...uh, if that's how you pronounce it and even though I'm not entirely sure what it is" + "Happy New Year!"

Contrast this with, for example, "Have a nice day!" Blech. "Goodbye" is perfectly adequate, and "Have a nice day!" adds nothing to it. It takes the goodwill conveyed and, if anything, makes it less intense. Not being one to reject polite gestures, I've never drawn myself up to full height and replied, "Actually, I plan to fill the remaining time before midnight with wickedly scrumptious indelicacies, but thank you all the same." Been tempted, though.

New Year's Day means pilgrimages to shrines, and as it approaches, the Yasukuni Shrine controversy is refueled yet again:

The question of whether Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will visit Yasukuni Shrine at the beginning of the year is attracting a great deal of attention as any visit is certain to further sour Japan-China relations. But there is domestic opposition to any cancellation based on outside protests.

It seems the prime minister cannot possibly please both sides.

Since his meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao on Nov. 21, the prime minister has remained silent about future visits to the shrine.

His silence on the matter was agreed on prior to the meeting.

According to lawmakers close to Koizumi, the prime minister believes that focus on his visit to the shrine would undermine the Japan-China relationship.

Rakutaro Kitashiro, chairman of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, said that a visit by the prime minister to the shrine would have an impact on companies operating in China.

His remark apparently also contributed to the prime minister's silence.

...

"No country should complain about another country's tradition," [Koizumi] said, indicating that he had reached the conclusion after weighing the options.

I'm not sure a tradition of honoring war criminals equally with citizens in good standing is entirely unassailable, myself. The issue is not an easy one, and the reason I've discussed it so often here is that both sides have a point. Which sounds more sympathetic at a given moment depends a lot on whether the wording its representative most recently tossed off to reporters was felicitous (in translation from Chinese to Japanese, in the case of Chinese politicians).

Ultimately, though, my view of the issue doesn't really change: while I have no doubt that the PRC is opportunistically looking for ways to cause problems that would get it leverage in trade negotiations with Japan and its adversaries, Japan is asking for it with its blithe let-bygones-be-bygones treatment of its own wartime conduct. If it's true that Japanese treatment of the dead requires enshrining them all equally, despite differences in how honorable their behavior was while alive--and my understanding is that it really doesn't--it doesn't strike me as excessive groveling to explain that. As it is, the pilgrimages look like yet another instance of non-acknowledgement of the seriousness of Japanese acts during the occupation of Asia. Perhaps fixating on them as an important issue in and of themselves is wrong, but the ill-feeling itself isn't groundless.

Good post at XGW about the way coming out is like a delayed-but-compressed adolescence. The numerical framework seems a bit 12-steppy, but the point that a lot of us spend our twenties going through the roiling-hormone stage normally associated with high school is an important one. One part I take exception to, however, is this:

If you find that you are a �gay teen� but your chronological age is 30+, or even later�rest assured that this time, you get to pass through adolescence without all that acne!

Go take a flying leap, honey. When I was a teenager with acne, everyone said, "Don't worry--it'll be over by your twenties." Well, my age has doubled since then, and while I've gotten over the awkward stages of coming out, I still have skin so oily it shines and have to use the full complement of salicylic acid products and the like to keep the blemishes down. Maybe I shouldn't mind so much, since my dermatologist says it may be a sign of high levels of androgens. But I swear, if one more person says, "You're so lucky! You'll never get wrinkles!" I will not be responsible for my behavior.

Virginia Postrel's feelings about the newest must-discuss topic basically mirror mine:

Why criticize merchants for including all their customers in wishes for a happy holiday season? The holidays do, after all, stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year's, both nonsectarian holidays. "Happy Holidays" includes Christmas, for those who celebrate it. But it also includes holidays we all share, as well as some others only a minority observe.

When you extend these greetings, are you wishing people happiness? Or affirming your Christianity? Do you want people who don't celebrate Christmas to be happy (or merry)? Or do you want to make them at least mildly uncomfortable? The answers will determine what you say.

I say "basically" because what she leaves out is the self-righteous wing of her own side: people who are not content to say "Happy holidays" themselves but feel the need to expunge any mention of Christmas from all conversation, loudspeakers, and surfaces within a five-mile radius.

But she herself isn't taking that extreme a position, and she's right about the standing-boldly-up-for-Christmas positions people are taking in droves. The argument is frequently made that we should all say "Merry Christmas," whether we're Christian or not, because Christmas is the origin of the holiday season. It strikes me as iffy, though--solstice rituals are, if not universal, widespread in world culture. That Christianity adapted one in the process of converting pagans may have been enterprising, but it's not much of a distinction. Nevertheless, Christmas is the direct origin of the particular holiday season most of us celebrate, and forcing people to pretend they aren't Christian, or being so taken aback when they acknowledge it that you can't respond, is stupid.

It also becomes flat-out ridiculous when the reason given is that people of other faiths might be offended. It's truly outrageous to see world religions, from Islam to African animism to Buddhism to ancient Mexican earth cults, treated as anthropologically fascinating repositories of deep spiritual wisdom about the mysteries of the cosmos...while Christianity, whose philosophers helped develop many of the principles that undergird our free society, is regarded as a set of hokey superstitions that some folks still can't shake.

Personally, I'll be celebrating Christmas the Japanese way, which suits my capitalist-atheist beliefs perfectly: on Christmas Eve, couples go out for dinner, exchange presents, and retire to love hotels. Atsushi, who wasn't originally going to be able to come home until the New Year's holiday (that's when the Japanese have their big family gatherings), surprised me by promising to fly home on Saturday so we could at least have Christmas day together. At first, I figured we'd go to a restaurant, but then I remembered that this is the man who, after four years, still looks at me tenderly and calls me "GI Sean" whenever I come back from getting a haircut. He's worth a week's worth of preparation to have sauerbraten and dumplings at home.

Anyhow, happy holidays to you all. And in the interest of cultural diversity:

良いお年を御迎え下さい。
(yoi o-toshi wo o-mukae-kudasai: "Happy New Year!")

Added after tea and cake: Ooh! I almost forgot. Everyone does read Miss Manners, right? I think her edge has dulled just a bit over the last ten years or so, but her advice is still on-target, and the books she's published are great reading. Perhaps my favorite column of hers ever is about hospitality and presents. It's immortalized in this book. The piece isn't holiday-specific, but I always reread it around this time of the year. It starts like this:

Offering hospitality is such a serious obligation of etiquette that it is mandated in the sacred literature and traditions of many religions. Just about everyone has been taught one version or another of the holy personage in disguise who was turned away by the uppity rich, but generously welcomed to share the humble home of the poor. In case anyone misses the point, a vivid description was provided of how significantly the hospitality was reciprocated and its absence punished.

So how are we doing with this lesson? The question most frequently posed to Miss Manners these days concerns how to make money from one's guests, or at least how to make them pay for their own entertainment. Another question that has begun popping up concerns the efforts of hosts to enjoy a better standard of living than they are willing to share with their guests. Miss Manners suspects that these people are going to fry.

It actually gets better from there.

Please, let it be true. Ronald Bailey reports in his TCS column that the Kyoto Protocol is no more:

The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development. [I didn't carry over Bailey's links--SRK]

For the last few years, I've cringed every time I've seen the word Kyoto leap out at me while scanning through a news story; dollars to doughnuts, it meant that someone was caviling that the US is pursuing profit over the cries of the sylphs and toadstool spirits.

Along those lines, people familiar with Japan will get a chuckle out of the name of the Japanese energy analyst quoted in the article: 杉山 (sugiyama: "cedar mountain"). If anything symbolizes Japan's own unromantic, calculating approach to environmental management, it's the replacing of old-growth forests with batallions of cedar and other industrial trees. I'm not sure whether there's a more specific name for the varieties usually planted than sugi, but to non-biologist me, the coincidence is pretty funny.

(Via Instapundit, so you've probably seen it already)

The LDP has drafted its Postal Service reform proposal, and having been developed by a committee, the thing appears to have fallen prey to all-things-to-all-people syndrome:

Having duly recorded the multiplicity of opinions [Gulp!--SRK], ranging from the argument that the current single-agent handling of mails, postal savings, and insurance functions should be maintained to opposition to privatization in its entirety, the committee hammered out a proposal in which post offices will be arranged as they are currently and will be uniformly charged with providing postal savings and insurance services nationwide. Mindful of opposing voices within the party, the committee also decided to forgo the use of the word privatization in the proposal.

Later in the (brief, as yet) report, the Nikkei explains that "the summary of points for debate released by the committee last month was predicated on privatization; however, because opposition within the party was so strong, the committee retreated into the wording 'postal reform,' which does not imply that the organization will be split into separate corporations or changed in other specific ways." So we're not privatizing the thing, just...rearranging it. Somehow. How, exactly, we'll tell you later.

The plan to priva...ACK!...reform Japan Post has been dragging out for a while now, and with this latest development, painful but necessary changes to its operations don't look as if they're going to be coming any time soon. Good thing much of the household wealth of the country doesn't hang in the balance, or anything!

I think I've successfully gotten whiteperil.com to redirect to the front page here. I'll add it to my masthead/banner/whatever as soon as I can figure out what font and size to use to avoid making it look too cluttered. Apologies to anyone who might have tried to memorize iwamatodjishi!

In the shuffle of being at home and then returning to non-vacation life here, I forgot about this on the exact day, but....

Last year, AgendaBender posted a post called "A Day without Bill," which is one of my two or three favorite posts ever by anyone. (I was going to fix all the redundant uses of post in that last sentence, but since Tom's story is about a very tall man, maybe they're kind of fitting.) It's a good read for this time of year, and I'm glad I remembered about it again while we're still in the zone between World AIDS Day and Christmas.

Today, we're doing the yin-yang contrast thing.

Tokyo, you see, is a vertical city. Full of concrete and glass. It can get awful stressful! But...but...there are pockets of escape in Tokyo's gardens. Requisite in these gardens is a Japanese maple tree (shown--can you guess?--with red leaves filtering the sunlight. Hey, stop kvetching, you cynical rabble-rousers! At least they remembered it's not cherry blossom season). Some Japanese guy is shown saying that the Japanese feel relaxed and refreshed when they're around nature, which as we all know is unique among world cultures.

What goes discreetly unmentioned, of course, is that Tokyo wouldn't have to call every tuft of grass poking up between two sidewalk bricks a "restful out-of-the-way garden" if the city weren't so relentlessly grey and neon and overhead-wired. As does the specific dearth of tree-lined boulevards that are the hallmark of just about every other world city. It's a shame we couldn't work in a shot of Mt. Fuji's looming snow-capped bulk (nature!) through which a bullet train glides across the foreground, since someone somewhere might figure out that that's not Tokyo. I'm sure there's still time, though.

Steve Miller at IGF links to this new piece Rich Tafel has in NRO about Bush-voting gays:

The one statistic confounding pundits in this election is the number of gays who voted for George W. Bush. Polls show that the president received anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million gay votes, up from 1 million votes in 2000 and double the number of gay votes for Bob Dole in 1996. This dramatic increase comes despite the fact that no gay organization endorsed him, no gay journalist editorialized on his behalf, and no gay leader supported him.

The post-election conventional wisdom fueled by gay leaders and the media is that President Bush won because he gay bashed. This notion serves all of their purposes: Gays can maintain their image of themselves as hated victims and liberal sections of the media can salve their wounds by admitting that because of their own tolerance they failed to appeal to America's intolerance.

Tafel, former head of Log Cabin Republicans and a knowing political operator (I don't mean that as a dig in this case), doesn't put it as bluntly as he might have--for instance, "Gay activists and journalists seem to be standing around and asking, 'Why the hell didn't you guys do what you were told?'"

This is funny in light of an encounter I had the other night (in the same place, actually, where I was granted my first taste of this holiday turkey). I was sitting--one of the reasons I usually don't post about these things is that it's hard not to give away other people's personal information, so I'll limit it to this--between a Muslim who has US citizenship but was brought up in one of the more Westernized countries in the Middle East, on the one hand, and an East Asian guy who's lived since childhood in various big cities in California's San-San population belt, on the other. The Muslim man was in his late 40's, at a guess, and the East Asian was maybe 21.

The conversation was lively, and at some point, someone brought up the election. Each of us was pleasantly surprised to hear that the other two had voted for Bush, and we spent quite an interval talking about the arguments we'd had with friends and the campaign messages that had and hadn't reached us. It was fascinating, because here you had a Muslim who divides his time between America and Asia--you know, very cosmopolitan and stuff--and a kid from coastal California who works in the entertainment industry, and both of them just seemed to want to know, What was it that Kerry planned to do? How was it going to be better than an imperfect but predictable Bush? And why was it assumed that they were going to be pulling the lever for the Democrat out of some sort of homo predisposition? Tafel nails the more specific issues, too:

Gays who voted for President Bush had a simple logic. They recognized that both candidates opposed gay marriage for political purposes. Their primary concern was the war on terror. They believed that we are engaged in a war for the future of our country and our way of life. They believed that the rise of militant Islam is a real and deadly threat. They believed that our country, with all its faults, is a force for good in the world. They believed that our enemy cannot be reasoned with. They believed that we needed a leader who understood the world in terms of moral values, and they didn't scoff when the president used the words "good" and "evil" to describe the battle against terror. They realized we've made mistakes, but also realized that the only thing worse than making mistakes is not even trying. Many gays understood all of this and voted for President Bush, showing that they are people as well as gay people and that they have concerns beside their group interests. They wanted someone who in the difficult months ahead would stand firm in his beliefs.

I doubt every gay voter who went for Bush agreed with every single one of these, but the overall characterization strikes me as sound. The problem isn't that reflexive-lefty gays haven't brought their own beliefs in line with ours since the election. It's that they still don't seem to be able to fathom our reasoning at all.

A decade ago, I was in college in the same city as Camille Paglia was teaching in, and her highly-publicized rants about loony-leftism really made me feel better about coming out. You know, the LGBA (which doubtless has a few more letters in its name by now) was full of JCrew types bleating about oppression. I went to one meeting and never went back, but it didn't rattle me too much. Paglia and her media followers really looked as if they might generate enough force to break queer activists out of their calcified ways of thinking.

It didn't turn out that way. She certainly had her effect--along with others--but it was to peel off the closet moderates and make them more comfortable returning to the common-sense middle. The wacko leaders who are the real problem haven't moved at all. It's a shame.

This is cool--a Black Republicans' club has formed at Penn, reports Erin O'Connor. What is not cool is that the DP article misspells supersede, indicating that it hasn't gotten much less retarded in the ten years since my graduation. I don't know how the campus climate really is now, but when I was a student, it was not hard to have civilized conversations with a wide range of political viewpoints--informally. The university-supported campus culture was as PC-addled as you'd expect, however, so I hope Sean-Tamba Matthew eventually has enough of a membership to march on Houston Hall and seek funding.

Far Outliers has a post up about one of the more perversely funny aspects of life as a foreigner in Japan: the Creole you end up cobbling together from Japanese and your native language. He The guy he quotes specifically remembers words used by Mormon missionaries, of which I thought these (the words--I haven't seen the missionaries) were rather sweet:

golden kazoku Family interesting in joining the church

kanji bandit, kanji jock Missionary who can read and write Japanese characters

Added on 20 December: You would think that having been reared in a church that was so obscure I had to go around saying, "No, we're not Seventh Day Adventists...no, we're not Jews for Jesus, either. See, it's like this...," I'd be especially careful not to slush other people's religions together. No such luck. Apologies to Joel for turning him into a different author and a Mormon.

The failure of a lot of the larger Asian countries to do something about their emerging AIDS problem--while places such as Thailand, which as a sex trip destination got hit very soon after the US did, have gotten theirs more or less under control--is in the news very frequently here. The latest story is that the PRC is making gingerly moves toward dealing with what everyone acknowledges is an AIDS disaster waiting to happen:

A study funded by the Chinese government shows few men who have sex with men have an understanding of how the disease is transmitted.

At least 80 percent of the men surveyed believed they were not at risk the official People's Daily reports.

The survey, conducted by the center of AIDS control and prevention found that only about 20 percent of those questioned knew how HIV/AIDS is spread.

...

The survey was conducted in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Information was largely collected from pubs, parks, public bathrooms, squares, cyber cafes and other public places.

The survey method was obviously not very scientific, so who knows how reliable the numbers are? But it's not unusual in Asia to believe that you're only at risk for HIV infection if you have sex with Westerners--a pattern that goes triple for the Japanese, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, AIDS first gained publicity as the sort of disease you find in big, crime-ridden American and European cities, which gave it the image of something that safe and orderly Japan, which in addition has a world-renowned health care system and traditional cleanliness fetish that make it feel insulated, would not be vulnerable to. Men who bring the disease back from business trips to Southeast Asian countries in which prostitution is easily available are the most commonly discussed way the virus has entered Japan, and the fact that the Japanese blood supply was still tainted long after the West had cleaned its up was highly publicized for a while. But people get complacent, and in my experience, a lot of Japanese gay guys are pretty blasé about STD's in general. No one is really sure what the infection rate is here, but it's pretty much a given that it's higher than the official figures.

Another, not really related, article on 365Gay reports that Andy Bell of Erasure is HIV positive. I'm not a fan--his singing always sounds to me like Phil Collins trying to imitate Alison Moyet (who is a favorite of mine)--but he's been one of the most out men in popular culture for years and years, and while I don't think he and his partner had an obligation to make this particular revelation, it's nice that they decided to.

Everyone is aware that Atsushi, always looking out for my well-being, has told me not to read the Asahi, yeah? And that the only reason I do is that I'm a disobedient boy? Okay. As long as we're straight (so to speak) on that, one of today's editorials is a model of weightless sentimentality, as you can see if I can just manage to pin the following citation down so it doesn't float away:

The most beautiful English word is "mother" to non-native speakers of the tongue worldwide, Britain's organization for international exchanges found in a survey. The British Council polled 40,000 people.

Other words that followed "mother" on the list included "passion," "smile" and "love." But "father" was not on the list, though I looked through it to the 70th place.

The phrase "mother test" has several meanings in the United States. One of them is that the the U.S. president, as commander in chief of the armed forces, must be able to explain to the mother of a U.S. soldier why her son or daughter might die in some armed conflict.

You can see where this is going, right? Actually, if you do, maybe you should tell me. I've read the whole thing, and I'm still not exactly sure what the big policy point is. The idea that adding a provision about withdrawing Japan's SDF personnel if the on-the-ground situation in Iraq deteriorates seems odd at this juncture--that strikes me as warranting half a paragraph, not a whole op-ed, but otherwise, the author doesn't, um, have, like, a whole lot to, y'know, say.

But you know what? That doesn't really matter. What really matters is that we're all once again assured that President Bush is a very bad man:

Was the addition of the provision a year later a ploy to soothe the stiff public sentiment against extending the term of the Iraqi mission? Couldn't appropriate measures be taken if it were not for such a provision? How did the troops fare in the past year without it? [Just fine, dumbass, which explains the almost complete absence of casualty reports--SRK]

This summer, I read the words of an American mother whose son had died as a soldier in Iraq. "It was the hollowest letter I have had in my life," she said of the form condolence letter she received from President George W. Bush.

QED.

Added (just barely) on 16 December: I'm not sorry I posted this one, but I do normally try to avoid just clipping the stupidest section of an article I don't like, appending some smarty-pants comments, and then pushing "Publish." I would, therefore, just like to repeat that I wasn't aiming to produce the ultimate slap-down of the arguments against the Iraq War in general or the deployment of SDF personnel there specifically. I was just dumbfounded that someone working for the Asahi actually got paid to write an editorial that could have been scribbled on the back of a bar napkin after 13 rounds of shochu.

Of course, I don't think that the Koizumi administration is being out of line in extending the deployment. There was, after all, a Diet election a few months ago, which voters were incessantly admonished to treat as a referendum on Koizumi's WOT and economic policies. Everyone who voted for an LDP or Shin-Komeito candidate knew that that meant formally supporting that coalition's war policy and had the chance to send the opposite message. I'm sure a lot of people struck an uneasy balance between foreign and domestic issues, perhaps hoping that Bush would be voted out of office in November and the Japanese support for the Iraq occupation would become less intense. But those are the trade-offs you have to make as a voter, and you don't get a do-over when external circumstances shift in ways you didn't gamble on.

Oh, this is kind of along the lines of that last post, but not really: Yesterday, Amritas said, "If Sean can quote from songs, so can I." He's right, of course. What was funny was that he was the first to mention it. See, I'm sure this will strike people as weird, but post titles give me the darnedest amounts of trouble. I'm not a journalist, so I often feel as if Sam-the-Eagle-serious headlines are...maybe not misrepresentations, but a bit gussied up for what they're being used to label. Occasionally, a stray line from a pop song would seem fitting, so I started using one when it came to me.

Then I got into a serious Kylie Minogue jag, and before I knew it, it became like a game: If within 5 seconds, I could think of something from one of her songs that fit the post and would help me recognize it in a list if I needed to edit it later, I went with it. If not, I used something more ordinary. But it was off the cuff. I mean, at some point, I noticed I'd named a good five or six different entries for lines from "Spinning Around," which is not exactly what you'd normally consider a model of quotability. It gave me a chuckle precisely because it was so random, and I figured few readers would have reason to pick up on it.

Then I noticed that I was getting a decent number of hits from Australia, the UK, Canada, Israel, and other non-US sources. I think most Americans know this by now, but Kylie is a massive celebrity of the Madonna/Janet/Mariah order just about everywhere on Earth except the States. You start using lines from her most inescapable hits, and the chances are not slim that people will recognize them, so I kind of started to expect that sooner or later, I'd open my inbox and be confronted by a message that ran something like

Dear YankeePoofterBitch,

Not a bad blog, but the Kylie lyrics as post titles?

WORST THING EVER.

Cheers, from the Commonwealth,

[name]

This is not to be taken as an offer to change my MO, you understand. Life is too short to be sitting around ruminating over the perfect single-sentence title for a blog entry. I just found it funny that, of the things people comment on in correspondence, that one never came up. In fact, Amritas himself put it in a casual footnote to a post of his own, not anything directed at me. You just never know.

To whoever it was who nominated me for Best Japan Blog: Thank you! What a sweet gesture. Please don't feel slighted because I've asked Simon to remove me from the list. I'm very, very to myself in some ways, and that's one of them; but it doesn't change the fact that I feel very fortunate that people read what I post here.

I do think the Asia Blog Awards do a good service by giving people a chance to look at clusters of sites they may not otherwise have been able to look into at once, and Simon's being generous with his time by taking charge of overseeing the nominating and voting. So if you haven't, please go see the variety of blogs in the region that are represented, and remember that when you visit them, they'll have other worthy sites blogrolled that you may not have seen in the lists of nominees.

I cannot make this scene. I turned on CNN while putting my jacket and bag away, naturally figuring American Morning would be featuring Bill Hemmer here in Tokyo. I mean, what better place to broadcast in the morning than from the Land of the Rising Sun itself!

And what's the first thing out of his mouth? "Zen Buddhism is synonymous with Asia and its traditional beliefs." Sufferin' Soseki. If no one minds terribly, I'm going to break my bottle of Perrier here off at the neck and slit my throat with it. Message to Bill's TelePrompTer writer-people: One hates to be a one-note sourpuss, but Asia is a large continent. It contains multitudes. No really--it keeps going west (no, the other...left, people, left! the hand that looks like an L when you hold it out in front of you!) after China for a while. There's India, there's Pakistan...gosh, all kinds of places in which Zen is useless for understanding the fabled Traditional Beliefs. Of course, they don't make Toyotas and Sony equipment or have Harajuku street erks in those places, so really, why should we care?

Besides, Bill Hemmer, stereotype-shattering man that he is (HOLY F**KING SH*T, they DID NOT just lead back in from the commercial break with synthesized koto music followed by a gong. They COULD NOT have. What is this, the commercial for SPAM Oriental from 1978?), apparently spent 20 minutes this morning going to a REAL JAPANESE TEMPLE and learning meditation! That'll teach me to be all making like a know-it-all.

It's the interview of Ambassador Howard Baker right now. He's just resigned, BTW--nothing embarrassing happened, mind you, he's just old and ready to retire. Naturally, he's talking like a diplomat, meaning he's saying nothing much but saying it very personably. Nice performance. Is it my imagination, though, or is he wearing a rust-colored tie and a pale lilac shirt? Never saw that seasonal combination for late autumn before. Maybe they're resignation colors. Or maybe they're a protest against that theme music.

Of course, it could be worse. They could have no one in an Exotic Locale, which would free up more time to interview various combinations of Peterson jurors in somber tones about why, exactly, they thought he should fry. (And I don't mean Amber, baby!)

How much do you want to bet that, even though it's December, cherry blossoms will make their way into this pageant before it's over?

Okay, enough of this.

Added at 23:19: Everyone giving those frantic "Hi, Mom!" waves from behind Bill's affably blocky frat-boyish head while he demonstrates the AMAZING TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT of Japanese cell phones? You look just as idiotic as you would back home.

I told you there'd be bile.

So I'm at one of my hang-outs, and the manager goes, "Sean-chan! There's a new version of 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' out--Band Aid 20. Want us to put it on?" He means on the DVD player that feeds the three televisions around the bar. Band Aid 20? Well, jeez, why not?

It's even more awful than I could have imagined. I mean, okay, I was a pre-teen when Bob Geldof was birthing the first version, and it wasn't much later that "We Are the World" and "That's What Friends Are For" were saturating the airwaves with showy benevolence. So maybe they were more horrible than I remember--not that I think of them all that fondly.

But, man, this was...was...you had Dido singing in that placid, contented "I-ayyyyyyeeee wanna thank yew" Ebba Forsberg half-yodel, seemingly unaware that the lyrics were about starving people who have not managed to sell several million albums. You had Robbie Williams (wearing a shirt, unfortunately, but no matter--I can play back the "Rock DJ" video in my head at will) grimacing through a couplet or two. Naturally, you had Bono rasping away for a bit--that man can smell an opportunity for notice-me professional compassion the way a vulture zeroes in on the closest pick-cleanable carcass.

But the most amazing part was when a close-up of the shrunken face of a suffering child was faded into the head of some plump, pampered pop singer--I don't think it was Des'ree, or Heather Smalls, or Caron Wheeler, because I probably would have recognized them, even if I haven't clapped eyes on them since college. Anyway, as my mother would say, Boy, I'll tell you--no shame! And naturally, we had to climax with wide-angle shots of the contributors assembled, choir-style, to show how sincere they were. After all, if all those cool people were willing to coordinate their booking schedules to be filmed in the same studio at the same time, well, it must be something important they're on about, right? It was a full-force reminder of why it's so outrageous to hear celebrities grouse about how callous and crass the general public is. Give me the Human League cluelessly pomposing about the Lebanon any day.

Added in the morning: I see through Amritas that others have had the displeasure already, too. Like some of the commenters, I found David Carr's last paragraph a little misdirected--poor Africans are deserving of more, not less, sympathy because they've been seized on by self-righteous Western celebs, in my view. But the contempt the song itself deserves can hardly be overstated. Did I mention the rap in the middle?

Added on 17 December: Okay, I've now seen the video again, and it looks as if the dissolve from the child's face may not have been to one of the Band Aid singers but rather to an African woman blooming with health thanks to the transformative powers of rock-star self-promotion. A small but significant ethical improvement.

Michael J. Totten is having a discussion with various commenters about this post about this story, in which he draws parallels between being a resident foreigner and being an immigrant and then calls on everyone to remember to a good "guest." I agree that that wasn't the greatest choice of words--in fact, it gave me a double-take--but I also think his point is obvious enough that it doesn't warrant going ballistic over.

I wouldn't renounce my American citizenship for all the gold in the world, but even if I wanted to, I probably wouldn't be able to become a Japanese citizen without supernatural help. Very much like many Muslim cultures, I suspect, Japan is the kind of place with very hospitable individuals and a very insular government. And I am, essentially, a guest, so I do most of the adapting.

What would I do if I did, in fact, immigrate? I would still do most of the adapting, only in that case we would usually call it "assimilating." Immigrating into a pre-existing country with its own traditions is not like founding a new one where you can stack the deck in favor of your own worldview. When you join a society whose tolerance for different ways of life is one of the very principles that allowed your entrance in the first place, you have to get used to being exposed to points of view that are opposed to your own. That doesn't mean you have to change your beliefs, necessarily, only that you have to accept that you won't be insulated from others'. Either that, or stay home where the surrounding culture is the same as your own but you have no job.

I didn't see any evidence in the Yahoo! article that the Christmas play, nativity scene contest, or Christmas songs were mandatory. And if they're not mandatory, well...suck it up. When I was little, I was part of a church that didn't believe Christmas was a true Christian celebration. When the rest of the class had a Christmas party, I was allowed to eat a treat or two and then went to the library. When we sang Christmas songs in music class, I was unshowily silent. Same at Hallowe'en, Easter, and Valentine's Day. None of this seduced me into believing in mainstream Christianity, or traumatized me, or what have you. Since Muslims have become such a large minority in Italy, it strikes me as a perfectly reasonable idea to incorporate their celebrations into fun-time activities in public schools where they'd be appreciated, and it's hard to believe there's nowhere the children of religious Muslims can go if their parents wish them to absent themselves from the sliver of the day devoted to Catholic activities.

But that requires appreciating a diversity of viewpoints, without trying to wipe out everyone's identity the minute it could cause friction. It's disturbing to see Italy, a country whose contributions to the development of Western civilization are older and vaster than those of almost any other, slowly let itself be cowed into becoming part of the ummah.

Oh, my. How very unfortunate. You know how, despite different cultures, languages, and aesthetic and spiritual traditions going back thousands of years, all East Asians are basically the same and can communicate with each other intuitively, using their yin-yang-mystical Oriental powers and stuff? Well, somehow, that's not the way it's working on the set of <