The White Peril 白禍

This just in: Irreverence seen in costuming at Hallowe'en party:

Despite a public outcry from gay, Jewish and African American civil rights groups, Virginia Military Institute will allow its own students to investigate a party at which some cadets dressed in drag while others wore Nazi uniforms and still others were in black face.

Pictures of the Halloween party only came to light on weekend when it was learned they had been posted on the Internet.

One picture shows three cadets in VMI uniform shirts giving the Nazi salute to the camera. Two of the students are wearing swastika armbands and one had a Hitler-style mustache.

Another photo shows a cadet was dressed as "a starving African". Other pictures show two men in tiaras, wigs and eye shadow. Both are wearing underpants and tank tops that read, "I [heart] a man in uniform."

There is also a picture of a man in a loincloth wearing dark makeup, and one of a man with a bull's-eye drawn on the rear of his pants.

Ooh, tell me more about that one! Was he hot? Did he have a bubble butt to do it justice?

Unfortunately, the article takes off in a different direction:

Advocacy groups called the pictures disturbing.

"There's nothing funny about gay men and lesbians in uniform right now risking their lives in Iraq," Dyana Mason, executive director of Equality Virginia told the Roanoke Times.

"As future leaders in the military, they [cadets] have to understand you can't make of fun of people at their expense."

I agree. It's too bad the rest of America doesn't take a cue from us gays, who wouldn't think of showing up at a Hallowe'en party ironically dressed as a nun (bonus points for studded leather underwear that can be flashed with a lift of the habit), a priest (bp's for bringing a friend dressed as a corruptible altar boy), a naval officer (Tom of Finland-style, with too-tight and too-unbuttoned uniform), or a rich Reagan-era Republican (who entertains all with cheery banalities about trickle-down economics).

Is it too much to ask that our flacks remember that there are straight folks out there who have actually...um...met homosexuals? A queer activist who lectures at people about being more poker-faced and pious is asking to be laughed off-stage.

Added on 1 February: Thanks to Chris and Michael for the links. Since they mean that someone I don't know might read this, I suppose I should clarify something. (I cut this out of the original post in a doubtless short-lived nod to conciseness):

I don't think that it's possible, even in photographs, to read people's thinking very well. Those wearing swastikas could have been viciously parodying the Nazis, after the fashion of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz on Hogan's Heroes. Those who gave the Sieg heil! salute could have been taking a rare opportunity to chafe at the hyperdisciplined atmosphere imposed by their instructors by satirizing it. It's possible that the "starving African" and drag queens are polite and easygoing around individuals of all kinds but are sick to death of PC coercive compassion (to use Camille Paglia's term) and identity politicking.

The point that people who enroll at a military academy are signing on to more rigorous standards of behavior, and that they're going to represent America in official ways that most of us don't have to worry about, is a good one. But, for pity's sake, it's a bleedin' Hallowe'en party for a bunch of guys in their late teens and early 20s, off the chain for some well-earned carousing. Do we expect them to come as their favorite Mother Goose characters? I could certainly see their superiors' advising them to err in the direction of avoiding the appearance of evil...by having the kind of party they like off-time and being sure not to--hello?!--post pictures of it on the Internet.

Weird week. Atsushi was here for a belated anniversary celebration, which was the highlight; of course, it meant I was keyed up before that. Friend's birthday last Sunday...Monday? Anyway, uncharacteristic work-night carousing. Made for some odd communing between self and current project. Probably odd posts, too.

Somewhere in there, a friend--not a birthday boy--asked me what he was doing wrong. You know, to find a boyfriend worth making a life with. It's not the sort of question you can respond to with, "Just about everything," even if that's pretty much the answer. This is one of those guys who...his way of showing a man he's interested is to be all effusive and touchy. Not touchy in a caddish way, where you have to glare at him and be like, "Sorry, bro, that's my knee"--just with the flirtatious-hand-on-shoulder thing. And he giggles and blushes. A lot.

Now, there's nothing wrong with being jolly and boyish, but if you're too jolly and boyish...and you go for big Australian guys...and you have a tendency to act shocked and affronted when they get the idea they're going to score with you, you are asking for trouble. Talking to my friend about this stuff reminds me of those dead-end discussions we had in college about whether a woman is being "provocative" if she goes around in an eyelet camisole and micromini and can't talk to a man without flipping her hair.

[CNN-related aside: Speaking of clothing choices, who the hell told Dianne Feinstein that the pale-green jade beads were a good idea with the black jacket? She looks as if she were about to show Princess Aurora something in the way of a nice, new spinning wheel.]

My friend fails, in the by-the-book way, to see where the problem might lie. I mean that he hasn't made the basic connection between, on the one hand, behavior that attracts men and gives you the thrill of being admired and, on the other, behavior that signals you're eager to provide a different kind of thrill in return later. You don't have to subscribe to the revolting belief that you owe a guy sex if you let him buy you a drink in order to believe that it's dishonest and manipulative to push his buttons to shore up your ego. My friend is well-intentioned and really doesn't seem to see it that way, and (at least where I usually run into him) the guys behind the bar as well as his buddies know how to keep an eye on him. It's just frustrating when someone asks you something important and doesn't want to hear the answer.

[Is Jane Harman the most annoying person in the world, or what? Sweetie, it's okay to choke out a single sentence without taking a dig at the President, sometimes. No, really--we'll be able to remember you hate him even if we go 30 seconds without hearing about it.]

In better news, since Atsushi was home for the weekend, I was able to pass along my parents' Christmas present to him, which arrived in the mail after he'd gone home from the New Year. He'd given them a figurine for the Year of the Rooster, so they gave him one back: a cat, probably because he played so easily with my parents' two (real ones, not figurines) when I brought him home two years ago. They're Siamese, so suffering themselves to be played with is not a habit.

The weather is supposed to turn cold today in his part of Japan--actually, along the Sea of Japan coast overall, I think. It's windier and colder than last week here in Tokyo, too, but it's still clear. I probably ought to air the rugs while I can. Now that Aaron Brown is on television, I probably ought to change the channel, too. Criminy.

I only comment on the stories that move me to do so, but it would be madness to let today pass without mentioning the Iraqi elections, even though I usually leave general WOT commentary to people who are better qualified. Reuters understandably, being a news organization, is stressing the attention-grabbing element of conflict in its lead story:

Insurgents threatened a bloodbath on Sunday when Iraqis go to the polls in an election intended to unite the country and quell violence but which could instead foment sectarian strife.

Does anyone seriously intend today's voting to unite the country in the tidy, cut-and-dried way that sentence makes it sound? I haven't heard anyone talk as if the thrushes will warble with joy and crocuses will bloom tomorrow just because there's been an election. Of course, the insurgents (you're catching me intone that word the way I might refer to myself as a "confirmed bachelor," yeah?) are going to go literally ballistic. Even if the new native Iraqi government is more symbolic than substantive at first, what it symbolizes is change in a direction reactionaries have to resist at all costs. It won't turn into Malaysia overnight, but here's hoping that the attacks today are contained and minimized as much as possible. Congratulations to the Iraqis.

How very strange. Look at this Yomiuri story. The headline says, "Pakistan opposes UNSC seat for Japan," which makes sense. This is a Japanese newspaper reporting things from the vantage point of local importance. The beginning is fine:

Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said in an interview with The Daily Yomiuri and other English-language newspapers in Asia on Thursday night that his government would not support the envisioned permanent membership of Japan on the U.N. Security Council.

[There are two reform proposals. Under Model A, more UNSC permanent memberships would be created for countries such as Japan. Under Model B, permanent membership would not be expanded.]

"(With Model B), nobody gets on (the Security Council) permanently, but everybody has a chance to represent its own region," he said. "It is very clear that the Security Council does need reform...but we oppose anything being done to create another permanent class of countries...It has to be done on the basis of equity, justice and in a democratic way."

That sounds nice. Who knows? Maybe Aziz even means it, even if Pakistan itself is not a world-class beacon of democratic transparency in government. It's interesting, though, to note a word that the Yomiuri reporter fails to mention even once: India.

Cheese and crackers! The "It's me" scam--which has now taken so many forms that it's referred to more elegantly as 振り込め詐欺 (furikome-sagi: "the 'Pay up!' scam"*)--caused losses of 28,400,000,000 yen in 2004. (That's about US $258,000,000.) The figure is nearly four times what it had been in 2003--the phenomenon really took off last year. The Mainichi ran an article a few days ago about one of the rings from which some members have been caught:

The ring was divided into 10 groups, each of which comprised of some 10 "shops." Each shop was headed by a "manager" and staffed by approximately 10 "employees."

Each shop was required to net at least 10 million yen a month from such frauds. Employees who showed outstanding performances were invited to participate in tours of Okinawa and dine at hotels. While those who failed to fulfill their quota were beat by their bosses.

Managers received about 500,000 yen in fixed monthly salary and employees got 250,000 to 300,000 yen, plus additional pay in proportion to the money they earned. One manager received 5 million yen as a monthly wage, police said.

You know, kind of like Fuller Brush, only with kneecappings and not a single satisfied customer. Of course, the efflorescence of this particular swindle only seems sudden; in fact, it's been gradually becoming more common over the last few years, and there's nothing surprising in the way more miscreants have been drawn to it.
* Before Amritas gets over his cold and points it out: 振り込め isn't the imperative of the verb usually translated "pay." It's more like "make the bank transfer" (or, if we're being literal, "sprinkle it in" or "wave it in"). I was taking license, poetic or otherwise.

Something else from the Japanese courts, this time on a recurring topic here:

The Naha District Court on Friday rejected a lawsuit against the government and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that was filed by almost 100 people seeking damages over Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine.

The ruling dismissed claims from the 94 plaintiffs, who experienced or lost relatives in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, that Koizumi's visits to the shine had caused them to suffer, and rejected their demand for 100,000 yen each in compensation.

In handing down the ruling, Presiding Judge Kazuto Nishii refrained from saying whether or not Koizumi's visits to the shrine, which enshrines class-A war criminals, violated the Constitution or if they were made in an official role.

Of course, Judge Nishii refrained from saying so--that's the million-dollar question. But he didn't have to; the reason behind the dismissal was "that the legal right to strictly request the separation of religion and state was not a benefit for residents and that that they could therefore not demand compensation if this right was violated." Okinawans are Japanese citizens, so the issue is not the same as it is with comfort women; they do frequently get the country-cousins treatment, though.

One of the big stories this week is that the Supreme Court of Japan ruled that it was not unconstitutional for the government of Tokyo Metro (an entity equal in status to a prefecture, though I realize I've just made it sound like a tram line) to refuse to consider foreign nationals as candidates for management positions. I think it's the first time I've ever seen the same top story at all three English-version Japanese newspapers I read on-line (the Asahi, the Mainichi, and the Yomiuri), though of course it was in the Nikkei and elsewhere, too.

Those familiar with Japan will understand the issue here, but for those who are not: we're not talking about immigrants. The controversy is over ethnic Koreans and Chinese born and brought up in Japan--many of whom have no real ties to Korea or China--who nevertheless do not have Japanese passports and are considered resident aliens. This is from the Yomiuri report:

The Supreme Court said the metropolitan government's preventing its foreign workers from taking promotion exams therefore did not violate Article 3 of the Labor Standards Law, which bans discriminating against workers on the ground of nationality, and Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees "equality before the law."

Meanwhile, Justices Shigeo Takii and Tokuji Izumi said in their dissenting opinions that the metropolitan government's refusal to let the second-generation Korean resident sit the promotion examination just because she is not Japanese was "an illegal act of discrimination," and that rejection of the plaintiff who has special permanent resident status from the first round of promotion exams was "unconstitutional."

Japan's treatment of its resident non-Japanese Asians causes a great deal of strain, especially because of the restrictions on civil service jobs (which can include public health, the field of nursing in which the plaintiff in this case practiced, and public education). For some reason, I can't seem to find a report on it, but there was a case last year in which the parents of a family of illegal aliens died. They were, I think, Thai and had been living in Japan for years. The government decided to grant the teenaged daughter citizenship and send the younger children back to Thailand. The reasoning was that the girl had never really known any life but that in Japan and was old enough to have formed her personality around her life here, while the younger children still had time to return to their native country and adapt to it without trauma. There's a case of an orphan like that every few years, and citizenship is, if my memory serves correctly, often granted.

Second- and third-generation children of intact non-Japanese families are another matter, but it's worth remembering that pity for them must be carefully qualified. Japan-Korea ill-feeling goes both ways, even if there can be no debate over which side got the short end of the stick over the last century or so. A lot of permanent residents seem to be perfectly happy to retain their special permanent residency while working to expand the rights attached to it. And, well, while the mistreatment of non-Japanese here is real, you can't ignore the fact that desiring the rights of a Japanese citizen while maintaining one's identity (and presumably loyalty of some kind?) as a Korean means wanting to have it both ways.

I have no idea what the plaintiff in this case thinks on the subject. By all accounts, she was encouraged by her superior to take the qualifying exam for promotion; she didn't go looking for trouble to make a grand point, and she doesn't seem like a chronic rabble-rouser. The Supreme Court decision, which simply affirms that it's not unconstitutional for a local government to preserve positions of authority for Japanese citizens, is hard to fault. The court cannot, after all, fix long-standing animosity and divided loyalties.

Added at 18:00: Man, can I be retarded sometimes. I looked at today's "Asia by Blog" installment over at Simon's and didn't see that he'd linked to anyone's coverage of this story--as I say, it was big here. It's sort of odd that I missed it, because it's the FIRST LINE of the Korea/Japan section. Anyway, his first link was to Joi Ito's post, which mentions that the nurse in question is, in fact, genetically half-Japanese. I take the point that Japan is bringing many of these problems on itself, though it's not as if it had a monopoly on xenophobia. I still can't dismiss the idea of requiring citizenship as a qualification for ranking posts in the government as a trumped-up issue.

Added on 29 January: Maybe I'm losing my mind. I'm still looking for the story about that Thai girl, but the only one I keep running into is the (far, far more famous case) of the girl who's applying for permanent residency because her grandmother's Japanese husband has adopted her. Her parents are dead. But she doesn't have any siblings, and she didn't grow up here. I wouldn't be surprised if I weren't correctly remembering all the facts of the case I'm thinking of, but I'm usually not quite that much of a space cadet.

Even in death, Japanese abductee Megumi Yokota is getting no peace. The DPRK handed over a collection of bones said to be hers a while back. About a month ago, Japanese forensic experts determined that--surprise!--the North Koreans were lying. If I recall correctly, it was suggested that the bones received might not all be from the same person.

It's taken the DPRK a month or so to respond, and its response, relayed through its state news organ, is, "The Japanese forensic report is a complete fabrication; a thorough fact-finding investigation into the fraud must be undertaken and the responsible parties severely punished." Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machida replies, justifiably, that if the DPRK has accusations to make, it should make them through direct diplomatic communication.

Yokota's first name, BTW, is officially written in kana: めぐみ. The meaning, tragically unfulfilled in her case, is "blessing."

This is from Ghost of a Flea:

I have not listened to this one in ages. How is it Stock Aitken Waterman got away with releasing the oddly similar backing beat to "Venus" by Bananarama?

He is referring to Kylie's much-spat-upon version of "The Locomotion," and I believe the answer is this (yeah, I'm sure it's on the Internet in a 1000 places): Kylie was one of the celeb guests at some charity performance-thing, and on the spur of the moment, they asked her...or everyone...to sing something. Anyway, I think she and some friends decided to improv their way merrily through "The Locomotion," and it went over so well that someone decided it'd be great to, you know, milk it for maximum profit by releasing it as a single. When S/A/W produced, they naturally weren't going to give it the full Rick Astley--it was just a one-off lark by a television actress whose amateurishness was part of the charm. So the fact that it sucked isn't all that much a stain on anyone's record. (The fact that Kylie's later covers of "Tears on My Pillow" and "Celebration" were made to suck with malice aforethought is another thing entirely.)

Actually, another funny story I've heard a bunch of times is that after the sessions for "The Locomotion," S/A/W said the usual "This was fun, stop by the studio and maybe we can get something bigger together" stuff, and when Kylie showed up as planned, they'd forgotten all about it. They had to write "I Should Be So Lucky" on the spot. Don't know whether it's true.

I like John Corvino's latest article posted to IGF, but, then, I like his writing in general. I could have done without the Rosa Parks analogy, which he crashes through the guardrail and follows in flames as it rolls down the ravine (just to be gallant and cover his bad conceit-making with my own). His priorities are in the right place, though, and I join him in wondering how other people can possibly fail to see this stuff:

Is that name difference silly? Yes, it's silly � maybe even insulting. But when health benefits are denied to committed same-sex couples, when a person can't get bereavement leave upon the death of her same-sex partner; when loving couples are split apart because one partner is a foreigner and can't get citizenship, that's far worse than silly or insulting � it's downright cruel. I contend that we have a fighting chance at ending such cruelty, and that once we do so we'll have an even better chance at ending the silly name-difference (again, see Scandinavia).

I still don't agree that attaining marriage under that name must, must, must be the goal. Even if we accept that legal and social circumstances are unequal now, it's possible that opening marriage to gays is not the solution in the best interest of the larger society (including us gays). If the child-rearing function really is central to marriage, perhaps it needs to be reemphasized through stiffened divorce laws and greater penalties for parents who make spurious accusations at each other in custody battles, for example.

The interference in individuals' ability to make contracts that dictate the disposal of their possessions and persons if they're incapacitated isn't even a given everywhere; as Corvino says, we need to start there. Forget even the part about "recognition of our relationships" in the general sense, or at least, hold it in abeyance. Accusations like the one in the hate mail with which Corvino opens his article can only come from people who don't see the current social and political climate for what it really is, a phenomenon that may be partially explained by their tendency to reach for invective when they should be assessing and countering arguments.

Along those lines, I'm sorry to see that Maggie Gallagher is the latest columnist who took pay by the Bush administration to plug programs and is only now disclosing it. Gallagher is not my favorite person, as you might imagine. She has always struck me as principled, though, and I've cringed whenever I've seen someone from my team decide that the way to provide a witty and substantive refutation of one of her pieces is to call her a bitch. What she's done isn't an ethical infraction of epic proportions, but it doesn't speak well of her--how does one forget about a contract for two grand, exactly? And even if her support for the program was there for the asking, anyway, is it impossible to believe that she might have been inclined not to publicize such flaws as it might have had once she and the government had an understanding?

What this does do is give people who could learn from Gallagher's arguments a new, easy reason to dismiss her as a bankrupt thinker. That's not exactly what we need on either side at the moment. (The Gallagher story was foreshadowed by Instapundit and Drudge.)

I don't mind all the searches asking whether country singer Kenny Chesney is gay, but I also don't have an answer. With the physique, the tan, the easily-removable outdoorsy clothing, the cat-like, angular features, and the lonesome tenor, he has plenty of our boys panting after him. That doesn't say anything about the man himself, though.

I also don't know anything about Atika Schubert, though no one seems to be interested in whether she's a lesbian. I know she's the CNN Tokyo Bureau Chief, and that her reporting style, while not conspicuously illuminating, isn't as twinkly and annoying as some other people's (at least to me). I assume lots of people are interested lately because she did a great deal of tsunami reporting? Or maybe there's a campaign going to pitch her as CNN's new star anchor, now that the word is Anderson Cooper is supposed to be it.

This fictional letter on Diplomad reminds me of that classic Bloom County sequence in which Steve Dallas is defending an elderly axe-murderess and, at the arraignment, so overzealously argues that she's harmless ("She's a lamb, your honor") that the bemused judge releases her into his personal custody. Priceless.

(Via biased Susanna.)

Added on 25 January: One reader (I forgot to ask whether I could quote him) thinks I'm suggesting here that people who have issues with our treatment of prisoners are a monolithic bunch of idiot leftists. To me, Diplomad's letter was pretty clearly targeting only the most volubly inane cultural-relativist types, who would complain about our treatment of prisoners if we set each of them up in beachfront property in Antibes. Those who question whether our personnel are acting in arbitrary ways that violate our own ideal of the rule of law, or worry that serious rusty-pliers-and-electrodes stuff may be worked on people because of possible failures in the chain of command--they were not, unless I read Diplomad incorrectly, the satirical target.

People with legitimate arguments to make do not, after all, rely entirely on vague blather about "cultural differences." And as for torture, the fictional addressee is someone who has complained specifically about treatment at Guantanamo Bay, where I don't believe anyone has been accused of torture.

Added on 27 January: My reader was tenacious (in a good way) and pointed me toward this article from The Baltimore Sun, in which torture allegations are, in fact, made about Guantanamo Bay. Sorry for speaking in ignorance. I still read the letter Diplomad cites as satirizing coarse leftism and not pooh-poohing actual prisoner abuse, but if an extra link will avoid possibly misleading people, here it is.

The spirit of international cooperation hovers, dove-like, over the end of the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR). Or not:

An international disaster conference ended over the weekend with participants agreeing on the need to help strengthen developing countries' ability to deal with disasters, but some critics were already questioning the action plan adopted.

Not only does the broadly worded document lack achievable numerical targets, but it also largely ignores the input of developing nations, they say.

"The conference has tended to be about what ideas developed countries had and could do for the affected (tsunami) region," said a delegate from India. The delegate said that it was important for the affected nations to take a central role, and that "existing systems in those countries be utilized."

I wasn't there, obviously, so I can't verify the accounts of the delegate from India quoted above, or those from Senegal (drought-stricken) and the Marshall Islands (worried about global warming). However, not much imagination is required to conjure up a picture of first-world delegates--high on their own compassion and the possibilities of fancy, whiz-bang techno-fixes--talking right over people with actual knowledge of the different local circumstances disaster-relief programs are up against in the large and varied "developing world."

The recent Sumatra earthquake and tsunami overshadowed everything, naturally. In the weeks since the initial emergency passed, the tsunami has evolved into a heightened version of the usual sexy, telegenic media story: a visually-impressive force of nature, the emotional trauma of sudden loss of friends and family, the occasional unexpected joyous reunion, the noble struggle to return things to normal. It's the sort of thing that would be rejected as implausible if it were submitted as the script for a fictional made-for-TV movie.

Am I being cynical here? Well, only partially. I don't doubt for a second that reporters feel the same compassion as the rest of us, and when they point out that they're telling the stories of people who have no other public voice, they're not just rationalizing. But it's hard to keep covering something like this without falling back on stock disaster-drama clichés and thereby trivializing it.

The complaints about the WCDR indicate that, sadly but not surprisingly, the same sort of thing is happening among aid agencies. The tsunami provides the perfect opportunity to say, "You see what can happen when you don't flood us with cash and make sure we have safeguards against everything?" To the best of our knowledge, though, the Indian Ocean disaster was (thankfully) a fluke. It is not representative of the issues facing the third world.

The problems that most poor countries are dealing with are mundane and un-dramatic. Much of what needs to be done is education, teaching everyday people how to evaluate their own circumstances and adjust their behavior accordingly. Technology is certainly useful in making it easier for developing countries to anticipate, weather, and respond to disasters, but in ways well-heeled do-gooders do not seem to have internalized:

During the meeting, big players from the developed world-including Japan, the United States, Germany and France-pushed their ideas for a tsunami warning system.

This did not sit well with some groups from the countries hard-hit by the tsunami. They felt their voices were not being heard when they suggested upgrading systems they already had for warning systems.

So the countries with non-tsunami problems did not see those problems addressed, and the countries actually hit by the tsunami felt that their knowledge of their own homelands was not taken into account by eager-beaver first-world technocrats. A toast all around, then, for a job well done.

Wow. Blizzard in the Northeast, huh? (It's probably kind of stupid for me to be linking a Japanese article to tell you about a snowstorm you already know about in our native tongue--I'm only doing so because that's where I first learned of it.) They actually had to close Philadelphia International Airport--and this time, not just de facto because of US Air's fable-worthy incompetence. Stay safe, everyone.

Speaking of problems in Japan that need addressing: Japan Post (you know, that agency that sells commemorative stamps, delivers mail and packages, and just happens to control a REALLY HUGE AMOUNT of the household savings of the second-largest economy in the world?) is still in the crosshairs of Prime Minister Koizumi's privatization gun:

The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September. One of the key planks of the policy is the creation of four entities--mail and parcel delivery, insurance service, savings service and an over-the-counter services network--under a holding company.

"The Fiscal Investment and Loan Program must be reformed because it's the connection between the entrance of funds, postal savings and kampo postal insurance, and the exit of funds to public corporations. The flow of funds should be shifted from public to private," Koizumi said. [You know the patronage and revolving-door systems that your econ professors said drive Japan? You're looking at the monetary engine right in this paragraph. All that's missing is explicit mention of the federal ministries involved.--SRK]

"The privatization is an indispensable administrative and fiscal reform to realize a smaller government," Koizumi added.

Regarding opposition to privatization within the Liberal Democratic Party, the prime minister said: "They say the number of public servants should be decreased, but they oppose the privatization. That's like instructing someone to swim but tying his arms and legs.

For all the bravado of that soundbite, there are critics who say the privatization plan in fact doesn't go far enough. In my favorite (in a bad way) analogy, it could create the sort of California-electricity fiasco in which bureaucrats still get to make all the rules while the new private owners get all the accountability. In committee, the proposal predictably got bogged down in the usual attempts to shut up everyone with a complaint. But that was December; this Yomiuri piece says, "The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September," which means not the further ground-down version from the very end of last year.

For those who are interested, the Yomiuri article leads with Japan Post privatization but gives a rundown of the issues the Diet hit in its first 2005 session.

When I talk about the cavalier way many Japanese doctors treat (in both senses of the word) their patients, friends of mine back home often chuckle, "Well, Sean, you don't have to go to Japan to find a high-handed doctor who thinks you're too stupid to be worth explaining things to!" The thing is that, here, it's been largely institutionalized. The behemoth Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare is taking some steps to remedy that, though:

The MHLW will, starting in April, make mandatory the disclosure by medical facilities to each patient of a receipt (itemized breakdown of medical costs) that indicates what was charged for what in a course of treatments. Patients will receive this receipt via the public health insurance programs they belong to. The aim is to increase the checks on the kinds of treatments prescribed by given patients themselves a handle on what the breakdown of their medical fees is. The new policy is expected to be an effective curb on the ballooning of health care expenditures, which have topped 30 trillion yen a year.

[ / wretched sight translation ]

I haven't seen all the details--the Nikkei report I've linked to here was the lead story in this morning's paper edition, too, but it focused on the projected effects of the new policy. It didn't say much about what the rules will be, so it's still possible to imagine crafty hospital administrators finding ways to hide inflated charges under bland, legitimate-sounding headings ("diagnostic equipment") if given sufficient leeway.

But even just as a gesture, the shift matters. "Doctor's orders" (unless he tells you to work less overtime) are pretty much law here; you don't have nearly the skepticism and comparison-shopping you do with US consumers. If it works, this could be a good first move. It doesn't set caps or micromanage; it just trusts that shame on the part of providers and knowledge on the part of consumers will sort things out. One can only hope it does. Health care expenditures in this aging society are an issue of archipelago-buggering proportions, and even small steps are preferable to the status quo.

This sort of thing leaves me speechless:

Some attendees clearly resented the Republicans who came in from all over the country to attend the official inauguration balls.

"There's this Republican head-in-the-clouds mentality - we just want to have a good time, because we gave a lot of money to the Republican National Committee," said Denise Ross, 31, of Arlington, Va.

She also lambasted their fashion sense, recalling seeing women in open-toe sandals and fur coats.

If it were just Denise Ross, 31, of Arlington, VA, who thought this way, I wouldn't mind so much; but it's not. She crystallizes an entire mentality, so just in case any of her fellow-feelers happen to wander by here, I'd like to set a thing or two straight:

Americans love Washington because the great temples of our republic are there. We know that it houses plenty of dedicated public servants who focus more on the service than on the public, and we're grateful to them.

Let's be clear, though: DC and its environs are a cultural backwater, a fact known around the world. For every self-abnegating true-believer--unshowy and discreet--you encounter what seems like a dozen smug types who appear to have come to Washington in the belief that simply being close to the Center of Power lends profound importance to their every memo, meeting, and trip to the bathroom. Yes, New York and Los Angeles have their obnoxious superiority complexes, too--New York's in its general where-it's-at-ness, and LA's in its inescapable talk about "the Industry." But those cities also exalt the transformative power of the imagination. That's more obviously true of LA, which creates movies full of make-believe, but it also inheres in New York's advertising and investment banking, which fund and publicize people's dream projects and test whether they have a receptive audience in which to flourish.

Washington's magnetism, in the age of lobbies and lawyers for everything, comes from the flat, decidedly un-dreamlike coercive power of legislation and regulation. LA attracts people who want to rule the public by becoming stars and capturing their hearts; Washington attracts people who literally want to be involved in making the rules that boss people around. (And, obviously, while I'm saying "DC" and "Washington," I'm referring equally to Fairfax County and southern Maryland.)

And--make me barf!--that goes quadruple for style. How dare anyone in that metro area criticize other people's fashion sense! This is the place where every outfit is chosen to make sure it can't offend the sensibilities of someone whose ass might need kissing. J. Press mannequins are dressed with more flair, idiosyncratic confidence, and presence than I've ever seen on a Washingtonian.

As for fur coats with open-toed shoes...well, that's not an obvious combination. I can see it being pulled off with ease, though, by a lady of a certain age. She would have had to keep her bosom and legs presentable, and to have relaxed into herself enough to be stouter than she was as a girl. And she'd need a positively obscene number of diamonds--drop earrings, clearly, if not chandeliers. But why not? Inauguration day only comes once every four years, and a more self-critical soul than Ms. Ross might have a chance to learn there are clothiers in the world besides Talbots.

*******

And finally, check out the accompanying picture of Barney Frank. Will the man never learn not to assume that deadly petulant expression in front of the camera? He looks like he went to his plastic surgeon and said, "I was hoping we could do sort of a Barbara Mikulski thing...."

Why do ads targeted at gay men always have to feature shirtless kouros figures, ask Michael and Chris? (It was especially fun to read this complaint on a blog called "boy's briefs" with a masthead photograph of a few hundred shirtless men milling around in the sun.)

I think part of it has to do with the kind of advertising they're looking at. I don't exactly make a habit of reading Out or The Advocate (or, if it's still around, Genre) when I'm back in the States--all that contemptuous muttering tends to make people at surrounding tables look up from their coffee--but you see plenty of ordinary ads there with properly clothed people.

Unsolicited mail and cheapo ads tucked in 2" X 2" boxes on back pages are placed by different companies. They target not "gay men" in general but the lowest common denominator--by which I mean both the types of guys who organize their entire lives around making pick-ups and the sucker in all of us who falls for non-reasoning that says, "Buying XYZ will unleash pleasures akin to having a romp with that muffin there in the picture." It's not as if you didn't see farm and automotive equipment being pitched to straight men with pictures of busty women in bikinis and pink workgloves, too.

Personally, I find these things tedious more for (warning: old, tired complaint ahead) the homogeneity of the men than for anything else. Back in the Calvin Klein bus ad era, the N'aired chests and improbably defined muscles were allusive and stimulating. I still remember smiling up at the giant Samsung ad (with the brawny man with a microwave under his arm) across from Port Authority whenever I came back to New York from home a decade ago. Now that every picture of a gay guy outside Honcho looks like that--usually showing the face with a bland Ken doll expression, too--it's played out and enervating. Seeing a guy with a jaw full of whiskers and a chest resurfaced to look like vinyl, my first thought these days is less like Mmmm! and more like I hope you keep your nails trimmed, 'cause you are gonna be feelin' the itch day after tomorrow, honey!

It's been understood for a few months that Howard Baker will be stepping down as US Ambassador to Japan (although the post may officially be designated something "Ambassador to the Court of St. James's"-ish--I'm not sure). His successor, announced on the day of President Bush's inauguration, will be current Ambassador to Australia ("Ambassador to the Kangaroo Court," maybe? I kill me sometimes, I just kill me) Thomas Schieffer.

His official biography is here. He's the brother of Bob Schieffer, the CNN reporter. Bet their family dinners are interesting! His given name is also John Thomas, though he has the good sense to go by "Tom." And, I assume, not to have married a lady named Jane.

The Nikkei says that many credit Schieffer with building a close, trusting relationship with John Howard during his tenure in Australia. That's nice, but one is left wondering...well, what The Japan Times wonders:

Some experts have voiced concern over Schieffer's lack of involvement in U.S.-Japan affairs and his relative lack of political clout in comparison with former envoys to Japan.

Baker was a Senate majority leader, while his predecessor was former House of Representatives Speaker Thomas Foley. Among the other political heavyweights who have filled the Tokyo post in the past is former Vice President Walter Mondale.

But other experts say that political background is not the only factor that determines the selection of an ambassador. In Schieffer's case, his close ties with Bush make it easier to report directly to the president and to get White House policies reflected in diplomatic undertakings in Japan, they said.

A Republican congressional source said the appointment signals that the Bush administration's policy of prioritizing ties with Japan will stay intact, with Schieffer expected to be the president's closest ambassador. The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to confirm his nomination.

Well, okay. Given the deep-rooted cronyism in Japan, I suppose Tokyo can't feel slighted by having Baker replaced by a long-time friend of Bush's. (Schieffer was one of his partners in the ownership and development of the Texas Rangers.) Also, given the famed closeness between Bush and Koizumi themselves, Schieffer seems unlikely to have to work with Japanese bureaucrats to smooth over friction created between their heads of state.

Even so, Japan is in a delicate spot right now. No one disputes that the US is its most important ally, but plenty of people dispute the means by which mutual support is given: the US bases here, especially since the announcement that our forces worldwide will be redistributed; the SDF deployed in a non-combat capacity in Iraq; the petition to make Japan a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with the attendant debate over revising Article 9 of the constitution.

Given that context, and given that Baker hasn't left office, it isn't yet possible to know whether Schieffer's way of being close to the power center--through intimacy rather than through career-earned clout--will be helpful to the Bush and Koizumi administrations. It appears to have worked in Australia, but Australia does not have the self-image of being impossible for uninitiated foreigners to understand that Japan does. We'll see. In the meantime, best wishes to Howard Baker, who does not have loads of presence as a personality but, from what I've seen, was unshowy, workmanlike, and gentlemanly in going about his duties.

Happy fourth anniversary, Atsushi.

Since Atsushi will see this site before I talk to him tomorrow, and since we won't actually get to see each other until next week, I'm going to put a picture up, temporarily. Of me, I mean. I mean, the picture will be of me until I age to the point that it doesn't resemble me, but it'll be up temporarily. For reasons that will be clear from the next post.

Right Side of the Rainbow is understandably pissy about the face-value content of this Reuters article:

Mistrust also runs deep among ordinary people. Some 58 percent of people surveyed in a British Broadcasting Corporation poll in 21 countries said they believed Bush's re-election made the world a more dangerous place.

"Negative feelings about Bush are high," Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes which carried out the study, told the BBC. "This is quite a grim picture for the United States."

People in three countries surveyed -- Poland, India and the Philippines -- said the world was now safer, while Israel, which was not part of the survey, also remains a big supporter of the 58-year-old president who took office four years ago.

I don't know that I would take it at face value, though. I mean, when an individual is quoted, you kind of have to assume he means what he says:

"I think 2005 should mark a new start in our relations ... based on listening to each other, having a more regular dialogue and mutual respect," French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said last week, reflecting the view of the European Union.

Bureaucrat endorses useless hen-party approach to politics? Okay, I believe him. But 58% of people over 21 countries leaves a lot of room for country-by-country aberrations, and the data themselves are not linked by Reuters. They are, however, on the Program for International Policy Attitudes' website, here. Japan's results mesh with those derived from an Asahi poll before the election.

The reason I'm cautious about interpreting the BBC poll as a Major Statement is not that I don't want to believe it. (I don't know whether 58% is the number, but overall, I do think Bush probably has more opponents than supporters in the global population.) Nor is it even just that polls are notoriously squishy. It's just that, given that the way the non-US media covered Kerry's campaign--a modern family man with an outspoken wife, anti-war beliefs, and Democratic Party affiliation just like our buddy Clinton!--a "Yes" to "Has Bush's reelection made the world a more dangerous place?" could imply a range of things.

My experience is obviously not unbiased, but I know plenty of people who think both Bush and Kerry were unappetizing choices but saw mostly evidence that Kerry was the better option. (Tokyo being a transportation hub, I'm not just talking about Japanese, either.) And those are the people who are even exposed to media outlets from a variety of sources. Who knows what the rank-and-file population saw that sculpted their ideas?

IOW, I'm not ready to give up on the rest of the world just yet. I wish people had more sense of urgency about the WOT, certainly; but minds change slowly, especially in places where de facto state control of the news media is a constant reality.

In the meantime, the inauguration is today, no matter what anyone else thinks of it. Congratulations to President Bush and the rest of America.

Good news! It's safe to eat again. The FDA has released its revised food pyramid, designed to make sure that even we stupid non-dieticians can somehow manage to keep body and soul together. Naturally, the CSPI has reacted with a degree of worshipful pyramidiocy that would embarrass J.Z. Knight:

CSPI Applauds New Dietary Recommendations

Calls for New Government Campaigns to Implement Them

...

Importantly, the guidelines apply to the federal school lunch and breakfast programs. Under the new Guidelines, schools will need to offer less-salty foods and more fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

This puts me in mind of something that happened my freshman year in college. Someone--the Vice-Provost of University Life, or the Greek Council, or some bored Trustees--decided that people were (be sure you're sitting down for this) drinking too much at frat parties. The solution? Force the frats to offer non-salty snacks. Yes way! My roommate had joined one of the few funky-renegade fraternities on campus; it decided to offer non-salty snacks in the form of lettuce (plunked as-is into a serving dish with hilarious, baleful irony) and jello (not finger jello, just a bowl of jello with no utensils). I don't remember the others.

Of course, if the CSPI has its way, publicly treating the new food pyramid with playful irreverence will probably be a felony before long:

To support the guidelines� healthy-weight goals, Congress needs to provide the Centers for Disease Control with greatly increased funding for programs that promote nutrition and activity and pass laws requiring calorie labeling on menus at chain restaurants and shielding kids from junk-food marketing. Because industry has done little voluntarily to implement past Dietary Guidelines for Americans, government regulatory agencies need to take such actions as limiting the salt content of processed foods, eliminating the use of partially hydrogenated oils, and lowering the current limits on fat in processed meats.

I know this is nothing new and shouldn't rile me up. But I just never, ever get used to locutions such as "industry has done little voluntarily to implement past Dietary Guidelines for Americans" and "government regulatory agencies need to take such actions as limiting the salt content of processed foods." It is beyond the wit of man how anyone can believe, in 2005, that the reason Americans are not subsisting entirely on raw carrots and cold oatmeal is that they've been hectored to do so in insufficiently direct, dumbed-down terms, or that food processors haven't marketed enough pleasure-free "safe" versions of foods we used to enjoy. Give us a break already, and go do something more useful, like devoting your lives to making rainbow-colored macramé plant hangers. Good grief.

Added five minutes later, 1.5-liter of Coke in hand: Oh, and I almost forgot (so much imbecility, so little time). Our Secretary of Agriculture offered this jaw-dropping bit of psychological non-insight:

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said the popularity of diet books and products shows that "Americans are interested in leading healthier lives, but they want credible, consistent and coherent information to help them make the best possible choices."

No, dear lady, what that shows is that people are interested in leading healthier lives to the point of pointing and clicking on Amazon.com but not to the point of actually giving up Sara Lee pound cake. Ye gods.

This post is addressing the several people who have asked me what they can do to learn Japanese, under the flattering assumption that I have useful information to give them. That I am addressing those people will not be very clear for the first few paragraphs, so I'm going to ask in advance for everyone to bear with me. Then, too, if you can't bear with me for a few paragraphs before figuring out what the topic of the post you're reading is...not to be rude, but...WTF are you doing coming back here?

Anyway. Connie du Toit recently posted a half-mischievous-half-serious set of new categories for websites in this general -osphere that, she contends, aren't blogs in the strictest sense. In it, she gives valentines to all her blog friends, and what's touching about them is that she's the sort of woman who doesn't give praise she doesn't mean. The section about me--no, I'm not going to quote it; linking it is quite sufficient as a gesture of fatuous self-regard--is something I'm very grateful for, but it's a little frightening, too. I say that because she pretty much hits all my specific points of vanity; what she wrote is the way I'd describe myself if I had the cheek to believe it's actually true. I mean, it was spooky.

One thing she called me was an expert in the Japanese language. Now, I don't think any linguist (or Japanese person) would agree. I mean, my Japanese is good. Considering that a lot of foreigners here are content to learn what they need to pick up guys (or girls, you know, if that's their thing), it's not really hard to distinguish yourself that way. And I've lived here for a quarter of my life by now.

However, the real reason is that I had fantastic teachers all the way through. Because my parents were willing to take out parent loans instead of telling me I could jolly well work my way through college if I wanted to go, I was able to loll about for four years at Penn, with only a work-study job (10 hours a week) to distract me from studying. Yes, I amused myself thoroughly, too, but I had the time and reserves of mental and physical energy to study. Having grown up around people who worked themselves to the bone, physically, I found this a new environment; and I really liked most of my classes, so I did the work gladly. The Japanese program was wonderful, taught mostly by native Japanese speakers who developed their own companion materials to go with Eleanor Jorden's books, which are classics in their way but are based on some implausible ideas about language acquisition. My mentor on the Japanese side of my comp. lit. degree was just fantastic as an advisor, reticent in that Japanophile way but also willing to express himself with clarity and point when necessary.

Where I ran into problems was during junior year. It was the worst year of my life, and I probably should have taken a year off to get myself together and resigned myself to being graduated late. But my grants and loans had already come through, and I'd spent the first two years piling on the courses, so I was able to take most things pass-fail and muddle through without disgracing myself (in schoolwork terms) or falling behind. I took fall semester of senior year to study abroad in London--it's becoming clear that I'm the most pampered son of a steelworker there ever was, huh? I wasn't able to take Japanese there, so I got the packets from the professor back home, and I worked through them and was able to enter second semester.

My assumption all along had been that I'd go to grad school. It wasn't just like, I woke up the summer after junior year, realized I hadn't learned anything marketable, and it was either a PhD program or law school. I was excited about becoming a professor. I loved Japanese literature; I read it for fun. Get paid to think and teach about it? Hell, yeah. I went to the place that gave me the most funding, a program that's known for being really demanding.

And WHAM! I hit a wall. See, for the last two years, I'd been getting by in my Japanese classes on my ability to memorize. It wasn't that I hadn't been trying, but I'd been distracted, so I'd focused my energies on getting through the next kanji quiz, the next sentence pattern test, the next translation assignment. I wasn't lazy, and I deserved my A's on the finals--I mean, I'd gotten most of the questions right. But the thing is, I was only really putting my heart into learning the hard stuff: the tricky two-part sentence structures, the gajillion-stroke kanji, the names of obscure little plants mentioned in poems. After the placement test and some trial and error, I was assigned to second-year Japanese.

That's second-year Japanese. As in, with the college sophomores. It is clear, is it not, that this site is generated by someone of no mean ego. Well, let me tell you, I was unutterably humiliated. Just ABJECT. This sort of thing DID NOT happen to me when it came to coursework. Now, everyone--the Japanese teacher, my mentor, the professors teaching my literature classes--fell all over himself to tell me that my talent as a critic wasn't in question, it was just that my language had to come up. Yeah, whatever. Lots of people are talented; I ACHIEVE, dammit, was my attitude. This sucked.

Now, luckily, in a perverse way, my junior year had been so extraordinarily bad that I had enough perspective to realize that this was not the end of the world. Being ashamed did not mean I was going to die, or anything. So I studied, and here, too, the university had its own first-rate materials and uncompromising instructors. Still, being in second-year Japanese was sub-par, and I didn't pass my review. I did great in all my lit classes, though, so it was agreed that I'd be given the chance to reapply the next year, as a new applicant.

There was nothing unfair about this; fully-funded spots in graduate programs are not the sort of thing a department can afford to waste on people who show early signs of not making it through. What they did--this is very Japanophile--was say that since I was already a student who belonged to the university, I'd be supported (not with my grad student funding, but by applying to the Japan Foundation and such) as one to do the next year at an affiliated language program here. In the interim, I could write what would be a master's thesis. So that's how I first came to Japan. I spent a year doing a program in scholarly Japanese here--classes about research and reading the newspaper and finally figuring out what the hell the newscasters were saying on NHK. Loved every minute of it, and made friends I still have today.

In that year, it became increasingly obvious that my mentor and I weren't right for each other. He's got a stratospheric reputation--it was not his problem. I didn't really fit the program, and, in his gentlemanly way, he kind of nudged me toward seeing that. At least, that's the way I interpreted it; one doesn't exactly talk openly about these things in Japanese departments.

Now that this post is longer than Middlemarch, you may be wondering what exactly, um, the message is. Don't bother studying Japanese, because you'll end up being wrong for grad school? No, not that. The message is: study Japanese. It's an adventure, and it's bloody hard. Like all adventurous, hard things, it teaches you about yourself and gives you the valuable experience of meeting and mastering obstacles. You can bluff your way through a lot of humanities courses nowadays, but, honey, when you're studying an Asian language, either you know it or you don't.

And yet....

Japanese teachers know that they are teaching a subject that foreigners find it hugely difficult to learn. They do their best to be rigorous, but unless you're the military, you can't ask people to sit still for 20 hours of instruction for a single course. There's no way to avoid cutting corners somewhere. That means that, of necessity, much of what they end up testing you on in the first several years comes down to short-term memorizing of lists. They can't help it. There's so much to learn that they can't make even the "cumulative" tests really cumulative. So if you're a quick study, it's easy to learn this week's lesson for Friday's quiz, cherry pick the things you think are cool enough to retain, and then re-cram everything for the midterms and final. And you won't even realize you're doing it, because sometimes, just cramming enough for the final will feel like a medal-worthy feat.

The Piper will show up to dun you eventually, though. You will be in your first class where you're supposed to read all those boring sentence patterns strung into paragraphs, and those paragraphs strung into a few pages of argument. And you'll realize you can't do it. You know most of the kanji, you've seen most of the 文型, but it's not clicking. The ideas aren't cohering into a main point, even though you can point to just about anything on the page and remember what it means.

Normally, I wouldn't generalize from my own experience about other people's weaknesses, but my friends who teach tell me that this is a very common problem among bright Westerners studying Japanese. Part of the thrill is that it's hard, so you gravitate toward the hard stuff. The easy stuff, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll remember that. Or, well, you recognize it on sight, which seems good enough, until you try to understand a five-page article in which you have to back-translate every phrase in your head to get what it means.

So here is what you must do: review, obviously, is the first thing. Don't wait until the next time you're threatened with a test to go back over p. 23, even though, it's, like, some stupid thing about when to use はand が. Trust me, p. 23 will come back later to hurt you bad.

But also remember that you can't learn a language just through classes. Nowadays, with amazon.com, you can get Japanese paperbacks and DVD's and audio CD's. I don't mean language lessons; I mean regular novels and television shows and movies and (heaven help us) J-pops albums. You won't understand almost anything at first; what you have to do is let it bathe your brain. Get used to the speech cadences, the way things flow. Get used to the way certain verb endings seem to appear in sentences with certain modifying phrases. Don't worry about learning the rules in the linguistic sense; that's why you're taking classes. Worry about getting an intuitive sense of what follows what. That's the way you think in your native language; you're constantly hearing traffic signals that give you a sense of what's coming next without having to be conscious of it. In your first year or so, books are a lost cause, to be blunt. It might be worthwhile to try reading a translation of a novel in English and then seeing whether you can run your eye over the original and get any glimmers of where you are in the plot. You won't, most of the time. On the other hand, kanji and kana jumbled together will become familiar to your eye, and you'll be able to practice reading the kana and recognizing kanji radicals, at least. You'll be moving closer to the day when your eye falls on a page of Japanese and reacts with, "Oh, words," instead of, "Huh? What are those squiggles?"

By this point, I'm sure I've lost just about everyone. Lately, most of my long posts have been due to my switched-off editing function, but this one is different. English will always be my favorite language. It's my native tongue, in which the founding principles of our country were first articulated, with its blend of modesty and plainspokenness. I consider it an immense gift, which I did nothing to earn, to have been born into a country in which my brain was reared to work in English, not just because of its market value, but because of the thoughts it plants in your head. But Japanese has had thousands of years of relative seclusion to develop into a language of formidable intricacy, subtlety, and power. It's beautiful, sometimes in that lovely way the world goes ga-ga over, but sometimes with a pleasing roughness that's not so famous. Japanese is worth learning, and it's worth learning right, which I'm grateful to have had a second chance to do. You won't need a second chance if you channel your energies properly the first time.

Okay, a small reward for those who've read this far: one of the most touching demonstrations of the way Japanese can use restraint and austerity to tap into large reservoirs of feeling is the best-known haiku by Kobayashi Issa, who lived, as it happens, through the time of the American Revolution. Unlike a lot of the haiku that Westerners take a shine to, this one has nothing quaint about it:

つゆの世は
つゆの世ながら
さりながら
小林一茶

tsuyu no yo ha/tsuyu no yo nagara/sarinagara
Kobayashi Issa

This world of dew
is a world of dew
and yet-- and yet--

Kobayashi Issa

That's not my translation; I don't know whose it is, but it's the one you normally see, and for good reason. It doesn't fit the syllable count, but it conveys the economy with which Issa conveys himself in the original.

The poem was written a month after the early death of his daughter. Buddhism, especially the Japanese strain, encourages an acceptance of the impermanence of life. Well, more like "requires." Dew is as ubiquitous in classical Japanese as the moon or cherry blossoms; it symbolizes, for obvious reasons, evanescence. Using essentially three concepts (dew, the world, and two related particles that mean something like "while"), he shows how he has not yet resigned himself to his daughter's death. (There's also, to me, something of a suggestion of the verb 去る [saru: "to pass"] in the use of the particle さりながら, but I don't think I've ever seen it identified as a pivot word, so that interpretation probably isn't an accepted one.) The different viewpoints and time frames come through, even though the poem could be said not even to be a complete utterance.

This is interesting:

Middle-aged and elderly men who smoke heavily are more likely to commit suicide, a major survey by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has found.

How, one is moved to wonder, did they go about finding the three non-heavy-smoking middle-aged and elderly men in Japan to serve as the control group?

Yeah, I know, ba-dum-bum. It's 2 a.m.--what do you expect? Phyllis Diller? What floored me was this part:

A total of 108 of the 173 people who committed suicide were smokers. The rate of suicide among people who smoked less than 20 cigarettes per day was about the same as for nonsmokers, but the suicide rate of people who smoked between 30 and 39 cigarettes per day was 1.4 times higher than those in the group who smoked under 20 cigarettes a day.

The rate of suicide for those who smoked 40 or more cigarettes a day was 1.7 times higher. Researchers said no differences were seen based on the number of years people had been smoking.

40 cigarettes a day? How do people do that? I'm not moralizing; I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. I mean, I dated a few guys who couldn't so much as say, "Good morning, dear," before taking their first drag, so it's not as if I haven't seen chain-smoking. But 40? I know, it's only a little over two per waking hour, which is not uncommon. It just sounds so huge when given as a total.

That it didn't matter how long people had been smoking is another interesting part. According to the article, MHLW thinks the nicotine itself may be the important factor, but it seems just as possible that people start puffing away more because they're feeling stress or depression.

Okay, good thing I'm not dressed for work yet, because this crack by Simon made me snarf. He's referring to PRC crackdowns on Chinese citizens who go to casinos over the border:

There's actually no need for casinos in China. If they want to gamble, they've got roads.

That, in turn, put me in mind of an article that ran in Salon last spring by one Linda Baker, whose civil engineering legacy will be to have proffered the following paragraphs without a trace of irony:

As it turns out, I'm far from the first person to think along these lines. In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and -- of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty*. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play. [Now, what kind of fuddy-duddies could stir up a controversy about that?--SRK]

For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been dominated by the "triple E" paradigm: engineering, enforcement and education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space is a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other "traditional" modes of transportation -- light rail, streetcars and bicycles -- are making a comeback in cities across the country. The shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe communities, you have to control them.

Ms. Baker, you will doubtless be surprised to hear, lives in Portland, Oregon, which puts her statements about the "comebacks" made by light rail and other non-automobile forms of transportation in a strange light.

What this has to do with Simon's quip, before I forget to tell you (which is always a danger with my scatty, free-associative mind), is that Ms. Baker spent a week observing the city of Suzhou in China, where the populace is unfettered by "dominant-paradigm" rules expressed through signs, color-coded curbs, and traffic cops. And she didn't see a single accident, even though she was totally paying attention, like, the whole week. Who knows? It's possible that, in all of China, there are enough yearly traffic fatalities to depopulate Peoria, but none of them happens in Suzhou because its traffic non-system really works. But why is it that what Baker describes still sounds like a hopeful dress-up of the usual traffic free-for-all seen in population centers in developing countries?

It's a shame that Baker and the brothers-in-arms she quotes tend toward the post-structuralist-Mad Libs mode of expression ("subvert the dominant paradigm," "give expression to the suppressed voice," and "communal," "communal," "communal" until I'm going out of my mind), because they're making some points that aren't as risible as they make them sound. When you're accustomed to following the signs and lights, you really do go on autopilot, and that is, in fact, a source of danger. When I'm back at my parents' place, I always have to remind myself on my first day of driving not to get too comfy, because within a ten-mile stretch, you can go from twisty back roads with Deer Crossing signs to a clogged intersection in downtown Allentown to the notorious Route 22, where you're jockeying for position with truckers like a video game come to life. I also take a lot of shortcuts when going through the town in which I grew up, the Borough of Emmaus, which has a population of 12,000 and is almost entirely residential.

Baker is talking about urban areas, but it's neighborhoods with a lot of houses that she seems most concerned with. Speed limits of 25 or 30 mph seem slow to impatient drivers, but they're actually just above the speeds at which a pedestrian who gets hit is unlikely to be seriously injured. Couple that with the fact that most people go a good 5 or 10 mph over the speed limit, anyway, and add in the way marking streets as cars-only territory puts drivers off their guard against a child who bikes or runs out into their lane, and...well, you can see dangers that might be addressed by mixing types of traffic.

Might. I suspect that the sort of intersection Baker is hot on works just fine in relatively small-scale neighborhoods within larger cities where everyone already knows the rules from before (as in the Netherlands) or everyone is used to improvising the rules because the idea of clear, impersonal rule of law is a fantasy throughout the larger society (as in the PRC). It's possible to imagine that it could work in Portland, where I gather residents are in general more receptive to these sorts of experiments. I just hope they get into the habit of warning us visiting Bos-Wash types at the airport car rental counter, though.
* Don't you love this particular polarity? "Certainty"--also known as "having some idea what the motley crew of speeders, pokers, weavers, clinically-diagnosed turnsignalophobes, tailgaters, daydreamers, and let's-play-chicken brakers with whom you're sharing the roadway are going to do and where"--is bad because it separates people from vehicular traffic. Trying to negotiate an intersection of random peds and cyclists and cars and peddlers sitting in lotus position is not "anxiety-provoking" or "nerve-racking." It's "intriguing." Turns commuting into a regular Marlene Dietrich movie.

Now that Nathan is decamping for Hawaii, it's apparently time for gay Spokane to make its move:

Spokane already has a gay newspaper, Stonewall News Northwest, and some businesses that cater to gay residents. It has had an openly gay member of the City Council.

But creating a district is still important, Reguindin said.

"It would help youth struggling with their sexuality to realize they don't have to go away to a big city to be gay. You can be gay right here in Spokane," Reguindin said.

Farand Gunnels, local representative for the Pride Foundation, a Seattle-based group that gives grants to support the gay community, wondered if there were enough gay residents in Spokane to support such a district.

The INBA is also preparing to launch a "visibility campaign," in which businesses will be asked to display signs in their windows proclaiming their support for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

"We'll know where we will be welcome and patronize those businesses," Aspen said. "We've had a very positive reaction from the business community."

Gay customers will be able to leave special cards at businesses they patronize, to let the owners know they were there, Aspen said.

"It will give Spokane an idea of the economic impact gay people have," Aspen said.

True, but it could also convince people that it's not possible for us to pay for a bottle of Windex without announcing that we're homos, which will not exactly militate against the stereotype that we've got sex on the brain 24-7. (It could produce a few comical exchanges, though. "Oh, here's my queer card. Do I just give it to you?" "No fooling! A gallon of whole milk, a dozen eggs, and Hydrox cookies? I thought all you boys were anorexic.") Also, if there's already a gay newspaper and there's been a gay city council member, does there need to be a whole neighborhood for gay youths to figure out that they might be able to find mates in their hometown?

I don't have any trouble with a bunch of investors starting gay-themed businesses on a street where properties are available, obviously. Announcing that you're pre-planning the creation of a full gay district strikes me as asking for trouble, though. Opponents will have an open invitation to blame gay life for any and every new social ill that hits the place. Some will do that even if a group of gay investors decides to gravitate toward a cluster of shopfronts and beat-up old houses, of course, but the increased revenue and residential gentrification are more likely to register as benefits because they won't seem like part of some institutionally-funded plot to give the gays a home base.

Added on 25 January: Michael (the sort of squeamish Charlie who apparently can't eat squid unless it's edited to look non-threatening, like X-large Spaghettios) also has a reaction to this, which he cross-posted at Dean's World and got an interesting discussion going.

Today, it's exactly ten years since the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which killed over 6500 people in and around Kobe. Given the recent catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in developing Southeast Asia, it's sobering to recognize that, even in a country known for its whizbang technology and millennia of dealing with these things, recovery goes in fits and starts. Reason ran a piece a few years after the quake about bureaucratic problems that hampered both immediate rescue and long-term rebuilding, which has an unsettling resonance given the already-emerging charges of incompetence against UN personnel handling disaster aid now.

There are a few other parallels. Kobe is not considered a hot earthquake zone in Japan. Neither is Niigata, which just got hit with a series of big ones in October. That means that building codes and disaster rehearsals were not up to the same standards as they are here in Tokyo, and not without justification. It just isn't rational to expend all kinds of time, energy, and money getting ready for something that's almost certain not to happen.

That's not to say that governments should rest on their laurels--the Mainichi published the results of a survey last week that indicated that many local governments don't feel prepared to deal with disasters. This year saw an unusual series of typhoons with their attendant floods and mudslides, followed by the Niigata earthquake, so the possibilities are very much fresh in the minds of municipal authorities. Many lessons from the Kobe earthquake have also been assimilated and put into practice--the city of Sendai fitted its gas lines with a different shutoff system, and when a 6.9 M quake happened in 2003, it had reason to be grateful. But no matter what the police and fire departments do, people scattered through buildings and streets still have to know how to live through the first strike long enough to be helped. (BTW, if you're reading this from Japan, do you have everything attended to?)

Added on 18 January: Thanks to Far Outliers for linking this post. He went to high school in Kobe (which used to have one of the largest communities of foreigners in Japan, I think), and he offers a few interesting slice-of-life details from what he remembers pre-earthquake.

Okay, last time I linked to something of Joel's, I changed his religion and made him the author of a book he hadn't written. And ended up in a long discussion about green beans. Therefore, I am making doubly sure he says he went to high school in Kobe, because I know he mentioned something about Kyoto in there...um, looks okay.

Amritas, gallantly looking for ways to show solidarity with others of his genetic heritage by sharing their aggrievedness, found a piece on plastic surgery. He can't seem to get too worked up over it, though:

Although I think "racial anorexia" is an exaggeration, I never understood the appeal of eye surgery or hair lightening for Asians. I don't necessarily think eye surgery makes Asians look more Caucasian because there are Asians born with 'double lids'. But I prefer the 'monolid' look (which some Caucasians naturally have!). And I don't think light hair goes well with Asian complexions. It looks fake.

"Racial anorexia" is the Naomi Wolf-ish word the writers of the original piece at Model Minority used to describe...um, I don't know exactly what they're describing, but it sounds like some sort of inferiority complex that makes Asian-Americans compulsively erase their Asiatic features. That's what the rest of us get for recklessly walking around looking white all the time.

I think Amritas is right about the looks stuff. The reason that the Japanese categorize eyes as 一重 (hitoe: "single-layer") and 二重 (futae: "double-layer") is that both kinds of eyelids are common here. And some people, like my boyfriend, have single-layer eyelids but don't have particularly small or sleepy-looking eyes.

He's also right about the hair. When Asians bleach their hair and wear it in a way you might call "decorative"--meaning, punkish and playful and frankly artificial, the way people do when they dye their hair