In case you didn’t catch it, you can watch me commenting on the other night’s election results with Ken and Garrett from Transpacific radio and special guest International Attorney Christopher Gunson.

The video is in three parts:

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

Skip around a little because apparently there are parts where the sound didn’t quite work. All the same you can hear us cover:

• Our election predictions, which are almost instantly shown to be way off


• How the lower house members are chosen


• Breakdowns of several races


• What the religious parties New Komeito and Happiness Realization Party are all about


• What kind of makeup politicians use to smooth out all their wrinkles to achieve the signature “Ichiro Ozawa as slimy salamander” look (thanks to viewer Kozo, we now know they use a kind of grease-based face makeup known as ドーラン in Japanese).


• And much more!

Once again, thanks so much to TPR for putting everything together and making it a spectacular evening (and for all the pizza too). Also thanks to Marcus for going out of his way to do the sound and video (he even brought a TV light!)

There’s a lot out there, but these two took the cake:

Next first lady feels affinity with Michelle Obama
Miyuki Hatoyama, who has a certain bug-eyed similarity to her alien-looking husband, has said she feels affinity with Michelle Obama. Next weird line: “He is blessed by his ancestors and his supporters and protected by their power, so whatever happens, he should be all right,” she said.” Man, I would have loved to see that in the original Japanese, if such an article exists perhaps some intrepid googler can track it down for me. She also wants their son, a shy engineer studying in Moscow, to run for office soon, a statement not exactly in line with the DPJ’s pledge to end hereditary politics.

Japan’s Underpopulation Crisis Led to Recent Election Upset Demographer Says
Lifenews.com, an anti-abortion news site based in the US, has said that Japan’s demographic crisis led to the DPJ win. Without explaining the logic behind that assertion, we heard that legalized abortion is the cause of the upheaval—which I declare to be complete nonsense considering the frequency of “dekichatta kekkon” in Japan, although I don’t have stats to back me up.

Joint posted at ComingAnarchy—weigh in with comments there.

I’m going to repost as an independent post something I first wrote as a comment four years ago regarding languages, and what languages to learn. I was reminded of this topic because of my co-author Younghusband’s post on preparing your child for the ComingAnarchy, as I wrote my first comment based on what languages I wanted my kids to study.

With regards to prioritizing language education, I consider five languages to be in the “first tier.” To rank them in general order of importance:

1. English (North America, Britain, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, most international cities: The international language, hands down.
2. Spanish (Spain, Latin America, large US cities): A language used broadly in the Western Hemisphere and increasingly in the United States.
3. Chinese (China, Singapore, elsewhere): Not yet used much outside China, but a language spoken by a billion people with real potential to become an international language in the 21st century.
4. French (France, much of Africa, Quebec, Iran): It’s international prestige is shrinking, but it remains popular in many former French colonies, and a vital language if you are working with any business that has any connection to France, due to the preference of the French to speak their own language.
5. Russian (Russia, former USSR, former satellites): The Russian language will shrink in importance as former satellites move to other, more international languages—Mongolia being one example. But for now, it remains the language of intercultural communication in places such as Kazakhstan and more useful than Turkish, which may well replace it in the coming decades.
   These languages have intercontinental importance. All but Russian will stay in the top tier for the rest of our lifetime.

The second tier covers languages that have broad Second tier:

1. Arabic (Middle East, North Africa): Arabic is the only language that is a language of the United Nations that is not in my first tier because it’s relatively provincial. Despite its geographic reach from Morocco to Iraq, it is not used outside that region, and is almost irrelevant in business except in the provincial Arab sense. You can get away speaking French or English in much of the Arabic world.
2. Portugese (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Numibia, Macau, East Timor, other nations in Africa): Portugese is a major language because of Brazil—otherwise it would be ranked in a nebulous 4th tier together with Dutch.
3. Japanese (Japan; other metropolitan areas of Asia): Japanese is, believe it or not, widely used in cosmopolitan, connected cities in Asia, and I’ve used it to speak with people in Thailand, Singapore, Korea, and China. In my own personal experience, I have spoken more Japanese than English in the shopping malls and tourist areas of Seoul. Add to that fact that Japan is the world’s number 2 economy and the Japanese have poor English language skills.

Then we have languages in the Third Tier that are used broadly in certain cross-border regions

1. Turkish (Turkey, adaptable to Central Asian languages)
2. Farsi (Iran, Tajikistan, Los Angeles)
3. Punjabi or Hindi (Much of South Asia)

But all of this is opinion. Does anyone else want to weigh in with additional comments?