I say “tragic” because it could have been avoided by either (a) better spelling or (b) better model placement.

(The title is supposed to be “Shelter,” as you can tell from the tiny katakana caption in the corner.)

Today’s New York Times article on the growing economic relationship between Japan and India contains the following line:

Consultants are trying, so far in vain, to coin the catchphrase, like “the Samurai and the Swami,” that will sum up the nascent strategic economic relationship between the countries.

Do the MFT readers have any brilliant suggestions?

As Joe mentioned the other day, I am back in New Jersey for the time being. I’ve just noticed how many weeks it has actually been since I’ve updated anything here, between a couple of weeks of travel, a couple of weeks of being extremely ill, a couple of weeks of playing tourguide to my mom and her boyfriend in Japan, and a couple of weeks of reading and getting graduate school related application stuff together-and topping it all off with trans-hemispheric relocation, a birthday, and various other odds and ends I have completely neglected this space here. So, while I have a few things that I want to write about, and a large number of photographs I want to post from my last several weeks in Japan (for this year anyway), in honor of my return to good old New Jersey, below are some choice quotes from a book of travel writing by the late humorist Irvin S. Cobb entitled Some United States (1926) purchased just this afternoon from the $1 shelves outside the famous Strand bookstore in The City. As the title of this post implies, today I bring you excerpts from the chapter on the great state of New Jersey.

CHAPTER XII

NEW JERSEY

Just Behind Those Billboards

After you cross by train through the tube under the North River, which is so-called because it is really the Hudson River and edges Manhattan Island on the west and bears no relation whatsoever to the northern boundaries of anything at all, and, this safely done, emerge from the tunnel mouth on the farther shore, you will see a large number of billboards. Well, New Jersey is just behind those billboards.

[...]

In billboards, New Jersey, regardless of comparative areas, leads all the states of the Union. I’m not sure but what she leads all the habitable globe. Next to the commuters, billboards constitute her most conspicuous product. The commuters come and go. In the morning they hurry away to New York of Philadelphia to earn their livings and in the evening they return to bed down for the night. Thus daily they come alternately under the head, first, of exports, and then of imports.

An orthodox New Jersey commuter is easily to be recognized in New York. He wears and imaginary string tied around a mental thumb to make him remember not to forget to call up the employment agency and notify the new cook who is going out to his place to spend two or three days with the family, possibly even staying the full week out, to meet him at the station for the 5:03; and she may recognize him by the worried lines in his face and the fact that he will be carrying parts for the lawnmower.

[...]

Whenever I have occasion to traverse the State of New Jersey by rail, I take advantage of the opportunity to reflect upon our outstanding institution of billboards as it presents itself to the purview of the traveler. Regarding billboards and billboarders , I have gone to the trouble of compiling some very interesting figures.

For instance, if all the billboards which desecrate the scenic areas of America were piled one on top of another, allowing twelve inches of horizontal thickness for each billboard, the total number would form a column one hundred and fourteen miles high; and to soak these properly for burning would require ninety thousand barrels of grade-A kerosene; and then when some philanthropist had applied the match, the flames of the bonfire would cast a glow visible as far away as Bermuda, and in every community in this country where people have learned to value the beauties of unblemished nature, there would be public dancing in the streets and a holiday for the school children would be declared.

Again, let us consider for a moment an even more agreeable summarization: If all the billboard art directors who go to and from in the land choosing decorative vista with a view to marring them with their billboards, where laid out side by side with lilies in their hands, it would make a very enjoyable spectacle for the rest of us provided only we were sure that one of them was in a trance.

While I speed athware New Jersey I frequently play a favorite game of mine. I call it Billboards. [Ed: his billboard obsession becomes troubling in its fetishization. Enough on that topic.]

For, when all is said and done and disregarding what figure New Jersey may have cut in the earlier days of this Republic and, before that, in the Colonial time, the question next arises: What now is she? And the answer is that she is become the smudgy and begrimed passageway that separates two great metropolii. [Ed: I know for a fact that Joe would disagree about the characterization of Philadelphia as a great metropolis.] Lying between them and holding them apart, she takes their overflow and they suck out her substances as they long ago sopped up her personality. The semicolon of the Eastern seaboard—that’s modern New Jersey. Never mind what she is commercially. Historically, she’s a cow that went dry about the time the boys got back from the Spanish War. An she has been dry every since. And from present indications will continue to be dry.

[...]

All of which, I claim, helps to explain why New Jersey is one of the joke states. It is not well for a state to be, by national estimation, a standing joke. Kansas once was one and it took her long years to live it down. [Ed: Kansas has worked hard in recent years to reclaim that title.] Arkansas was one and has not yet entirely recovered. Connecticut was one and because of traditional memories lingering in the popular mind of wooden nutmegs and shoe-peg oats, will never entirely get over it. [Ed: I have 0% idea what those references mean. I suppose that means Connecticut HAS gotten over it.] Missouri, for a spell, had a close call with being one, but lacking all else, the state which foaled a Mark Twain would have a title to immortal grandeur on that sole account.

New Jersey still is one and a hopeless patient. For half a century references to Jersey justice, Jersey skeeters and Jersey lightning made her the football of the jesters. [Ed: And all the more embarrassing for us, having invented football here.] As a matter of fact, and giving them due credit, her mosquitoes must sharpen their bills yet finer ere they may hope to compete with the Long Island variety. And in these piping Prohibition days her homemade applejack, potent though it may be, stands comparison with the bootleggers’ best. It may give you the blind staggers, but the blindness is a temporary affliction.

[...]

With time the symptoms have changed, but the case remains incurable. For to-day New Jersey is still a joke state. Outsiders think of her as the State where they suffer from billboarditis and ride on the Erie and harbor the corporations and broadcast the bedtime tales. They forget her material contributions to the national prosperity. And who can blame them?

[...]

But just look at the blame thing now! Coal tipples and garbage dumps and freight tracks and smelters and refineries invade the marshes, and the birds are mostly fled away, and for wild life the mosquitoes are left. The elm-shaded towns where once upon a time future statesmen were born and patriots grew up and writers ripened their art, have become clamorous, cindered, smoky factory places crowded with transcendently ugly workshops, the dirty, homely streets swarming with alien workers quacking a jargon of tongues fit to eclipse Babel’s Tower itself.

It is hard to believe that here, long ago, poets dreamed their dreams and painters plied deft brushes and masters in statecraft dealt masterfully with the politics of their time; that once upon a time great publicists and great orators dwelt in these spots. It is impossible to believe that any such ever again will abide here.

[...]

In all of manufacturing  New Jersey the most agreeable sight, I think, is the sign on the road to Pompton which says you are now leaving Paterson. When I get that far I stop and give thanks.

I’d state the obvious and say that Lonely Girl is the lamest bunch of crap that ever existed, but then I might hurt my own chances of a sweet product placement deal with Pocky.

Lonelygirl15 Breaks Ice With Hershey’s

MARCH 20, 2007 –
Lonelygirl15, the pseudo-video diary that became a YouTube phenomenon last year, has signed its first major product placement deal with Hershey’s for its Icebreakers Sours Gum brand.

In a video posted on March 20 on the official Lonelygirl site, Lg15.com, the show’s main character Bree is seen offering her friends a piece of Icebreaker’s gum, and a closeup of the product is shown. The sponsored episode of scripted teen drama is slated to eventually be featured on YouTube and other video-sharing sites in the near future, said officials.

This level of product integration marks one of the more sophisticated examples of branded entertainment to emerge from the rapidly-evolving world of amateur-created online video. The deal was initiated by the Dallas, Texas-based agency TracyLocke. Ad sales were handled directly by the agents from Creative Artists Agency who represent the Lonelygirl creators. “It’s empowering for us to have major international brand like Hershey’s treat us like they would any other major entertainment property,” says Greg Goodfried, Lonelygirl15co-creator. “Deals like this are good for the community – they help us pay our operating expenses, which has been an ongoing struggle.”

(from MediaWeek)

... he gets SLAMMED by Amnesty International “for comparing human rights to fatty butter.” If you put it that way it makes me think he was high when he said it.

As someone who reads far too many news articles for his own good, I may be somewhat more sensitive to media cliches than your average news consumer. For instance, I have a whole category on this blog for “kabuki” metaphors.

But today I want to talk about another of my pet peeves in the English-language news world: when the reporter flips things all around and makes him/herself the focus of a story. While some people might be interested in the daily life of some freelance writer who rides his bike around town, probably most of us don’t want to read about what substantively is no different from following a homeless man around all day and writing about it (though wait, that would be a good idea). And speaking of homeless people, I almost broke my mp3 player in outrage when I heard this pointless “report” about a man who decided to write out of a storage unit in New York. He should have tried that in DC - he’d have ended up getting arrested if he was lucky, but more likely had his ass handed to him like the rest of the crackheads who try that stunt.

Or consider the reporter who freaked out when he was deemed unworthy of a Wikipedia entry for lack of notability. He spent a full two pages on the subject, and once published the article apparently made him immediately eligible for an article again. This naked display of the writer’s fragile yet gargantuan ego leaves me almost speechless but I will say this: You use Slate to whine to the world that you’re underappreicated, and then that whining (intentionally or not) simultaneously pressures the source of the perceived slight to recognize you once again? You should be ashamed of yourself! (I am not mentioning the writer by name or linking to the article in the hope that he won’t ever find this and have a mental orgasm over seeing his name in print because of something I wrote. I wouldn’t be able to touch the keyboard again).

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Journalists can be pretty egotistical, and as writers they no doubt have a burning desire to tell their story. Or perhaps sometimes they’re just dicks (“I got Bill Clinton to threaten me!”). Foreign correspondents especially seem eager to put themselves in the reporting, which is usually justified (“My convoy got hit with an IED!” “I got kidnapped!”) but too often an unappealing by-product of the expat experience (“Look at me, I am getting paid to walk around China!”). And often it’s less about autobiography than it is a cheap stunt (“Look at me, I got waterboarded!”). Whatever the case, it just doesn’t sit right with me when there are real things to report about. Much like nonbinding resolutions directed at foreign governments, these articles seem to be lost on their way to somewhere else.

Since I haven’t been around for very long, I am going to assume that this practice has been around for a while—HL Mencken seemed to like writing about himself for one thing, and you can see traces of Hunter Thompson in a lot of these kinds of projects. But at the same time this practice seems like some unholy amalgamation of gonzo reporting and the Today Show with Katie Couric meets livejournal, which would make its growth more recent.

There are better ways for a reporter to talk about him/herself as part of the story than to simply say what is happening and then try to link that to some cosmic truth or the zeitgeist or whatever justification you use to get printed in a news publication. The best use of personal narrative that I’ve seen in recent reporting is Nicholas Kristof, who has used the sheer power of his reporting to play a pivotal role in keeping alight what little focus the US has placed on resolving the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, not to mention his efforts to force people to take a hard look at the state of child prostitution in Cambodia from a much more dynamic perspective than almost any other source would have the guts to give. That might be setting the bar high, but I think it has to be pretty high or else we’ll never hear the end of Budding Journalist’s Amazing Tales of Public Transportation.

I’ve been back in the US for about two months now, and while I’ve settled back into the full-time student routine here, I can’t get over the feeling that I’ve left something better behind.

A few weeks back I came across this post by Debito while I was having a minor bout of insomnia, and it sums up the feeling perfectly.

I liken a trip back to America to Superman making a trip back to Krypton.

When Siegel and Schuster first made the Man of Steel, they had to inject a little science into their fiction, because comic-book hero or not, an invulnerable superhuman was a little hard to believe. So they talked about Clark Kent coming from a planet called Krypton, which being more dense than Earth has a higher amount of gravity. So when Clark crashlanded on Earth, he was superstrong because things were physically lighter, and he had X-Ray vision from eyes attuned to a different opacity. Superman’s nemesis was, of course, fragments of rock from his home world—Kryptonite—which made him lose all his powers.

Hence America becomes my Krypton because I feel absolutely sapped of strength there, even at the most interpersonal levels.

Here in Japan, I can relate more to people; they generally give me the time of day and listen to what I say. This could be due to their interest in America, their tendency towards deference with White people, or my ability to describe in Japanese what I see around me—my X-Ray vision, so to speak.

In terms of strength, here I feel I can accomplish more in a negotiation than the average Japanese—with the right mix of loud voice, humility, deliberate ignorance of custom, and choices of which battles to fight.

Then there’s the financial and emotional integrity in Japan (something which even Clark Kent, with a shitty job as a reporter at the Daily Planet, didn’t have); here, I’m not troubled for money, bored with bad food, starved for pretty women to gaze at, or frustrated by a lack of intellectual challenge.

Now, anyone who’s been in Japan for a substantial amount of time probably knows about Charisma Man, the little comic book about a Canadian “geek” who goes to Japan and becomes the ultra-cute “Charisma Man.” Charisma Man can clear a train car in 5 seconds and scare away oyaji by showing off his elephant-like penis. His arch-enemy, naturally, is Western Woman! who can turn him back into a geek just by looking at him.

It’s a true enough phenomenon. Western guys who go to Japan all become Charisma Men to some degree, and the ones who have charisma before they come to Japan become practically superhuman. But the mystery is: why? And everyone seems to have their theories.

I talked about this with Roy, and he seems to believe that it’s a question of audience selection: there’s just a subset of Japanese people who are interested in foreigners (particularly women interested in men), and that’s the attention that turns foreign guys into Charisma Men. That’s probably not a bad theory.

But there’s another half to it, and I think Debito hits it squarely on the head. When you aren’t brought up in Japan, you don’t worry about being the deru kugi—the nail sticking up—and that puts you ahead of those who do. I think it’s a lack of that dreaded word from elementary school: self-esteem. I vaguely remember trying to explain that concept when I was in high school in Osaka. I had to look it up in my electronic dictionary. That communicated the word, but not the concept. The teacher said: “Oh, like selfish?”

And indeed, when I talk to Japanese people in America, many seem to feel the exact opposite effect as Debito and I do. They come to the US, and often they become Charisma People (men and women alike), living freely without a society telling them what to do.

Maybe it’s just psychosomatic. Maybe we just have to be in the environment that we enjoy. So maybe it’s more appropriate to give each their own. Let Mariko have freeways and beaches and pizza: let me have subways and sakura and sushi, and we’ll be even. Which is why I’m all about a world with fewer borders.

A scandal in which two newspapers (Sankei Shimbun and Chiba Nippo) paid temp workers and Sankei-affiliated deliverypersons to attend events promoting the new lay judge system to be introduced from 2009 has inspired this latest use of my favorite journalistic cliche:

Court slams payments to public forum attendees
Kyodo NewsTwo newspaper publishers acted inappropriately when they paid participants to take part in public forums intended to popularize the lay judge system, the Supreme Court said Monday.

The Osaka headquarters of the Sankei Shimbun and Chiba Nippo, a local newspaper in Chiba Prefecture, have acknowledged paying 3,000 yen to 5,000 yen to some participants at the events, which they cosponsored with the top court.

The court announced that it learned of the situation from a “journalistic institution” on Jan 26 and began investigations henceforth. I wonder which institution of fine journalism earned the privilege of ratting out its competitor? At least one blogger has noted that Asahi’s reporting reads “as if they were taking advantage of the situation“, but I won’t point any fingers myself.

Kibashiri Nikki reminds us that the last bit of fakery took place earlier this month, right after Sankei was extremely critical of the Abe administration for its handling of the faked town meeting scandal just last month.

But it is worth noting that Sankei and Chiba Nippo may not be the only ones who deserve to get slammed:

According to contract documents obtained by The Asahi Shimbun under the information disclosure system this month, the Supreme Court placed an order with advertising giant Dentsu Inc. to hold such forums at 50 locations across Japan from 2005 through 2006.

Dentsu said in its project proposal that the forums could be made known to readers of newspapers with a combined circulation of about 19 million.

So it paid local newspaper publishers to secure the sites for the forums and for other expenses. Each newspaper advertised the forums.

The newspapers are taking the blame for this, and if they were the ones making the payments that’s their responsibility. But isn’t it quite a coincidence that we’re seeing Dentsu involved once again in promoting government policy through so-called “public forums.” You may remember that Dentsu was the main contractor managing the scandalous “faked town meetings” a few months ago. In both cases Dentsu’s clients have been slammed for mobilizing “sakura” (slang for decoy participants) to make the forums look like more of a success. The general sequence of events is the same in both the town meeting scandals and this incident: Govt contracts to Dentsu > Dentsu places responsibility for the project to someone else (local government officials and the newspapers, respectively) > that someone else gets in trouble for poisoning the well. It must be nice for Dentsu to be able to keep its profits and its reputation of being the far-and-away top promotion company in Japan, such that even the government seems content to rely on them.

The Homeku blog sums up the situation well:

If you’re wondering why the newspaper company went that far to support the promotions, it’s because a feature story on the details of the meeting was printed the day after the forum, along with an advertisement for the Supreme Court’s lay judge system.

I think the real story is something like they got overeager in their desire for ad revenue. And anyway, we are talking about that newspaper company. They seem to have a weak sense of mission and ethics as an institution of journalism.

At last night’s press conference it was explained that both companies [Sankei and Chiba Nippo] bore the costs of paying the sakura. But that is inaccurate. These “Nationwide Forums on the Lay Judge System” were contracted out by the Supreme Court to Dentsu (Again?!) and Dentsu paid local newspapers the costs to manage them. Accordingly, the source of the money paid to the sakura was originally from the Supreme Court, in other words it was paid from tax revenues.

Another thing that bothers me is that there seems to be a problem with the Supreme Court spending money to promote the lay judge system. It seems like this deviates from the Supreme Court’s role.

The sequence of events in both the lay judge forums and the town meetings cases is that the government used tax revenue to have Dentsu promote the govt’s own policies to the public. It might be easy to understand if you consider that these scandals occur because the motives are impure.