Incidentally, I love all the little references in there, like Kim Jong Nam’s Mickey Mouse ears, recognition that Taro Aso was on the  Olympic rifle team, and a GWB reference everybody will get, but what I really want to see is an adaptation of the storyline that shows Pope Benedict employing ancient Catholic magic to win at mahjong.

This week’s Metropolis has a feature on underground gambling. It’s an interesting read:

The gambling professional is, in general, not who you think he is. For a pro gambler, Rei looks pretty normal. He has an average build, wears average clothes and works a regular day job. He lives in a messy six-mat apartment. The paint on the walls is peeling off, and his stuff is strewn about the room. In the corner lie a couple of duffel bags thrown there the previous night. By all appearances, it’s a standard Japanese bachelor’s apartment.

Except that those bags contain enough ¥10,000 bills to wallpaper the entire room.

Later on in the article, there are short notes about gambling in Japan. Academics may be surprised to read this:

Doing research on Japan? There’s a good chance you’re being supported by the gambling industry. Every year The Nippon Foundation donates roughly ¥30 trillion to charitable and educational causes. It all comes from boat racing.

For the most part, this is true. The Nippon Foundation, the largest philanthropic organization in Japan, receives over 3% of kyotei (motorboat racing) annual revenues.  According to the 2006 Government Whitepaper on Leisure, the total market for 2005 for kyotei was 978 billion yen. In the early 90s, it was about double this. More details can be found in David Plotz’s Pachinko Nation. (Incidentally, Plotz’s research was supported by a Nippon Foundation grant.)

Of course, this isn’t to criticize the foundation itself, which has supported good works around the globe. Apparently some academics in Japan do look down on their grants, however. Last year, a friend of mine was faced with the choice of either a Fulbright or a Nippon Foundation grant for her dissertation research. When she told an academic friend of hers about this, the friend closed the door and quietly told her that she risked a small amount of stigma were she to go with the latter.

If this is how some Japanese academics deal with researchers whose grant is merely peripheral to gambling, I wonder how they will treat someone whose research is on gambling…

Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan came out this past Fall. A tale of sex, scandal, and gangsters, it was written by Jake Adelstein, a former vice reporter for the Yomiuri and the only American to have been admitted into the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department press club. If you’re interested in hearing more about the seedy side of Tokyo, I recommend picking up a copy. It’s a great read, at least as interesting as Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Underworld.

Some of you may have heard of Adelstein when his name popped up a year or so ago as the author of a Washington Post article about the yakuza (Japanese mafia). He is an interesting fellow; besides his unique former press credentials he also was instrumental in the 2006 TIP report that embarrassed Japan into adopting stricter anti-trafficking measures. Additionally, he runs the “Japan Subculture Research Center,” a blog devoted to the Japanese underground. He is currently running around the world promoting his new book. This isn’t just to generate sales. The publicity he generates keeps him alive.

You see, back in 2007, Adelstein stumbled upon an interesting story: a yakuza boss had secretly gone to UCLA to get a liver transplant. I won’t go into details, but here are a couple of articles here and here and a link to a very good piece CBS did. (Interested parties should note that this is an under-reported story that deserves more attention, especially in light of UCLA’s offensive non-apology.) Before Adelstein had a chance to write the story, he was visited by a man from a certain organization who calmly informed the reporter that if he did not erase his story, he would be erased himself. Adelstein complied, but after the story leaked out through a different channel, the yakuza placed the blame on him.

Rather than trying to hide, he reasoned that it made more sense to speak out as much as possible about what he knows. Since the yakuza is interested in keeping him silent so that he doesn’t say what he knows, he hopes that the more publicity he generates, the less incentive certain gentlemen have to silence him since he’ll have already spoken as much as he can. After getting his book out this past October, he’s gone on a whirlwind publicity tour, hitting 60 minutes and The Economist (mp3), as well asthe Daily Show (Jon Stewart’s deadpan reactions are hilarious.)

Having long had a personal and academic interested in Adelstein’s career, I contacted him offering to interview him for MFT to generate a little more publicity for his cause. He graciously agreed, on the condition we limit the content to gambling and yakuza. Those readers who are familiar with my interests will not be surprised that I had absolutely no problem with this. I’ve split the interview into two parts and will run the second one next week.

(Be warned that some of the content of the interview is a bit colorful—nothing graphic, but don’t read it if your boss is looking over your shoulder)

So, without further ado, here’s Adelstein:

Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by MFT!

My pleasure.

The bakuto, ancestors of the yakuza, were gamblers but not much is known (in the English world) about the yakuza’s current connections to underground gambling. One well known academic claims that there are well over 1,000 illegal casinos in Tokyo alone, all with yakuza connections. Sound true to you?

I don’t know if there are over 1,000 illegal casinos—it would seem reasonable to say that there are a lot of gambling dens in Tokyo—including mah-jong parlors. The “casino” as is typically imagined is something that many Japanese people can now experience by buying a cheap ticket to Macau or somewhere else and this has limited the appeal of the underground casino parlors. In the TMPD, the 生活安全部 (seikatsu anzenbu, Community Safety Bureau) is typically the section that busts the gambling dens and casinos but they have a huge area of responsibility and in terms of man-power they can probably only afford to bust two or three casinos a year if they are going to handle anything else. Maybe five at maximum.  Of course, betting on fights, sports events, that kind of stuff—the yakuza will always have a hand running bookie operations.  I think the number is a little high if you really mean “casino” but as for little venues where illegal gambling is conducted, probably accurate.  When J-League was super-popular, the yaks took a lot of bets on soccer game outcomes. However, casinos can make a lot of money and the baccarat types are very popular. The TMPD raided a place in Kabukicho called MARKS, in May of this year, and that one illegal earned close to ten million dollars in half a year.

In the past few years, off-shore betting sites targeting Japanese have popped up. Do you suspect yakuza connections to these as well?

I would suspect as much.  Many porn producers now make uncensored versions of their DVDS to sell overseas and gambling site operators must realize that operating overseas is much safer than doing it in Japan. I can’t think of a case where off-shore betting sites run by Japanese have resulted in criminal prosecutions. Kajiyama Susumu, the so-called Emperor of Loan Sharks, from 2000 to 2003 (if my memory is correct) used to play millions of dollars in cash in a safe deposit box of a Las Vegas casino with offices in Japan and then withdraw the money in Las Vegas (in chips)—making him a whale (VIP). There certainly is evidence that the yakuza gamble overseas so setting up an operation overseas to do betting with Japanese customers is highly probable. I once entertained an offer from the Sumiyoshikai (Ed—One of the top 3 yakuza organizations) to run a Japanese porn (uncensored) network and the servers from the United States but turned it down on moral grounds. Maybe if the pay offered had been better? (LOL)

Ever heard any stories as to why the baccarat games are so popular, or the extent to which Japanese love them? When I was in Macau I saw whole casino floors devoted solely to baccarat.

I think it reminds Japanese guys of James Bond movies. It’s that simple. It’s “cool.”

Is the Hoanka the same division in charge of busting the other types of fuuzoku (Adult Entertainment Establishments)? Any interesting stories with sei (sex) fuuzoku busts?

The Hoanka does fuzoku busts. Well, I heard that when the wrestler and porn star, Chocolate Ball Mukai, was arrested for doing a live sex demonstration (public indecency) at a “happening” bar that he panicked and literally got stuck inside the girl he was having sex with—supposedly this also happens with dogs, and it took a few minutes for him to dislodge. I made it to the tail end of the raid (no pun intended) so I did not get to see Chocolate Ball in action or in a “fucklock” so I can’t tell you if it’s true or not. One of the cops on the raid says that they had to douse him with cold water to get him off the girl but I think he was pulling my leg.  I could never tell with that guy when he was kidding and when he wasn’t.  By the way, I don’t know why he was called Chocolate Ball Mukai. A Happening Bar is often a swingers club but definitions of what one is tend to very.

I’d love to hear that story about the Nanako-kai running a gambling outfit in Roppongi!

In the fall of 2002, if my memory serves me correctly, the Nakano-kai (now disbanded) was running a gambling casino in Roppongi—in Sumiyoshikai turf. The Sumiyoshikai enforcers busted into the casino and a fight ensued. The Nakanokai guys ran out into the street and one of them was cut down with a sword near the bar Propaganda. It was an immense amount of blood and when the guy got sliced—it looked kind of like an invisible hand had folded a walking paper doll. I could hear yelling and I always imagined I heard a “swoosh” but probably that’s exactly that imagination.  It was a huge bloody mess. It never made the papers. I was out the night drinking with drug cops and went to Azabu PD who filled me in on the details but didn’t announce the incident.  The Nakanokai guy lived apparently, so maybe he just go sliced up pretty bad. I think the police didn’t announce it because they didn’t want a gang war breaking out. My boss at the time was not interested in the story either.  The police do this now and then. For instance, the shooting in Yokohama yesterday—-the shooter was identified as an Inagawa-kai member but the victims were not identified as Yamaguchi-gumi members. Associates might be a better word. Hayashi-san, the shooter, was defending his turf from a sneaky invasion by the Yamaguchi-gumi. Pardon me for digressing here but i wanted to illustrate my point.

Was there any mention of any civilians/katagi being hurt in this fight? Being customers of the casino, there would have been a lot of them, right?

Nope the fight took place on the streets outside the bar.

Casino legalization in Japan seems to be moving forward and its possible that a law will be passed in the next couple of years. What do the yakuza, who currently have a de facto monopoly on casinos, think of this? For that matter, what does the NPA?

Oh, I’m sure the yakuza aren’t that concerned not the smart ones. They have a much better casino to profit off of: The Japanese stock market. Koizumi’s relaxation of the financial laws made it very easy for them to set up front companies, venture capital outfits, anonymous investor unions, securities companies and even auditing firms. They are still in a wonderful position to game the market.  The yakuza know that if you want to win gambling—you have to be the house and they have been very effective in doing it.  There’s a hell of a lot more money to be made on moving stock and high finance crimes than there is skimming profits from a casino.  There have been some amazing cases in the last few years. Close to 100 million dollars vanishing in the Goodwill buyout of Crystal.  Then there was Lehman Brother Japan losing 350 million dollars in a deal involving people with yakuza ties.  That’s a lot of money.  More than any illegal casino could ever touch.

As for the legalization of casinos,  I’m sure the NPA is excited about having a new means of making sure that they all retire to cushy white collar jobs.  Probably someone is already planning to set up the casino equivalent of the Traffic Safety Association.  I’m sure Ishihara is plotting to set up a casino in Tokyo and he has sent city staff overseas on fact-finding missions about gambling to Las Vegas and other places.

That’s all for now. Check out Part 2 next Monday at 9am JST!

Each year, Mizuho Bank (which has a special relationship with the lottery from its days as a government bank) tallies the total number of lottery (Takarakuji) tickets sold and divides that number into each prefecture’s population to obtain an average per capita spending total. According to their numbers for fiscal 2007 (as reported in the Nikkei), the top ticket buyers were Tokyo, Osaka, and Kochi prefecture in Shikoku. There was a huge gap between the top of the list (Tokyo’s 12,933 yen) versus the bottom (Yamagata’s 5,328 yen). The top prefectures tended be prefectures that house large cities, such as Aichi.

UPDATE: A typical lottery ticket in Japan costs around 300 yen, meaning that Tokyo residents buy around 43 tickets a year or just about one every week.

Prefectures with the lowest home ownership rates tended to buy more lottery tickets. Tokyo and Osaka, the first and second highest per-capita lottery players, also have the two lowest home ownership ratios, in the same order.  Okinawa has the third lowest, and its residents are Japan’s sixth biggest lottery gamblers. On the other hand, Aichi, another prefecture full of takarakuji hopefuls, had the seventh lowest home ownership ratio. (Bonus fact: Toyama prefecture had the highest home ownership rate in 2003 (around 80%). Toyama residents play it relatively safe with a middling per capita lottery spend of between 7,000-7,999 yen).

The outlier was Kochi prefecture, however, indicating that low home ownership, a signifier of relative poverty, does not make up the only factor explaining the results. An official from Kochi prefecture’s budget division speculated, “Perhaps the prefecture residents’ nature of determination and love of gambling had an impact.”

A brief overview of Japan’s lottery system

Though it only brings in about 1/20 the revenue of the almighty pachinko, Japan’s lottery, with its estimated 15,000 or so ticket booths outside train stations (more booths than pachinko parlors, one for every 8,600 people), has been a highly visible form of legal gambling in Japan throughout the postwar era, along with horse racing, yacht speedboat racing, bicycle racing, and mahjong.

According to Wiki Japan, lottery-style gambling in Japan got its start in the Edo period as Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples offered tomikuji (essentially the same as a lottery) in order to raise funds for repairs. Over the years, tomikuji faced various bans from the authorities, and private-sector lotteries remain criminalized to this day. In July 1945, a desperate wartime government instituted a lottery, but Japan surrendered and chaos reigned before a drawing could even be held. A national government-backed lottery was re-instituted during the US occupation in 1948, though it was abandoned in 1954, leaving only regional lotteries. Takarakuji took its current form in 1964 with the foundation of the Japan Lottery Association, a grouping of the regional lotteries.

According to association data, in fiscal 2007 (the period covered by the above survey) Japanese gamblers bought 1.0442 trillion yen in tickets, or about 8,200 yen per person. The US doesn’t have a national lottery per se, but the UK does – on average, UK residents spent 80 pounds (12,905 yen by the current exchange rate) per capita on national Lotto in 2008. The UK lottery’s press kit (PDF) claims that 70% of adults are regular players (but doesn’t cite a source), while a 2007 poll from Japan’s lottery association found that 55% of those polled had purchased at ticket at least once in the past year. The UK system, in which operations are contracted to a private company, appears to be more efficient than the one in Japan. According to the UK press kit, 10% of every pound spent on lottery tickets goes to operations and expenses (5% in dealer commission, 4.5% in operating costs, and 0.5% in shareholder dividends), versus 14.4% of each ticket in Japan (with 45.8% going to paying winners and 39.8% going into the general accounts of each prefecture and major cities).

The odds of winning a current popular Japanese game Loto 6 is 1 in 6 million, which is comparable to other lotteries I am familiar with in the US (and of course less likely than getting hit by lightning).

See the full list after the jump!

List of per capita Takarakuji spending by prefecture, April 1, 2007-March 31, 2008

10,000 yen or more

• Tokyo (top spender overall)


• Osaka (second-highest)


• Kochi (Third place)

9,000-9,999 yen

• Aichi

8,000-8,999 yen

• Yamanashi


• Shizuoka


• Fukui


• Kyoto


• Wakayama


• Tokushima


• Hiroshima


• Fukuoka


• Saga


• Okinawa

7,000-7,999 yen

• Aomori


• Akita


• Ibaraki


• Tochigi


• Gunma


• Kanagawa


• Nagano


• Toyama


• Gifu


• Ishikawa


• Mie


• Tottori


• Yamaguchi


• Ehime


• Oita


• Kumamoto


• Miyazaki


• Kagoshima

6,000-6,999 yen

• Hokkaido


• Iwate


• Miyagi


• Fukushima


• Niigata (third from the bottom)


• Chiba


• Saitama


• Shiga


• Hyogo


• Okayama


• Kagawa


• Shimane


• Nagasaki

Less than 6000 yen

• Yamagata (bottom of the list)


• Nara (second from the bottom)

Source: Nihon Keizai Shimbun, June 3, 2009 evening edition , p. 3

Japan’s Pachinko Parlors Beat Vegas as Gamblers Defy Recession
...
As Japan’s economy shrank at an annual 12.1 percent pace in the last quarter and revenue slumped at Las Vegas casino companies like MGM Mirage and Las Vegas Sands Corp., the 23 trillion-yen pachinko industry is on a roll. Sales from the machines, which resemble upright pinball games, rebounded 0.5 percent in last quarter, reversing a six-year decline, and rose 0.9 percent in January, according to government statistics.
...
Kyoto-based Maruhan Corp., the biggest pachinko-hall operator by sales, forecast net income will rise 11 percent to 20 billion yen in the fiscal year ending today, according to a statement on its Web site. Operators aren’t publicly traded and typically don’t provide financial information.

Casino gambling revenue in Las Vegas fell the most on record last year and dropped 15 percent in January as the U.S. recession curbed spending on travel and betting. Shares of MGM Mirage and Las Vegas Sands fell more than 95 percent in the 12 months through March 27.

Introduced in the 1920s, pachinko is played by about 13 percent of Japan’s population, who fed 23 trillion yen into the machines in 2007, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development.

Numbers are down from 16 percent of the population and 29.6 trillion yen in 2003, a drop that was caused by a regulatory crackdown on types of machines that encouraged heavy gambling, according to a February 2007 report by CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets.

13,000 Parlors

Japan’s 13,000 pachinko halls—more than one for every 10,000 residents—are located throughout the country around train stations, along highways and in entertainment areas.

Pachinko players seek to amass piles of small steel balls that can be exchanged for prizes. Because casinos are illegal in Japan, cash can’t be paid out on the premises. Prizes can usually be exchanged for money at a nearby booth.

Operators are luring customers with new high-stakes machines that yield bigger profit margins, while lowering fees for others to 1 yen per ball from 4 yen.

“Parlors are thinking more carefully about which machines customers like, which machines are the most profitable,” S&P analyst Miyuki Onchi said. “Sales have come up bit by bit.”

Lower-fee machines have widened the customer base at Maruhan, the company said in an e-mail. Founded in 1957, Maruhan said it has 242 parlors, up from 225 a year ago, and about 12,000 workers.
...
Spending by Japanese households dropped 5.9 percent in January from a year earlier, the most in more than two years, the government said last month.

...

“It’s an industry that in the past, when the economy has slumped, it has improved,” Kobayashi said. “But this time we don’t know how bad the recession will be.”
...

•  3,800 McDonald’s stores


•  1,102 Sukiya beef bowl stores (they edged out Yoshinoya in 2008)


• If pachinko parlors were a convenience store chain, it would be the biggest (7-11 Japan is the biggest with 12,071  stores, with more than 50,000 convenience stores nationwide)

For some reason the article doesn’t mention that part of the new attraction of these “new high stakes machines” is the aggressive advertising and licensing deals. Recent titles have included Evangelion, Space Battle Ship Yamato, Korean drama Winter Sonata, and even Tensai Bakabon. There is also a difference between pure pachinko and pachinko-slots (“pachi-slo”) that I still don’t really understand.

Four years later, I am only now learning of the game’s hentai origins:

Cross Channel (officially spelled CROSS†CHANNEL) is an eroge for the Windows and PlayStation 2 platforms. The Windows version was released on September 26, 2003, and the PS2 version (CROSS†CHANNEL~to all people~) on March 18, 2004.
...
Story

Gunjo Gakuen (Deep Blue School) is a facility designed to gather and isolate those students who got a high score on an adaptation exam (Scoring high on this exam indicates that the student is less likely to be able to be adapted to the society) mandated by the government.

After a failed summer vacation with other members of the school’s broadcasting club, Taichi Kurosu and some of the other club members return to the city, only to find that all living creatures within it except for the club members have completely vanished. In order to confirm the status of the outside world, Taichi decides to gather other club members to help Misato Miyasumi, the president of the broadcasting club, who is trying to set up a broadcasting antenna to contact any possible survivors. However, Taichi soon discovers that the world is actually repeating the week after they found the others vanished…
...
Nanaca Crash!! (officially spelled NANACA†CRASH!!) is an online spin off game featuring characters from Cross Channel. The object of the game is to click, hold and release the mouse button to determine the angle and velocity of Nanaka crashing her bicycle towards Taichi, sending him flying across the screen. Your score is determined by the distance of his flight. Certain characters he crashes into will greatly affect his velocity.

You can play the game through Firefox with the FireNES extension.

War-theme designs often mirrored current events. Inui found a kimono that depicted Adm. Heihachiro Togo, who was credited with Japan’s 1905 victory over the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan.

She also found a design that spelled out the name of Yosuke Matsuoka—in romaji alphabet—then ambassador, when he pulled the Japanese delegation out of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1933.

Heartwarming stories and tear-jerkers also made it into kimono.

The story of the heroic Nikudan Sanyushi (Three human bullets), or Bakudan Sanyushi (Three human bombs)—three engineering corps soldiers who reportedly perished in a suicide bombing during the Shanghai incident in 1932—were given sweeping coverage by the media. Headlines and parts of the articles from The Asahi Shimbun and The Mainichi Shimbun became part of kimono designs.

Take the early wartime game Battle of the River Plate, for example. Based on the first major confrontation between German and British naval forces, it is one of the earliest known games to reflect the international conflict. Players tried to score points by firing wooden sticks at the ship with a spring action. A direct hit caused the gun turrets on the ship to “explode”.

Another, Bomber Command, depicts bombing squadrons and invites players to bomb Berlin, at the centre of the playing board. Players take turns to throw dice to move toward the target. When materials were in short supply, the dice were replaced by a numbered spinning card.

“It was a game you can easily imagine people playing sitting in the air raid shelter while being bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz,” says historian and author, Robert Opie.

What would be some good examples of popular culture reflecting enemies and conflicts in the world around us today? Off the top of my head, there’s naturally “24,” which I’ve never seen but I understand is about how Arab terrorists want to kill us. And then of course there’s the video game Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, in which a disaffected North Korean general stages a military coup on the eve of reunification with the South in some near future year, or on a similar but slightly more afield topic, take the third season episode of the fairly recent Justice League Unlimited cartoon show, in which a number of DC superheroes travel to a fictitious militaristic Northeast Asian nation, clearly modeled after North Korea, to stop a rampaging nuclear powered robotic monster which they claim they had built “to protect us from the foreigners,” clearly modeled after North Korea’s metaphorically rampaging nuclear (non-robotic) monster.

All of these are in fact less examples of government sponsored propaganda than grass roots, genuinely popular culture expressing such things as a society’s popularly held fears and hatreds regarding their enemies at that time. I recall during the first Gulf War, when I was 10 or 11 years old, I saw someone at a flea-market selling “Desert Shield” branded condoms, which exclaimed on the package something along the lines of “Don’t you wish Saddam Hussein’s father had worn one of these?” Perhaps it is due to the fact that I was out of the country during the early stages of the recent Iraq invasion, but I can think of no examples of similarly popular expressions of support for the current war. Is it wrong of me to think that the initial support for the invasion was, however high the level, generally a grudging and ambivalent sort of support, lacking the level of enthusiasm needed to generate items along the lines of the pro-Axis kimono, the Hitler-face dartboard, or the “Desert Shield” condom?

An Akihabara Nerd to Run for the Upper House… Tarui Dresses Like a Fantasy Warrior on RPG-like Homepage

The LDP’s Foreign Minister Taro Aso is well-known for being popular among the Akihabara (read:anime/manga/video game nerd) set, but there is one man in the DPJ who considers himself an “Akiba-kei” (Akihabara-style otaku). That man is 39-year-old Yoshikazu Tarui, a former Lower House member. He is gaining attention for his uniqueness in such odd moves as putting pictures of himself dressed like a fantasy warrior on his business cards and homepage and displaying images of DPJ President Ichiro Ozawa dressed as “King Zawa.”

Open Tarui’s homepage, and a story on the theme of “a country built on entertainment” will begin. It’s set up like a role-playing game, and King Zawa asks “Warrior Tarui”: “Hey, what happened Tarui? What is it?” as the story progresses.

Tarui is well known as a professional wrestling and kickboxing fan in the DPJ, and “Killer Kan” a great general played by Acting President Naoto Kan also shows up. This is a pun on the famous wrestler Killer Khan who was big in New Japan Pro Wrestling and famous for his special move the Mongolian Chop. DPJ Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama’s appearance is still in the planning stages, reportedly.

Tarui is running in this summer’s upper house race as a proportional representation candidate, but in response to questions from Yukan Fuji (=ZAKZAK), he explains, “Since there are no Akiba-kei Diet members in Nagata-cho, I thought that I’d try and grab the segment of people who are interested in pop culture and digital contents, so I made this site.” His campaign promise is “promotion of the entertainment content industry.”

He has a fold-out business card with the word “Tarutsu” on the cover in the style of famous video game magazine “Famitsu” along with a photo of Tarui dressed as a warrior. Open the card, and along with pictures of Tarui with “King Zawa” and “Killer Kan” there is a pun-filled message: 「かったるい国政、変えたるい！！」 (I’ll change the tired old national politics!). On the back is the strong slogan: “Bring the first akiba-kei Diet member in history back to national politics!”

You’d think he’d have confidence in this masterwork, but Tarui actually seems to be keeping his distance: “I gave this to Kan, but I’ve been too scared to show it to Ozawa since I made it without asking. This might freak regular people out, so I am not giving it out so much. I am mostly just giving it to people in the industry.

Certainly, there are those in Nagatocho who are cool on the wacky concept, saying “all we can do is laught,” but a source close to Tarui explains that he’s “a totally serious person.”

Actually, in Tarui’s own running column in “Weekly Famitsu” magazine, he seriously explains his ‘pet project’: “Promotion of entertainment not only has economic effects for the country, but will also help to raise [Japan’s] image. Would you want to fire a missile at Korea after having seen Winter Sonata? If you consider those feelings, you can understand that entertainment content is truly the best diplomat for prevention of wat and boosting tourism and economic exchange!”

Even Aso must be surprised at this guy!

ZAKZAK 2007/02/13

Both sides are likely to run celebrities and other fluff candidates for the national PR seats this summer, but a seasoned policy wonk with a taste for the absurd? I like.