Last week’s issue of weekly news magazine Shukan Asahi contained a feature story claiming to have strange video footage of Shinzo Abe attending a party in Nov 2002. This was around the time of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il’s admission of his country’s secret program to kidnap Japanese people. Abe, then Dep. Chief Cabinet Secretary, saw his star begin to rise as he received credit for pushing a strong protest of the program. At the party, for Ekojuku (Wisdom Light School), a “business consultancy” that uses fortunetelling and magic energies from the (now-deceased) founder’s hands to give business and career advice. The party was held to celebrate the birthday of the company’s founder, Hitoyoshi Mitsunaga.

Abe’s speech to the crowd gathered was as follows, in translation:

“Every November I attend Mr. Mitsunaga’s birthday party. We have a long relationship that goes back to the days of my father. Each and every day there are lots of hectic goings-on, but I am thankful, knowing that this is truly thanks to Mr. Mitsunaga. I would really like Mr. Mitsunaga to send his power to the diplomats in negotiations with North Korea now, and defeat North Korea. This is how I feel.”

The article goes on to detail numerous meetings between the two (who hail from the same area of Yamaguchi prefecture), the fact that Abe was a board member on some of Mitsunaga’s companies, and some dealings that the Abe family had with Mitsunaga. Sure, the man’s beliefs are his own business I suppose, but it just irks me that crucial details like the man’s philosophy (i.e. magic hand energies can sway diplomatic negotiations) don’t make it into English-language media reporting on a major world leader. Somewhat less irksome is the absence of credit given to Abe for his 2002 best dresser award.

I don’t feel like going into detail on this now, I just wanted it covered since I am working on a post about right wing religions in Japan.

A Japan first?
A moving stone bicycle.

Gravestone carver’s shop. Yamashina District, Kyoto.
June 18, 2006

If you enjoyed my recent posts on WW2 era comic book covers and are in the New York area, you may want to check out Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics, an exhibition running at The New York Jewish Museum from September 15, 2006 to January 28, 2007. Curated by Jerry Robinson, whose best known creation is The Joker, possibly the best known comic book supervillian of all time, showcases art from the golden age of comic books (from the popularization of the art form in the late 1930s until it came under a period of attack in the early 1950s) in the context of the socio-political conditions of the time. Naturally, since this is The Jewish Museum and the vast majority of early comic book creators were Jewish, there is a strong focus on the relationship that these creators’ Jewish identity had to their art.

Comic book news site Newsarama has a very interesting interview with Jerry Robinson about the exhibit.

NRAMA: Do you have any insight into why Jews were such a big part of the comic book industry in the beginning?

JR: I’ve done a lot of research on this and it’s going to become a book based on the two exhibitions and it will be published by one of the major art publishers in America. Jewish artists and creators have been prominent in New York culture since the turn of the century. A lot of artists, writers, poets, also scientists and other professions were in that first wave of immigration in the 1890’s/1900’s. Then the next wave was due to the rise of Nazism and that wave included a lot of artists, writers and theatrical people. So from that whole first half of the 20th Century, New York absorbed a lot of diverse talent, along with many other immigrants of other nationalities, German, Italian, Russian, etc. But many of them were Jewish and were prominent in their areas. For example, the early movie industry was also dominated by a lot of Jewish actors, writers, filmmakers from Europe. They immigrated to New York and settled in the Lower East Side and at one time there were hundreds of theaters around the country that were showing Jewish plays and performances. The film industry, again, had many prominent Jews such MGM with David O. Selznick, Carl Laemmle with Universal. I can’t name them all.

I was pleased to see that in the interview he also mentioned the exhibit’s collection of covers he chose to include Captain America #1, which earlier this week I called my favorite of the WW2 era anti-Axis covers.

Unfortunately, I will not be back home in the New York area until next summer so I will be missing out on this exhibit, but it sounds well worth visiting for anyone interested in the history of American popular culture, American/New York Jewish history, or comic books at all. And of course, while on this topic I must make a very strong recommendation that anyone with even the slightest, teeniest bit of interest in this stuff immediately get your hands on a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. Don’t let the fact that it won the Pulitzer prize for literary scare you off. This fictionalized account of the careers of a a duo of Siegel and Schuster-esque creators of a Nazi-fighting superhero by the name of The Escapist is amazingly fun to read.

I was just reading the latest news about the anti-Chen Shui Bian protests in Taipei when I saw it mentioned that they were camped out on Ketagalan Boulevard. Not recognizing the non-Chinese name of the street I nautrally punched it into Google. Ah, 凱達格蘭. Yes of course. Now, who or what is Ketagalan? As is often the case, Wikipedia has an answer.

Ketagalan 凱達格蘭 is a Taiwanese aboriginal tribe originating in what is now the Taipei Basin. Their language has now become extinct.

On 21 March 1996, the road in front of the Presidential Building was renamed from Chiang Kai-shek Boulevard (介壽路) to Ketagalan Boulevard by the Taipei City Government to commemorate this tribe. Traffic signs banning motorcycles and bicycles from that road were abolished at the same time.

Legend has it that their forebears originally lived on another island. One day, a ‘monster’ appeared on the island. Every night the monster would appear in the village, terrorizing the villagers.

Accordingly, the villagers laid traps for the monster all around their homes and fields. The wounded monster was forced back into the mountains and the village was peaceful again for a while. But soon afterward the monster reappeared. Crazed by hunger, the monster reached into a hut and seized a child.

The villagers lived in fear of being eaten by the monster and didn’t dare sleep a wink. The villagers debated heatedly but no one could think of a way to deal with the monster. So with no other choice, it was decided that they must pack up and leave the island. Following an arduous sea voyage, they sighted land. The island they landed on was Taiwan.

Many years later, the tribe was growing so one day the villagers agreed to draw straws. Those who drew long straws were permitted to remain living on the fertile plain while those drawing the short straws would have to move into the mountains. Thereafter, the villagers were separated into plain-dwelling and mountain-dwelling tribes.

If I were a KMT nationalist filmmaker during the days of the military dictatorship, I would make a film version of this story which actually takes place in the mythical past, but the “monster” is a symbol for Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. It would never be explicitly stated, but evident through symbolic use of colors and icons suggestive of both the CCP and KMT, the civil war, the famines of the Great Leap Forward, the oppression of the Cultural Revolution, etc.

Today it would be regarded as a classic of the propaganda genre, along with Leni Reifenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” but like them would also be considered an uncomfortable reminder of an earlier time and rarely watched by any but serious students of film or history.

In 2012, Ang Lee, the world famous Taiwanese director known for his love of exploring new genres, would direct his first animated, a lavish fantasy story whose animation is inspired largely by Studio Ghibli’s painterly backgrounds, but with a greater use of computer graphics for special effects and management of large numbers of actors and objects in scenes of fast action. This first Taiwanese-made animated blockbuster would be widely hailed as evidence that Taiwan, like Korea and Japan before it, is beginning to overcome its image of being merely a technocratic and business-obsessed East Asian nation, and the Taiwanese press would, in a somewhat lame attempt to copy the corny but effective phrase “Korean wave” present it as the beginning of a Taiwan Typhoon of pop culture that would finally give the diplomatically isolated yet economically powerful island nation a taste of cultural soft power.

This film would, however, be a straight adaption of the myth, lacking the political undertons of the earlier Chiang Kai Shek era film. It would, however, alter the myth slightly to accomodate recent archaeological research indicating that Taiwanese aborigines who probably immigrated from what is now the Chinese mainland may in fact be the ancestors of the entire Malasian/Austronesian culture/linguistic people. The Ketagalan tribe of the film would flee from, instead of another island, the Mainland, and in the end they would not divide themselves between lowlanders and highlanders, but lowlanders, highlanders, and a third group who in the films melancholy conclusion once again set off in their flimsy wooden boats, in search of the unknown with nothing to guide them except the stars and their prayers.

ZAKZAK, never a letdown, has run an article that quotes political/financial fortuneteller known as the “Onmyoji of Nagatacho” (whose sessions start at 30,000 yen) Shoken Fujitani’s predictions for who should go in Abe cabinet. While I don’t understand his system (it’s based on the fact that Abe was born aligned with Mercury in the year of the Horse [1954]), I’ll note his results here so we can come back on Tuesday to see how close he was:

People who are compatible with Abe:

Foreign Minister Taro Aso

Previous Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura (Has good “overseas luck”)

Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Shoichi Nakagawa

Lower House Member Sanae Takaichi (connection to culture i.e. Education Ministry)

Fumio Kyuma, chairman of LDP’s General Council

Lower House member Yasuhiro Shiozaki (pictured below dining with old people for Respect for the Aged Day):

Lower House member (one of the “female assassin” candidates from last year’s election) Satsuki Katayama

Lower House member Yuko Obuchi (daughter of former PM the late Keizo Obuchi)

People who aren’t compatible with Abe:

LDP Policy Council Chairman Hidenao Nakagawa (who made some enemies as a diehard pusher of Koizumi reforms)

METI Minister Toshihiro Nikai. Here he is giving Koizumi and companions the classic fakeout (What the hell is that? – Huh? – ... See ya!):

Ex-PM Yoshiro Mori (but then again no one’s compatible with Mori)

Lower House member Yukari Sato (another “female assassin” candidate that was less well-received than Katayama)

Financial Services Minister Yosano Kaoru

and finally… Koizumi himself!

I have no clue how much stock people actually put in these predictions, but Japan tends to be much more superstitious than the US and they certainly hold enough value to be featured in a trashy tabloid. In politics as well as every day life inauspicious days are usually avoided for major events and traditional superstitions (such as blood type personality distinctions) are usually respected if not wholeheartedly accepted. In one famous episode (as described in Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons), bankers gathered in large numbers to an Osaka fortune teller’s home so they could touch her ceramic toad and hear her stock picks. Japan certainly isn’t anywhere near as bad as Burma, where the ruling junta moved the whole capital on the advice of feng sui experts, but nevertheless a man like Fujitani has been able to make a good living with his essentially baseless political predictions. His list of “accurate predictions” includes warning former PM Keizo Obuchi not to make the incompatible Hiromu Nonaka in his Chief Cabinet Secretary or else he would “risk his life” (he later died of a stroke while in office).

These assessments seem less like astrology and more of a “who’s hot and who’s not” of Japanese politics. Pretty safe choices. We’ll come back on Tuesday to see how he did.

Osorezan! “The Mountain of Fear.” Ain’t it quaint. It was the first stop on my recent tour of northern Japan with Curzon (who’s still wandering around the back roads of Hokkaido).

Although some misguided websites call it a mountain, it’s actually a temple in a valley surrounded by mountains. The temple is surrounded by rocky terrain lying atop a very sulfuric hot spring, which releases smelly gas from vents in the ground.

When pre-modern types saw this, they assumed that they were seeing spirits escaping the underworld. So legend has it that this is a natural gateway to Hell, and many pilgrims come to leave little offerings for the dead. One common sight around the hot springs is little stone statues dressed in children’s clothes—memorials to dead young’uns.

Anyway, if this is what going to Hell looks like, maybe I need to maintain my life of evil…

Yasukuni Shrine, Japan’s controversial unofficial war memorial, is in financial trouble, says the Asahi Shimbun. Apparently, the drop in major donations spurred by the disappearance of the war generation has run headfirst into plans for a revamping of its war-nostalgia museum in preparation for its 130th anniversary. Let’s look at the numbers:

Total cost for renovating the museum: 8.3 billion yen
Annual budget: 1.8 billion, down 5% from last year and almost half of the 1985 budget of 3.2 billion yen. So they’re dipping into the endowment, it looks like.

In terms of revenue, Teikoku Databank shows that Yasukuni only reported 235 million yen (parking fees, rent for the gift shop and building, and entrance fees for the museum), down from 400 million yen in 1996 (NOTE: edited from original post). It’s the 3rd highest earner of all Shinto shrines, but only makes 1/5 of the top earner, Meiji Jingu. At this rate, the shrine is currently moving forward with rationalizations such as not replacing retired workers, outsourcing some operations, and getting estimates from multiple contractors and auctioning out construction/repairs.

Obviously, this development will have an effect on the recent reemergence of proposals to nationalize the shrine. Although the Asahi warns that “it is doubtful that Yasukuni will agree to dissolve itself” it’s not like a bankrupt Yasukuni (or its backers in the war bereaved association) could really say no to national patronage if it means saving the expensive but apparently effective museum.

Andrew Sullivan says that the most interesting thing about the recently foiled terror plot is that the terrorists were planning on using “liquids” of some kind in the attack. Since the authorities are still being tight-lipped about the actual details of the attack we have no idea what exactly that liquid was, but there are a number of possibilities. Andrew’s pet theory seems to be that they were using a device that combines liquids from two different chambers to create hydrogen-cyanide gas. According to this BBC article, it was in fact liquid explosives, with electronic detonators hidden inside portable devices, which presumably would be dis and reassembled within the plane.

Whatever the exact nature of the liquid being used in this particular attack was, there is one major past terrorist attack perpetrated through the release of liquids inside a vehicle. I am of course talking about the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway sarin gas attack of March 20, 1995.

Earlier this year I had a large translation project in which I translated a couple of hundred pages of Aum Shinrikyo related material, including a large portion of Aum and I by Ikuo Hayashi, a medical doctor and member of the cult, who participated in the sarin release. Below are some excerpts describing the preparation for, and actual release of the sarin inside the subway.
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