About two weeks ago I talked about how the protests in Taiwan over the importation of American beef are more about anxiety over a loss of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of  China than about any serious concerns over possible mad cow disease. Well, this has only become more obvious as the debates and protests continue. For example, DPP caucus whip Pan Meng-an says “The [lifting of restrictions] on US beef became effective spontaneously, without legislative approval, as did the financial MOU with China. Will [the government’s plan to sign an economic cooperative and framework agreement] be next?” And whether or not allegations that DPP Chairperson Tsai Ying-wen secretly met with American Institute in Taiwan (the unofficial embassy) director William Stanton to promise that the protests were purely an election ploy to discredit the ruling KMT and not a sign of anti-Americanism turn out to be true, that is also clearly a major impetus for the protests.

But what is a mass political protest without a little crazy? Well, some was provided by Chu Cheng-chi (朱政騏), a PhD student at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Sociology, who posted a video of himself eating a “burger” made out of actual cow-shit to youtube as a symbol of…something I guess.

Chu Cheng-chi (朱政騏), a graduate student at NTU’s Graduate Institute of Sociology, lay down outside the legislature’s front gate and covered himself with a straw mat — a gesture Chu said symbolized how the poor cover the body of a deceased person.

He said he would continue his hunger strike to protest a proposal by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus to amend the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法).

Chu was referring to a proposal the KMT put forward last Tuesday to authorize the government to “draw up measures to inspect beef products from areas where the risk of mad cow disease has been under control,” instead of two other prosoals for a ban on “risky” beef products from the US.

Chu began a “lie in” protest in a coffin in front of the legislature on Saturday and vowed to stage a hunger strike until today, but police fined him and forcibly removed the coffin on Sunday night, saying Chu had violated the Road Traffic Management and Punishment Act (道路交通管理處罰條例).

Huang Tai-shan (黃泰山), a doctoral student from National Tsing Hua University, who also covered himself with a grass mat next to Chu, said five more doctoral students would join the protest should police forcibly remove Chu and Huang.

But of course, you really want to see the video itself. Enjoy.

After the opening vignette of him tasting a cow patty is the opening title of:

I eat cow dung, I protest!

My rough translation of his monologue is as follows:

I have in front of me some delicious edible beef.
After the Ma adminstration opens the door to American Beef, it will turn into beef that one could fear is poisonous.
I am just an ordinary youth who decided to protest against the government.
I have no power to change things, I am only able to make my own body suffer.
This is the most serious kind of protest!
I am now going to take Taiwanese cow dung and prepare it.
Consuming American beef will absolutely be scarier than eating the dung of a Taiwanese cow!

Followed by another title reading:

Eating American beef is scarier than eating Taiwanese cow dung!

They then drive out to Qingtiangang (擎天崗), a ranch area created during Japanese occupation, now part of Yangmingshan National Park to collect the fresh cow dung as cloying music plays in the background. You finally see him sit in front of the presidential building, prepare the burger, and eat some of it while reciting more nonsense about how he can “absolutely guarantee that it is still safer than American beef” and that “the Ma Yingjiu administration is opening up to American beef and not protecting the safety, well-being, and health of the people.” He then pukes in the bushes.

Enjoy the e-coli, chu. E-coli, for those who forget, is a bacteria found mainly in the digestive tracts and feces of animals, which generally poisons humans when it is transmitted by accidental contamination of meat by feces from the same animal when it is slaughtered.  According to the CDC, e-coli poisoning kills at least 60 Americans and sickens 2000 every year. For comparison, take a look at the CDC’s own stats on mad cow disease-showing only 3 confirmed cases in the US to date. And note that these are the numbers of cases in COWS, to date there have been exactly zero cases of humans contracting the disease from cows raised in the US.

The US healthcare reform bill that recently passed the House only did so after a controversial amendment was inserted banning any insurance plan which pays for abortion from accepting any federal subsidies, a clause that will probably eliminate abortion from most or all health plans if it goes into law. One reader at TPM had the following thought experiment:

What would happen if a few female members of the House put in (or merely proposed) an amendment to the health care bill which stated that men would be barred BY LAW from purchasing health insurance which covered Viagra, all hair-growth medications or procedures or transplants, etc.?

This thought experiment reminded me of the well known case of the birth control in Japan. Actually, I say well known, but when I checked to confirm the dates, the details were rather more complex than the simplistic version of the story that I had thought I knew, in which the pill was simply never legalized in Japan until a decade ago.

The first birth control pill was approved for that use by the United States FDA in 1960, but was rarely used in Japan until recently. The pill was not approved at all in Japan until 1972, but this was the high-dose formulation that was already being replaced in other countries with a low-dose version of the drug due to safety reasons. Because the safer, low-dose pill was never approved in Japan, oral contraceptives remained little used. Even after the original high-dose formulation was removed from the market in the US in 1988, the low-dose pill remained off the market in Japan.

This changed in 1999, after Viagra was fast-tracked for approval. Viagra first went on sale in the US in March 1998, and only a few months later was already being studied for approval in Japan, where it went on sale in March 1999 – only one year after the US. Feminists complained about a double standard that allowed a drug whose primary purpose is allowing recreational sex for old men to be approved almost immediately, while the safe low-dose birth control pill was still not approved after four decades. At the time, Yoshiaki Kumamoto, president of the Japan Foundation of Sexual Health Medicine, was quoted as saying that viagra was approved so quickly because old men in parliament “want to have that drug.”

The modern pill was finally approved in September of 1999, although women taking it are required to have pelvic exams four times a year, as opposed to once or twice in most countries, and there is still a widely held association with the dangerous side effects of the old formulation. According to a late 2006 study, only 1.8% of Japanese women were using the pill for their birth control needs. This compares with, according to UN figures for the year 2005, 7.5% of women worldwide, and 15.9% of women in developed countries.

Over the past few weeks, Taiwan has been in a furor over a recent deal to resume the importation of  beef from the USA, which has been banned for some time due to the alleged risk of mad cow disease. Readers may remember a series of protests that gripped South Korea not long ago when their government similarly decided to life the ban on US beef. In Korea the US beef issue became a catalyst for large anti-American protests by throngs of protesters whose fundamental concerns were really far more about the macro view of the South Korea-US relationship, such as the continuing extraterritoriality of US soldiers, than about an arcane and minor, if horror-film creepy, food safety issue.

Creautzfeldt-Jakob disease, the term used for the human version of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE), popularly known as mad cow disease, is a disease that lends itself to hysteria. An infection, not caused by the familiar bacterium or virii, or even a paramecium, it is produced by a truly exotic pathogen-a mutated prion, a class of protein itself unfamiliar to the layperson. The warped protein spreads throughout the nervous system, tricking healthy proteins into losing their shape, eventually causing such a complete breakdown of neural tissue that the brain is left full of small holes, like a sponge (hence the name, “spongiform”). To make it sound even more disquietingly like the contagion in one of the more science fiction themed zombie movies, neither thermal nor chemical – or even radioactive – means of sterilization have any effect on the mutant prion. Worst of all, the initial transmission vector of BSE or other variants of transmittable spongiform encephalopathy is cannibalism (as has been down since the discovery of kuru, a similar disease found among cannibals of Papau New Guinea), specifically the practice of rendering unsellable scraps of flesh, bone, and viscera left over from cow butchering into a protein sludge, which was then added to the feed of other cows on the feed lot. Even the most ardent carnivores among us reacts with visceral disgust to cannibalism, even in other species, compounded in this case by the fact that it is implemented so casually, for minor savings, so much unlike the rare cases when it is necessary for survival. Due to the disquieting nature of the disease, it is easy to see how A) people might overreact and B) how easy it might be to goad people into over-reaction for political purpose.

Taiwan’s English language Taipei Times, generally a strident partisan supporter of the Green (DPP/pro-independence) camp, carried a surprisingly non-partisan and fact-based editorial on Friday, in which they pointed out that there is in fact no appreciable risk of  catching the zombie plague from American beef.

The ferocity of politicians would be entirely justified if it were imports of UK beef we were talking about, as the UK was where the BSE epidemic was first identified and where the vast majority of cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), the human form of BSE, have been reported. The disease is a mainly British affair and the WHO says many of the cases reported in other countries were people likely exposed to the BSE agent while living in the UK during the height of the epidemic in the late 1980s.

Figures from the UK’s National Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance Unit show that at the end of last month there had been 167 deaths from vCJD in the UK, with the peak (28 cases) occurring in 2000.

In the US, to date there have been just three cases of BSE (one imported) and three deaths from vCJD, but two of these three deaths were likely cases of exposure in the UK, while the other was a recent immigrant.

Not to say that American been is entirely safe, but the danger is not mad cow disease. Just the other day a US meat company issued a recall for a huge batch of ground beef following two cases of fatal E-coli poisoning, a disturbingly common occurrence. Assuring food safety is one vital task of government in general, particularly when importing food from abroad, where standards may not be the same. But since the food safety issues here are largely fabricated (no-one has even mentioned the far more serious risk of E-coli), it is clearly about politics.

While the debate over US beef has similarly gone well beyond the realm of science into political theatre, the issue is not anti-American or Taiwan’s relationship with the United States. No, instead, as with almost every contentious issue on the island nation, it comes back to Taiwan’s hyper-partisanship, so extreme that it almost makes American political arguments look reasonable. (Well, maybe not America…)

The details are too complex and boring to get into, but the short version is that the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) government pushed through an unpopular accord over US beef in a attempt to curry favor for more important issues, while on the other side the opposition and pro-independence DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) is making ridiculous claims about the danger of US beef in a cynical attempt to peg the KMT as anti-democratic incompetents that are willing to trade public safety for a minor diplomatic advantage. However true such an assessment of the KMT may be overall, their opponents are being unfair in this particular case.

The beef issue has been a sticking point for US diplomats in several countries, due to the strength of the US agricultural interests that benefit from such exports, and in Taiwan specifically, eliminating the ban on US beef is widely considered to be one of several precondition for granting Taiwanese the visa-free entry status that has been rumored for a couple of years now. I also want to repeat that the idea of caving to US pressure is in and of itself not as much of an issue here as in many other countries, as both sides want stronger ties with the US in terms of trade, military, and diplomacy. However, the real issue, as always, is China. Since Ma took office the KMT led government has been promoting a series of pacts with the Communist governed People’s Republic across the strait, and the Taiwanese opposition has been far from happy, claiming (with some merit) that such pacts tend to favor China more than Taiwan, and promote economic and cultural integration that will eventually lead to political integration along the lines of Hong Kong. It is in this context that the protests over US beef must be considered.

As yesterday’s Taipei Times editorial states:

The government’s atrocious handling of the expansion of US beef imports — opaque, peremptory and confused, regardless of the merits of the products — is becoming a real cause for concern in terms of the bigger picture: cross-strait detente, and particularly a proposed economic pact with China.

[...]

One legacy of the US beef controversy is that many more people have little or no confidence in the government’s ability to negotiate with China without jeopardizing Taiwan’s interests.

[...]

Once again, this cavalier attitude toward ordinary people only raises suspicion as to how open and trustworthy any agreements between this China-friendly government and Beijing will be.

Even though the paper’s editorial board has correctly dismissed the health claims of the beef accord opponents, they are still greatly concerned about the WAY in which the accord was reached. If the pro-China KMT government is willing to negotiate behind closed doors and against public opinion with the US, why not with China? The government’s quid-pro-quo trade of US beef for progress on several outstanding issues (visa free status, progress on a larger trade accord, increased likelihood of more and better weapons systems) is therefore seen less as a capitulation to the US than an example of the KMT’s general attitude of capitulation towards China. And of course, food safety of imports from China is a far more serious problem. I’m sure everyone remembers the horrible milk-poisoning incident from last year. Well, some of those products made it into Taiwan, and although nobody was sickened, the incident spurred anti-KMT and anti-China protests. The controversy over American beef is actually more similar to those protests than to the anti-US beef protests in Korea.

My current lower house representative in Tokyo’s 13th district is Ichiro Kamoshita, an LDP man who is now seeking his sixth term in office in the August 30 general election. He’s also a licensed psychiatrist who’s written more than 90 self-help books.

Early polls show him facing an uphill battle against DPJ challenger as anger at LDP rule rises, but that doesn’t mean he’ll go down without a fight.

To help promote some of his policy ideas as he seeks re-election, Kamoshita has borrowed a fun idea from the Scientologist playbook: stress tests! Those who visit his website or receive one of his pamphlets can take a test entitled “Working 2.0” (働き方 2.0).

The test asks, “Is your mind stressed out?” (心のストレス、たまってませんか？）. To answer, the reader must go through a list of symptoms and check all that apply. Here is the full list:

• I feel like meetings and discussions are actually meaningless


• I keep working hard but I remain poor as ever


• I have at some point felt like throwing it all away


• I sometimes feel like I want a life where I can spend all day looking at the ocean


• I sometimes feel like I want to liquidate the past and start over from scratch


• I can more or less predict what my life will be like in 20 years


• I have been doing the same exact job ever since joining my company


• I have recently stopped chatting with family and coworkers


• I have at times felt suddenly lonely in closed-in spaces such as the subway or elevators


• I have called someone just to hear their voice, only to hang up after the second or third ring


• It has become painful to go back and forth between home and work


• It makes me jealous to see the empty trains heading the opposite way during rush hour.

Results

Here is my paraphrase translation of the results

If you checked 0-3 items: You’re the type who is good at dealing with stress. As someone with the capacity to process pent-up emotions, you realize it’s not worth it to get mad at your idiot boss. You know you can either take action or ignore it.

4-7: You need a mental detox. Just as removing toxins makes your skin look healthier, removing stress will make each day brighter and help you become better at many things. Why don’t you try and talk with friends or those around you about the things that worry you? Talking to someone will help you sort out the things that have been going back and forth in your head when you were thinking about them all by yourself.

8-10: Try and improve your lifestyle. Stress is the worst when you cannot escape it. You might need to switch jobs, take a vacation, or do something to get out of the group of people you are having problems with and break with the status quo. You might benefit from vegging out in the bathroom for 30 minutes or skipping a day of work sometime.

How did you do on the test? You can take it in Japanese here. I think I got around 4, but then the test seems designed to put everyone in that range. Who hasn’t thought about living at the beach?

Kamoshita’s plans for you

After the results, the next page is a list of labor-related policy proposals (note that at this point the reader still doesn’t know this is a political pamphlet, let alone from LDP man Kamoshita). They are:

Telecommuting – With almost 70% of workers in the services sector, it is possible for more and more people to work using technology instead of commuting to an office.

Working closer to home - Under this proposal, people would have two homes – a small room in the city close enough to their office to let them get their by bicycle, and a larger weekend house in the country where they’d rest on holidays and retire in old age. This would eliminate the issue of packed commuter trains.

More flexible working hours - By allowing flextime and diverse employment schemes such as temp work, people would be able to choose their working style while being eligible for the same social programs.

Kamoshita understands

In the final two pages Kamoshita reveals himself, tells of his own experience, and pledges to fight for the hard-working salarypersons of Japan.

You see, until age 44 Kamoshita also had to ride crowded trains to work. He even occasionally had to get off midway due to the stress (thankfully he got elected in 1993 and has probably never ridden a commuter train since).

***

According to the Yomiuri, Kamoshita wrote this pamphlet himself and is immensely proud of it, noting that this original pamphlet might be the first of its kind in Japan.

For a politician, maybe. But unfortunately the Japanese Scientologists have beat him to it!

In my last post about bicycle parking, I noted that the enforcers didn’t seem to be making much of an impact on illegal bike parking, except maybe at the margins (I’d be tempted to park there more often if I didn’t have a reliable space at my apt. building).

Another rule in Adachi-ku that’s only effective at the margins is the ban on smoking on the streets. In a reverse of the common American rule, in Japan smokers are often allowed to smoke in designated areas of public buildings but banned from smoking on the street. This makes for some smoky izakaya, but to me it makes sense because Japan’s narrow streets and urban lifestyle mean you are affected more by street smokers than you would be in a big American city.

Unfortunately, the bans tend to be ignored by whoever is insensitive enough to light up. They obviously know it’s against the rules but wear a “screw you” scowl on their faces and no one does anything.

One effort to combat these scowlers has been to enhance enforcement in high-traffic areas by dispatching workers who enforce the rules by collecting small fines on the spot. Adachi-ku has imposed such a ban since October 2006 starting with a 1,000 yen fine in the Kitasenju Station area. Ever since I have been in the area I have seen elderly people (volunteers I presume) asking some very surprised and incredulous smokers to pay 1,000 yen on the spot.

Similar exchanges are expected to come to my neighborhood this October as the fine is set to be expanded to include the Ayase Station area:

From Adachi-ku bicycle parking enforcers

The details of anti-smoking ordinances vary from place to place, but most appear to follow similar guidelines – ban smoking on the street everywhere (except some small smoking areas) but only enforce in areas of major foot traffic such as train stations. Many places such as Tokyo’s Chiyoda-ku post their enforcement stats online. Since beginning its policy in November 2002, Chiyoda-ku has fined a total of 42,230 people. Though I could not find figures on whether these people are actually paying the fines, if everyone has paid they have collected a total of 84.5 million yen, which adds up to something like 11.3 million yen a year.We also don’t know how many people the enforcers tried to stop but couldn’t.

For its part, Adachi-ku claims to have issued 3,498 fines in the Kitasenju area. As noted above, the preferred collection method is to demand payment on the spot. Enforcers are required to show proper ID upon request, and you are allowed to appeal if you don’t think you deserve the fine. However, there appears to be nothing the enforcers can do if you simply ignore them or refuse to take possession of the ticket.

In the initial period of enforcement, Ayase can probably expect a similar reaction that was documented when Kobe expanded its enforcement in 2007 – refusals by people who claim ignorance of the rule, people tossing out cigarettes just before entering the restricted area, and lots of people simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of the enforcers. Seeing the jerks who light up even when they know the smoke bothers everyone is one of my pet peeves, so here’s hoping our friends the elderly enforcers can get the job done.

I’ve mentioned the US’s HIV travel/immigration ban before, and Andrew Sullivan reminds me that there are still two weeks left to sign the public comment petition, in advance of what will hopefully be the final stage of the repeal of this severely out-dated regulation. Surprisingly, I don’t see any wording that the petition is limited to US citizens as I would expect, so feel free to jump in and add your comments. I had to submit to an HIV text when applying for my Taiwan visa back in 2005 (I think they’ve eliminated it since then) and found it pretty invasive (obviously I was negative since I got the visa) and look forward to this restriction being lifted on would-be US residents.

Just got this warning from the US embassy:

July 10, 2009

Warden Message – Roppongi Security Notice:  Drink Spiking

The U.S. Embassy continues to recommend that American citizens avoid frequenting bars and clubs in the Roppongi area of Tokyo due to drink-spiking incidents.

The U.S. Embassy continues to receive reliable reports of U.S. citizens being drugged in Roppongi-area bars.  Most reports indicate that the victim unknowingly drinks a beverage that has been secretly mixed with a drug that renders the victim unconscious or stuporous for several hours, during which time large charges are fraudulently billed to the victim, sums of money are charged to the victim’s credit card, or the card is stolen.  Victims sometimes regain consciousness in the bar or club, while at other times the victim awakens on the street.  Assaults on Americans have also been reported in connection with drink-spiking.

Sign up for updates here.

According to the Ministry of Justice website, starting April 1, 2010, anyone extending their Japanese visa or changing their residency status will be required to show a valid health insurance card/booklet. The relevant portions are below.

平成２２（２０１０）年４月１日以降申請時に窓口において保険証の提示を求めることとしています。

８. 社会保険に加入していること
社会保険への加入義務がある場合には，当該義務を履行していることが必要です。
なお，平成２２（２０１０）年４月１日以降は，申請の際に窓口で健康保険証の提示を求めることとなります。

While technically the rules have already required registration in the national health system (technically it is a duty of almost all residents, citizens included) there has not previously been any penalty for non-registration, although I hear a history of insurance non-registration it may cause problems when applying for permanent residency or citizenship. Note that although in principle residents are supposed to be registered in both the national health insurance and the pension scheme, these regulations refer only to the health system, and it does not seem that non-registration in the pension scheme will have any effect on visa renewals.

I have met an awful lot of foreign residents of Japan over the years who have never bothered to register for either public social insurance program and have never had any trouble over it, but this will not be the case in the future. Any Japan resident foreigners not registered in the national health insurance who are thinking of extending their stay past their current visa term had better look into registration ASAP.