The ongoing 2channel litigation just claimed a collateral victim: Debito’s website. Those who read his blog/newsletter will know that he also recently sued 2channel for libel, although he has yet to try collecting on his judgment.

Unfortunately for him, some otaku read the news stories the wrong way and though that it was Debito who was seeking to shut down 2channel. (It’s actually another Japanese guy who’s making the threats to seize the server and the domain name.)

Here’s what happened next, according to an e-mail Debito sent this morning:

From Monday morning Jan 15, the hate mail began trickling in. Then the death threats. Finally, according to my website domain admin today, debito.org has been zapped—i.e. people with large bandwiths have aimed internet guns and fired millions of page accesses onto my the debito.org server, overloading it and closing it down. Which means I am stuck without a site, or a blog, or email, until they get bored.

...The most ironic thing is that most of the hate mail and death threats are in English. Native English, for the most part. Claiming responsibility for all this is some place called “4chan” which is apparently the overseas version of 2-Channel, with the same attitude towards information, anonymity, and personal responsibility.

Here’s the thread that seems to have started it. (Be warned, though, that 4chan is pretty much the realization of the “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.”)

At any rate, Debito’s site appears to be back up and running now.

Of all the asinine things that come out of Washington, this latest tirade by Charles “Cully” Stimson, the Defense Department’s point man on the Guantanamo detainees, is ridiculous. In an interview on Thursday, he went through a laundry list of large New York law firms which are representing the detainees… and then suggested that this was inherently wrong, and merited reprisals from big-money clients.

From the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog:

Said Stimson: “I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Trés daft. The right to counsel aside, and every American lawyer’s [aspirational] obligation to do some pro bono work aside, Stimson had just pointed out that almost every big firm is involved on the defense side in the detainee cases. So where are these corporate CEOs supposed to send their legal work? India?

As if this wasn’t enough, he then went on to suggest that foul play was afoot:

“Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving monies from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Despite being a GMU law graduate and Navy JAG, Stimson must have missed the defamation section of his Torts class. I hope that someone actually drops a major law firm on these grounds, so the firm can sue the living daylights out of Stimson.

Anyway, there are some good reactions coming out already: Senator Leahy came out against Stimson and the Defense Department stated that Stimson’s comments were not representative of the Department.

Hot off of Kikko’s Blog　(via Livedoor News but not a direct translation, just a summary of the report with my own commentary):

Rumors are being reported that Prime Minister Abe, who within weeks after taking office had already started mentioning goals for a second term, might be forced to step down in May, after an assumed poor showing in April local elections. A Livedoor News article reports that “voices within the LDP” are calling for his resignation before the Upper House electios in July. He and his team have become a lightning rod for scandals, some of which we’ve detailed (faked town meetings, faltering on tax reforms, scandals among his policy team etc).

The new prime minister could take office after the end of the regular Diet session, allowing Abe to save face. This would follow the same pattern as even less popular PM Yoshiro Mori in 2001.

The most likely successor to Abe is Foreign Minister Taro Aso, an LDP more senior and even more right-wing than Abe, who earned more rank and file LDP member support than expected in his run against Abe in September. He has hardly stopped campaigning since, coming out with major foreign policy objectives and announcing the formation of his own intraparty faction just last week. The likely rival to Aso would be Yasuo Fukuda, whose candidacy in the last election sputtered for its low prospects of victory and health concerns. A source quoted in the article suggested that Koizumi could even make a comeback. Oh, I can only pray that happens…

You may have noticed that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe isn’t all that popular these days despite only having been in office for 2 months. The newspapers are reporting a 20% dip in support, and he has been mired in scandals, the most recent of which surrounds Tax Commission Chairman Masaaki Honma, who was forced to step down for living in subsidized housing with his mistress. This is the first change to Abe’s appointed team since taking office and a major development that could lead to further loss in confidence.

Compared to Koizumi’s first 2 months in office back in 2001, when the lion-maned PR darling was a veritable rockstar with his own hit photobook, Abe isn’t getting a break. And this despite the nuclear missile test in NK, which would presumably inspire a nation to rally around its leader.

While the substance of Abe’s policy agenda got its share of attention, the media has seemed to go out of its way to focus on Abe’s missteps, in particular the town meeting scandal (Abe knew!), the readmittance of the postal rebels (the LDP is cynical!), and his supposed lack of resolve in pursuing economic reform and budget discipline (he’s giving power back to the evil bureaucrats!).

Why? One reason is the Ozawa-led DPJ. They have so far done a good job of relentlessly pushing the first two issues in the spotlight, in particular the town meeting scandal, which was embarrassing since the LDP government was caught red-handed. There’s an upper house election in 7 months, and it comes at a time when LDP is vulnerable (the LDP member who won seats in 2001 on the Koizumi popularity wave must now stand for reelection) that also happens to be a traditionally unlucky year for the LDP. While some reports claim the DPJ is being needlessly uncooperative, the numbers show that these scandals are taking their toll on Abe’s popularity rating, and that makes them effective. Without public support Abe loses quite a bit of leverage if he’s to lead policymaking and stay in power for his full term.

But another, more likely, explanation is that Abe is having a tough time dealing with the media. For one thing, he isn’t playing ball with the press gaggle.

I noted back in October that Abe decided to cut in half his daily press availabilities from 2 to 1. The reports offered no real explanation for the change, but it was significant enough to get reported in the first place. Instead, he is relying on his PR double team of Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki and Special Advisor Hiroshige Seko to deal with the press while he does the awesome prime minister stuff like eat school lunches.

But it hasn’t taken very long for the media to complain that they aren’t getting enough face time. Abe got in trouble just yesterday when he talked way too long during his press conference announcing achievements upon the end of the recent extraordinary Diet session. He used up 19 minutes of a 20 minute press conference to blab on listlessly about the legislative achievements of passing patriotism-instilling education reform and the promotion of defense agency to ministry status.

The media was livid and ran stories announcing that only 2 questions could be asked, and later reports announcing the forthcoming apologies from both Shiozaki and Abe himself. Abe pledged that it someone made a “clerical error” by giving him a long speech at a press conference. How convenient just a day before you have to fire someone!

Now, I don’t want to go and accuse the major media of manufacturing any of his scandals, or blowing things out of proportion (though they may be doing the latter). It’s just that they haven’t been very sympathetic, either. The Honma scandal came out of a muckraking piece by a less-prestigious weekly. Many reports by the weeklies (such as Abe’s ties to shady cults) are ignored by the larger newspapers, but this time they picked up the story, making the problem much larger than it normally would have been.

It’s strange to see this change in the relationship, since as far as I know, Abe has so far had a rather amiable relationship with the press, who helped raise his image as the hero working to rescue kidnapping victims from North Korea. Now it’s like they’re setting him up for a fall just because it would be a good story.

But rather than being angry, the media could simply be getting bored with a prime minister whose hair is far too normal. One anonymous insider quoted in a Reuters story was sympathetic with Abe’s situation, noting that Abe is in part simply dealing with the Koizumi legacy of staged appearances and neverending soundbites: “Abe is doing what he can, but to the public who’s used to theater-style politics it just looks normal.” Replace the word “public” with “media” and you’ll get the idea.

The December 7 issue of Shukan Shincho ran a story in its “Heaven’s still a long way off” section about bothersome right-wing sound trucks that plagued the city of Kobe in the months of October and November. Here is a quick translation of the article:

The behind-the-scenes story of the 50 right-wing sound trucks that gathered in Kobe

A number of police officers watch the intersection intently. There is also an anti-riot squad carrying duralumin shields. Security trucks are stationed at hotels, and several patrol cars can be seen spinning their red lights at the city hall. This is what Kobe looked like on November 26 as a state of heightened security continued throughout the city. Just what was going on that day?

It all began in late October. The right-wing group Japan Emperor People’s Party submitted an application to use a public parking lot located on the city’s Rokko Island. The city administration granted the group permission saying there was “no reason to refuse them.” It was a contract to use a space that can hold 150 passenger cars for one month.

“Since then, several right-wing group sound trucks started gathering in Kobe. The prefectural police immediately deployed a massive amount of anti-riot police. They installed a checkpoint at the road in front of the parking lot and the two sides started staring each other down. There were some minor fisticuffs when the police searched the person of one of the group members,” says a local journalist.

Then on November 5, 50 sound trucks began a large-scale demonstration in town. A taxi driver who witnessed the event describes the scene:

“I saw them at the intersection on the west side of Kobe station, and it was a doozy. All of a sudden, black and white sound trucks were there as far as the eye could see. It’s quite a sight to see so many at once. They were playing military marches or something, but the volume was low. It was actually kind of creepy, too quiet.”

The real reason

Just what did they gather in Kobe in droves to protest? Masashi Takajima, action committee chairman of the JEPP, which continues its activities in Kobe, had this to say:

“Our recent sound truck activities were intended to protest the North Korea issue. That country is trying to return to the six-party talks while in possession of nuclear weapons. These activities are in response to that. The reasons we chose Kobe are several including the fact that they continue giving tax breaks to facilities owned by [pro-Pyongyang Korean-Japanese group] Songryon.”

However, an official from the Kobe Prefectural Police contends:

“We see their true objectives to lie somewhere else. At the end of September, just before Kobe held the National Athletic Meet [Kokutai], the large hotels in Kobe city established a ‘Liaison Committe to Exclude Organized Crime Groups.’ They made it clear that they would refuse to allow members to stay at or use their facilities. [These recent events] are in protest of that.”

Also, a senior leader of a right-wing group who participated in the sound truck activities murmurs:

“It’s true that the refusal to let gang members stay at hotels was the inspiration for the recent sound truck activity. More than the hotel issue, we intend to put pressure on the prefectural police who called for the exclusion of organized crime members. However, there’s a gag order in place and no one is allowed to tell the ‘real reason.’”

Takajima rebuts these claims, explaining, “That’s totally wrong. We never went to protest at hotels, nor did we talk about that in the sound trucks. A gag order? There’s nothing like that at all.”

The right-wing group quickly vacated the sound trucks from the premises of the parking lot on November 24, the day the contract expired. That is because the city refused to extend the contract. However, Takajima notes, “All we have to do is secure another location to base our activities from. We intend to continue our activities, including during [Christmas light show] Luminarie, when people gather in Kobe.” The battle between the police and right-wing groups looks likely to drag on.

A full report by an independent committee has been released detailing the scandal has embroiled the Abe administration surrounding faked “town meetings.” Since their beginning under the Koizumi administration, the meetings, which were intended to serve as a forum to include citizens’ opinions in the policymaking process for such initiatives as postal privatization and education reform, most of the meetings have been exposed as frauds, with government officials planting questions and paying participants to provide opinions supporting the government’s position. Moreover, massive cost-padding has been discovered in the administration of the meetings, which cost an average 11 million yen to hold and occasionally featured a staff member being paid to operate the elevator.

Conspicuously missing from English-language reporting on this scandal, including at least one report from a Western outlet, is the fact that the contract for administration of the first meetings was awarded to massive Japanese ad agency Dentsu with no competitive bidding. I’m just a little surprised that the angle hasn’t been more fully explored, since no-bid contracts always ripe for criticism and the Western media have had a great time slicing and dicing the Halliburton corporation for its ineptitude in Iraq.

Dentsu involvement is no secret, but so far even the Japanese-language newspapers haven’t done much to pick up that part of the story. The Asahi’s wording is especially strange:

Another revelation in the investigative committee report is that the government likely overspent on some meetings. The report said the cost of holding a town meeting in the first half of fiscal 2001 was 21.85 million yen, not including advertising, whereas in fiscal 2002 and later years the average cost per meeting was between 7.19 million yen and 12.85 million yen.

The reason is likely that in the first half of fiscal 2001, government officials selected companies to operate the town meetings. In subsequent years, the companies were chosen by competitive bidding.

Hokkaido Shimbun, reporting on the investigation results, noted that Dentsu ran the first 16 meetings since the program began in 2001, costing the Japanese government 395 million yen, or about 24 million per meeting. After the meetings were opened to competitive bidding, other companies including Dentsu managed the meetings, and the costs came down to more than half that.

An excerpt from the 2005 book Dentsu’s True Colors: The Media Industry’s Greatest Taboo, indicates that Dentsu was an advisor to the Koizumi administration from the very beginning. Along with other ideas that came to define the Koizumi administration such as US-style “one-phrase” (sound byte) politics, the town meetings were Dentsu’s idea to begin with, and the government left management of them up to the company’s discretion, leading to criticism from then-Nagano governor Yasuo Tanaka:

That was how Dentsu became involved in policymaking not just on the national level but on the local level as well, and tied it into their business.
It looks as though “town meetings” were just such an instance of Dentsu involvement. The office in charge was placed in the Cabinet Secretariat, but Dentsu was contracted to manage the town meetings with a private (no-bid) contract. One reporter commented that he was surprised one time when he went to cover a town meeting in Okinawa:
“When I went inside the hall, staff wearing Dentsu badges were all over the place. And regarding the content of the meeting, I couldn’t understand the meaning of spending money on such a thing, and the statements of the people in attendance were more like petitions than a conversation.”
The fact is, the average cost to hold these meetings was a staggering 60 times greater than what it cost to hold Nagano Governor Yasuo Tanaka’s powwow meetings, which were started earlier on.

It’s been explained by Japan policy academic Robert Angel that the town meeting scandal resulted from a lack of careful attention to the administration of the meetings, and deference to local leadership, “once the novelty wore off,” led to the planting of questions. But the planting of questions has so far been documented to have begun as early as October 2001, while Dentsu was in charge. According to Asahi, “In fiscal 2001, 185 people asked planted questions at 50 town meetings, although there is no information available to determine if the government paid them to do so.” And as e-mail records (PDF courtesy of DPJ lower house member Daisuke Matsumoto) of preparations for the meeting in Hachinohe, Aomori prefecture show, the planting of questions and guidance came from the town meeting office in the cabinet, not local leadership.

Dentsu has a reputation for being a shadowy manipulator of public opinion, and has been accused of a host of dubious accomplishments from swaying sheep-like voters with flashy pro-postal privatization campaign tactics in the September 11, 2005 general election resulting in a huge LDP victory, to staging the entire “Train Man” phenomenon on popular message board site 2-channel to reap massive profits from pre-planned soap opera and movie adaptations. However, according to an anonymous retired Dentsu official quoted in True Colors, Dentsu relishes this reputation and cultivates it: “Dentsu’s public image, as if they have been involved in national conspiracies, has had the effect of making the company look more powerful than it actually is. Dentsu is aware of this and purposefully neither confirms nor denies this role.”

As much as I’d like to see Dentsu dragged through the mud for their role in this scandal, the fact remains that the government led this initiative to deceive the public and drown out actual public opinion. Given the history of the Japanese government, this comes as little surprise, but these days scandals spread like wildfire over the Internet, people are aware and quick to anger at such flagrant ethical violations, hopefully forcing the political leadership, who increasingly relies on public support to stay in office, will start paying attention to what the public really thinks rather than staging horse and pony shows.

The fine tradition of poisoning continues in Russia, as Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB spy, is reportedly suffering from thallium poisoning.

What is thallium?

“It is tasteless, colourless, odourless. It takes about a gram – you know, a large pinch of salt like in your food – to kill you”, he said.

Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who also lives in Britain, said thallium was a “special” poison, that “you couldn’t just get over the counter”.

“You could say it is only available to secret services,” he said.

While thallium is not as easy to get as rat poison, it is most emphatically not only avaliable to secret services. In fact, even a child can get it if they try hard enough. Long time readers of this blog will remember the case of the teenage girl who poisoned her own mother with thallium. As the girl wrote in her creepy, creepy blog:

“It’s a bright, sunny day today, and I administered a delivery of acetic thallium,” the girl wrote in August. “The man in the pharmacy didn’t realise he had sold me such a powerful drug.”

While we are on the subject of Soka Gakkai, let us not forget that while they may be the largest creepy somewhat religious organization in Japan, they are far from the creepiest. That honor, naturally, goes to our old friends Aum Shinrikyo. Now, Soka Gakkai and Aum Shinrikyo may be rivals in terms of how much they creep us out, but did you ever know that they actually had some more direct rivalry? More specifically, that Shoko Asahara, the Guru of Aum, actually attempted to assassinate Daisaku Ikeda.

Here are a few relevant passages from Aum & I, but former Aum conspirator Ikuo Hayashi MD.

At the same time, Asahara was in that story blatantly attacking Daisaku Ikeda, the honorary chairman of Soka Gakkai, Morihiro Hosokawa, and Ichiro Ozawa as immediate enemies, saying that they were being controlled by the shadow organization that was controlling America and selling out Japan.

For more of Asahara’s enemies list, see this earlier post.

Later in the book is a section entitled The Daisaku Ikeda Poa Incident. I will explain Poa in detail in another post, but basically it is is a Tibetan term for reincarnation that Asahara used to mean ritual assassination.

Although Dr. Hayashi would eventually be one of the perpetrators of the Sarin attack in the subway, he only learned about the assassination attempt on Ikeda after the fact. As he explains it:

On December 18th, one of the final remaining days of 1993, a situation occurred where Nakamura came into AHI carrying Tomomitsu Niimi, who was experiencing difficulty breathing.

Later, the event known as the Daisaku Ikeda Poa Incident became the trigger for me to actually learn the religious group’s shadowy operations, which I had not been aware of until that time. This incident would also become the trigger for my getting involved in the “secret work” that would lead to the execution of the sarin incident on the subway.
[omitted]

“What in the world is the cause of this? I can’t properly treat him if I don’t know what the cause is!” I said.

[omitted]

“Actually, it’s sarin. Would you mind coming with me for a minute?” Nakagawa requested.

[omitted]

Nakagawa opened the door and stuck his head inside the car. After saying something [to the person inside] he immediately turned toward me and motioned for me to get in the backseat. It was the first time I had ever ridden in Asahara’s car and I was nervous as I sat down in the rear. As soon as the door was closed, Asahara, who was sitting in the front left passenger’s seat, said without even turning around, “We tried to perform Poa on Daisaku Ikeda with sarin but failed.”

There are a few pages here describing the symptoms and treatment for sarin poisoning and so on. Interesting stuff, but let’s skip ahead to Ikeda.

Limiting the assumptions to my personal feelings towards Daisaku Ikeda and the judgment expressed by the guru to whom I devoted myself, Daisaku Ikeda was an object that we must fight. Since this was so, and Asahara could fully see this karma, the act of having Poa performed upon oneself was something that would be a “happy” outcome for the person.

The main thing was about karma: that since Ikeda was a mastermind secretly trying to kill Asahara, by preventing the disaster of his carrying out this evil act of assassination, which would lead him to the Avici Hell [Buddhism’s Limbo], Aum was just trying to save him.

So there you have it. Asahara was convinced that Ikeda was plotting to kill him, and so sent his agents to kill Ikeda through Sarin poisoning. This was not just as an act of self-defense, but by killing Ikeda they would prevent him from committing awful crimes and he would therefore avoid punishment in the next life. Everybody wins! Murder as altruism- don’t you love religion?.