I was just reading the 1938 edition of “Social Education in Taiwan,” published by the Japanese colonial government, when I came across this rather neat line in the middle of a section (page 76) on how the civilian population was being taught to aid the war effort (Second Sino-Japanese War) on the home front.

個人所有の金の価値が装飾用又は個人の虚栄心を満足させるが如き単に個人的価値を有するに過ぎないが一度国家の所有に移転すれば、国際収支決済の機能を発揮し、延いては国運発展上寄与する所極めて大なること。

This translates to:

The value of gold held by an individual merely possesses the value a piece of jewelry, or of causing vanity, but should that ownership be transfered to the state, then it will not serve a function in resolving the international balance of payments, but also serve as a grand contribution to the development of the fate of the nation.

It then goes on to recommend that citizens (or perhaps “subjects” is a better word)

think of their own personal finances and sell their gold to the government, as it will not only be highly profitable to sell at the current high market price, but that by exchanging the gold official currency, it can be invested in other ways such as bank deposits, where it will bring about a natural increase in wealth [i.e. through interest], which will be far more profitable than letting it going to waste  sitting at home. [Error in my original translation corrected thanks to Aki’s comment below.]

I don’t feel 100% confident about my translation of the latter part, so if anyone has a better translation for 「之を貨幣に換へ、貯金其の他の方法にて運用せば自然財産の増加を来すを以て徒に死蔵し置くに比し極めて有利になること」 than please let me know. Incidentally, this isn’t a section I plan to use in what I’m working on now, just that I thought it would be of interest to all of you.

Now, I wonder how the value of the original gold vs. the paper money held up over the course of the next several years.

Obama won the Nobel Peace Price completely out of the blue and really without much in the way of results. I think the whole world must be scratching its collective head now.

So to try and help make sense of things, I just wanted to echo the sentiment in this post from Talking Points Memo:

My new circumstances give me access to most of the daily papers, in real live dead tree format. So today I looked at the Nikkei and came away with some thoughts:

Nikkei has an editorial forcefully demanding that the DPJ scrap any plans it might have to eliminate press conferences for every ministry’s vice-minister (事務次官). The piece is a reaction to a recent comment from incoming foreign minister Katsuya Okada that they wouldn’t need to hold their own press  conferences because the traditional vice-minister inter-ministry meetings will be discontinued. Under LDP rule, the meetings had become a sort of shadow cabinet meeting and a manifestation of bureaucrat rule.

Calling the suggestion “rash,” the editorial writers lecture Okada that the people in power always try and reduce the number of press conferences as a way to escape scrutiny, and that it’s not up to those in power to decide what the public’s right to know is. One example of the benefits of these press conferences is that the agricultural vice-minister recently had to step down for making inappropriate comments at his press conference about a tainted rice scandal.

I checked, and none of the other major newspapers felt the need to devote an editorial to this issue (the Yomiuri for its part allotted its second editorial to lionizing Ichiro for his new hitting record). But I wouldn’t be surprised if some follow the Nikkei’s lead.

The incoming DPJ administration is expected to open up the press clubs in government institutions, which previously have been almost exclusively limited to domestic, mainstream newspapers and TV stations. Hence, the mainstream news media are on the watch for any signs they could lose their biggest asset – privileged access to those in power. The newspapers are more exposed to damage on this front than TV stations as the news is their only business, at least in their principal medium. The Nikkei in particular just got done posting its first loss since it started publishing figures, for the first half of 2009.

In principle, I agree with the Nikkei’s point that the powerful should be held up to scrutiny. But the Nikkei is changing the subject. Okada didn’t necessarily say he wanted to reduce the number of press conferences. As far as I can tell, Okada’s is merely saying that if the vice-ministers aren’t going to be in a position to speak for their ministries, of course they shouldn’t have press conferences. Maybe a political appointee would be the more appropriate person to put in front of the podium.

In fact, the DPJ’s plans to open up press clubs to independent media will open up government, so I would not be worried if the government stops holding press conference for people who are supposedly irrelevant anyway. The DPJ shouldn’t listen to the Nikkei. Remember, the media will try to portray itself as a defender of the public good, when in fact it’s an institution that’s exploited government secrecy for decades to its financial benefit. I would be happier if the Nikkei spent its vast resources not on acting as stenographers for the government and occasionally getting someone to say stupid things in public (as they did to make the vice minister resign), but instead on actual investigations.

Just thought I’d pass this amazing video along.

Some of the interviews are unfair “gotcha” material, but it’s great to see people get confused when he asked them why they’re so opposed to health care reform and what exactly will happen when the “Obama revolution” goes down. These people really should stop and ask themselves what they’re getting so paranoid about.

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!

On Tuesday, parts of Japan’s political net-osphere will go dark as the official campaigning period begins for the August 30 general election to select members of the nation’s lower house of parliament. Considering that this election has the potential to take government control away from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party for the first time in 13 years, national and international attention on this race is high.

So what can I add to the conversation? My interest in Japanese politics and other current events is fairly intense, so I plan to follow this story with the same rigor I apply to my other favorite topics.

Mainly,  I plan to profile the candidates up for election in my district (Tokyo’s 13th) to give a worm’s-eye-view of the election from my perch in Adachi-ku, Tokyo. Some readers will recall my series of candidate profiles leading up to last month’s Tokyo prefectural assembly elections.

But first, some opening remarks:

What will this election decide?

On Sunday, August 30, Japanese voters will go to the polls to elect all 480 members of the House of Representatives, the more powerful house of the country’s bicameral legislative branch of government. After the election, the Diet (Japan’s word for its parliament) will be convened to choose a prime minister, who will then form a cabinet. The upper and lower house will each conduct a vote, but if the upper house vote differs from the lower house’s, the lower house’s choice will prevail. If one party has won an outright majority of seats in the lower house, it can elect a prime minister without the aid of any other party, but if not various parties will have to negotiate and form a coalition government.

The lower house is where most substantive legislative business is done. It controls the passage of the national budget, can override an upper house veto with a two-thirds vote, and most importantly decides the appointment of the prime minister. The DPJ currently controls the upper house, which is a less powerful but still significant part of the legislative process.

The party (or coalition of parties) that wins this election will ostensibly gain control over essentially the entire country—if the DPJ gains control it will preside over the executive branch, dominate both houses of the legislature, and possess the power to appoint Supreme Court and lower court justices.

In practice, however, the prime minister and cabinet’s power has been limited – to give a very broad outline, powerful ministries set the agenda on most important national issues, the legislature exists mainly to ratify that agenda and distract the public with loud but ineffectual drama and scandal (in exchange for funneling money back to their districts), and the judicial nominees are almost never decided by the elected officials themselves.

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan are on track to make significant gains in this election, though it will be a tall order to increase their current standings (110) to exceed the LDP’s total of 303. The DPJ are campaigning on many issues, but perhaps first and foremost on a revolutionary vision of administrative reform. They believe that the bureaucrats in the country maintain power based on, in Secretary General Acting President Naoto Kan’s words, a “mistaken interpretation of the Constitution” that bureaucracy has the inherent right to control government administration, while it’s the job of the cabinet and legislature concentrate on passing laws. The DPJ would like to wrest control away from the “iron triangle” of unelected bureaucrats, powerful business interests, and their cronies in the Diet and place power squarely in the politicians’ hands. But more on that later.

How are members selected?

Since the law was changed in 1993 following a major LDP electoral defeat, members of Japan’s lower house have been chosen using two parallel systems – 300 are selected through single-member districts nationwide similar to the US House of Representatives, while the remaining 180 seats are allotted through a proportional representation system (or PR for short).

Under Japan’s PR system, the parties running in the election field candidates in each of 11 regions. On election day, voters write down two votes for the lower house – one for their preferred individual in their district, and the other to choose a party they’d like to receive the PR seats in their region. In the interest of counting as many votes as possible, votes will still count if a voter writes in the name of an individual running in the region or the party leader’s name instead of the party name.

For example of how this works, in 2005 the Tokyo PR district had 17 available seats. To win a seat, a party would have had to earn at least 5.88% of the vote, or 389,682 votes. Only one party that ran (Shinto Nippon with 290,027 votes) failed to gain a seat in this district.

The fact that relatively fewer votes are needed to win a PR seat has convinced smaller parties to try their luck. Most recently, the Happiness Realization Party, a newly formed political wing of new religion Happy Science, has decided to field more than 300 candidates in all single-member and PR districts (though as of this writing it is unclear whether they will actually go through with it). The religion’s leader Ryuho Okawa has announced his intention to run in the Kinki PR district with the top position. To do so he will need 3.45% of the vote, which would have been around 375,000 votes in 2005. His party would have to seriously improve its performance after winning a dismal 0.682% (13,401 votes in 10 districts) of votes in the Tokyo prefectural elections. Okawa had originally planned to run in Tokyo, but Tokyo has a higher 5.88% hurdle to overcome.

How does voting work in practice?

After entering the polling station, voters will be handed a paper ballot and a pencil (yes, a pencil, not a pen). They will be directed to a table with a list of candidates and instructions on how to vote. There they will write in the name of their preferred candidate along with their PR vote. To make it easier for voters to remember, many candidates spell their names using phonetic hiragana instead of kanji, which can be harder to write and have many different readings.

Since this election will also include a people’s review of nine of Japan’s 15 Supreme Court justices, voters will be required to mark an X next to the names of justices they would like to see dismissed. Blank votes will be counted as in favor of keeping them on.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the issues and outlook for this specific election before getting into the more provincial task of profiling my local candidates.

“Do not forget the US imperialist wolves!”

“Let’s extensively raise goats in all families!”

Check these amazing samples of NK propaganda posters, with an interesting analysis:

Stylistically, North Korean art is far more than a mere copy of Soviet Russian socialist realism. As was the case with the revolution itself, North Korean socialist realist art had to accord with Korea’s specific historical conditions and cultural traditions. Kim Il Sung pronounced that “Korean Painting” [Chosonhwa], the indigenous post-revolutionary development of traditional ink painting, was the best representative of Korean styles and emotions. He made the essential features of Korean painting the model for all fine arts. Kim Jong Il in his Treatise on Art (Misullon, 1992) described the qualities of Korean Painting as clarity, compactness, and delicacy. These characteristics have become the standard applied to all art produced in North Korea. As such, they also form the basis and model for poster art. On the latter, Kim Jong Il had more to say in his treatise on art. As important tools in the mobilization of the masses, posters have to have an instantaneous impact on the viewers’ understanding and their desire to act upon this understanding. Their message has to be accessible, clear and direct; informative and explanatory, as well as exhortative. The link between contemplation and action is crucial. A poster artist is ultimately an agitator, who, familiar with the party line and endowed with a sharp analysis and judgment of reality produces a rousing depiction of policies and initiatives that stimulate the people into action. Only if the poster appeals to the ideological and aesthetic sentiments of the people will it succeed in truly rousing the people. Kim Jong Il refers to poster painters as standard bearers of their times, submerged in the overwhelming reality and in touch with the revolutionary zeal and creative power of the people, leading the way from a position among the people.

Posters are visual illustrations of the slogans that surround the people of North Korea constantly. North Korean society is in a permanent mobilization. Party and government declarations are stripped down to single-line catchphrases. Through their endless repetition in banners, newspaper headlines, and media reports, these compact slogans become self-explanatory, simultaneously interpreting and constructing reality.

-Koen de Ceuster

(thanks to @cominganarchy)

Amazing: 471,567 households applied for their FREE MONEY from the Japanese government, but failed to fill out their addresses correctly!

Friday, July 3, 2009
471,000 Applications For Cash Handouts Sent Back With Wrong Addresses

TOKYO (Kyodo)—A total of 471,567 applications for the government’s pump-priming cash handout program have been sent back to municipalities as they were incorrectly addressed as of last Friday, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said Friday.

The ministry said it will step up its publicity to call on households who have not received the cash benefits of up to 20,000 yen per person to file their applications as they are feared to fail to receive them.

Meanwhile, a survey showed 86.0 percent of households in 1,798 cities, towns and other municipalities across the country have received the cash handouts which have totaled 1,772.6 billion yen as of last Friday.

The municipalities began providing the cash benefits in March to cover about 54.8 million households under the government’s economic stimulus plan.

Of the applications sent back, 73,000 were sent to foreigners, who have often failed to provide moving notices to municipalities in urban and other areas.

The households will lose their right to receive the cash handouts unless they file applications in six months after the municipalities began to accept applications.

“The wrong addresses” apparently means that the addresses on the applications somehow did not match their residence registry (住民票). This could be anything from a kanji mistake to the head of the household neglecting to update his address with the local authorities.

Since Japanese nationals only had to fill out one form per household (foreigners had to fill them out individually since they’re not listed on residence registries for now), each mistaken application might be for multiple people. If we assume the “average household size” of 2.56 people, and roughly assume that all of them were only eligible for the basic 12,000 yen, that means we could be talking about 14.5 billion yen up for grabs.

I wonder what happens if the households “lose their right to receive the cash”? The towns better not get to keep it. It’s about 115 yen apiece for the other 125 million people in Japan, or more than enough to build another of the controversial proposed national anime museum.