A terrible crime was committed in Fukushima, Japan recently:

17-year-old boy turns self in with severed head / High schooler tells police he killed mother
The Yomiuri Shimbun

A 17-year-old high school student was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of killing his mother after turning himself in at a police station in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, carrying her severed head, police said.

According to the police, the boy, in his third year at a prefectural high school, came to Aizuwakamatsu Police Station at about 7 a.m. on Tuesday with the head in his school bag. He told the police he had killed his mother at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday.

The police went to the boy’s apartment in the city, where they found the headless body of the mother.

The boy was quoted by the police as saying: “I killed her by myself at home early Tuesday morning while she was asleep. I wanted to kill somebody, whoever it was.”

Later it was revealed that the boy also sawed off his mother’s arm. After the crime, he went into an Internet cafe, watched a Beastie Boys DVD, and apparently wrote the following note (apparently leaked by police):

I have committed a crime that should never be committed.
—What was your motive?

A reason? Just because.
—Other people won’t be satisfied with that!

Well if I had to say something, I guess it’s a form of self-expression.
—You had no other way to express yourself?

Maybe not.
—Don’t you feel any regret?

Not right now. I feel relieved. But I’m sure I’ll probably regret it later.
—What will you do after this?

I will go have myself charged with the crime.
—Isn’t that a foregone conclusion?

Oh, you might be right. But at the very least there is no crime I desire in reality [Note: this line was a little hard to figure out. The Japanese is reproduced below:]
　あーたしかにそうかもしれません。でも現実でだけはボクの望む罪はないと思いますが。
—Do you feel like continuing on?

Not really.
—If you keep going, what will you do next?

I don’t know since I’ve just been acting on my whims.
—Don’t you feel like killing yourself?

No, that would be scary. Plus I promised I wouldn’t kill myself.
—Who did you promise?

I don’t want to say.
—Why not?

Just because.
—Aren’t you being evasive by saying “just because”?

Perhaps. I’ve always been running away like that anyway.
—Any last words?

Thank you for putting up with my nonsense all this time.
(Thanks to the Daily Yomiuri and ZAKZAK)

Comment: This is a sad tragedy that seems to contain similarities to both Columbine (troubled teenager who couldn’t make it through his last year of high school), the Virginia Tech slayings (weapons bought beforehand, a pre-planned media strategy and a clear “self-expression” motive) combined with the all-too-common Japanese mother-son tension. The reports that I’ve seen so far seem to regard this crime as a total aberration by a troubled youth, which it is. But it looks like this sort of thing could be prevented. It’s been reported that it was known that he had been skipping school and a doctor had already diagnosed him as “mentally unstable.” As hard as it is to rein in rebellious teenagers, it’s sad that there wasn’t more done to try and help (or at least medicate) someone with clear mental problems before he became a danger.

That’s a whole course! Maybe for my wedding party I should volunteer 1/5 of my wedding meals to get sent to North Korea.

Other stats from this Shukan Toyo Keizai article:

Average cost of a wedding: more than 3 million yen (US$25,000) in 2006. The cost of weddings has been rising since 2003, when the Japanese economy started turning around. (Source: wedding planning site Zexy.net)

Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF) researched how much food is left uneated at wedding parties (披露宴 routinely make up 3/4 of the cost of an entire wedding) by surveying 40 wedding halls nationwide. The figure of 22.5% (19.2% when you exclude drinks) is light-years away from the amount of food left uneaten at home (1.1% according to a 2005 survey) or in restaurants (3.1% as of 2006). And it’s a high percentage even compared to food at regular banquet-style parties (宴会) that offer alcohol, 15.2% of which goes to waste.

Perhaps that has something to do with the sheer amount of food served at wedding parties, which is averages an enormous 2230g—almost four times the average 600g served at cafeterias and restaurants. That means people who simply can’t finish more than what they usually eat in an entire day are wasting an entire meal’s worth of food, or 500g.

Why so much food? The STK conjectures that since people want to give their guests the best possible service, it’s either become a tradition or people are trying to be ostentatious by offering more food than necessary. But as someone planning a wedding party myself, I think the most obvious explanation is that the event halls need to justify charging 10,000 yen per plate plus open bar charges.

Quiz time! What percentage of Tokyo is non-Japanese?

Answer: 2.93% – that’s the percentage of registered foreigners in Tokyo as of January 1, 2007 (an increase of 1.8% over last year), says Shukan Toyo Keizai. That means that 3 out of every 100 people you see in Tokyo are foreign (one of whom could be a white dude staring at the Daily Yomiuri [picture courtesy STK]). There are 371,000 registered foreigners among Tokyo’s overall population of 12.69 million. The information comes from a “population movement survey” conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Top nationalities:
Chinese – 126,000
Korean – 109,000
Filipino – 31,000

Most foreign districts:
Shinjuku-ku (where Tokyo’s Koreatown is located): 30,000
Adachi-ku: 21,000
Edogawa-ku (home to Indiatown in Nishikasai): 21,000

Tokyo’s foreign population has surged 2.5-fold over the past 20 years, going from a mere 150,000 in 1987 to the present 371,000 (18.5% of the estimated 2 million registered foreigners, or about 1.5% of the total population).

These numbers may just be the tip of the iceberg. The ‘registered’ foreigners are merely the people in the country legally for purposes other than tourism, some of whom are temporary visitors who have no intention of making a life here. But many do plan to (there were 349,804 permanent residents that are not zainichi Koreans/Chinese as of 2005). According to Immigration Bureau statistics, there were approximately 190,000 people illegally residing in Japan (presumably concentrated mainly around Tokyo) as of 2006. Though the number of illegal immigrants has decreased as controls have gotten stricter over the years, Japanese manufacturers have no intention of turning back from their use of cheap, often illegal, foreign labor to stay competitive as the numbers of Japanese workers decrease and fewer people are willing to take such jobs. On top of that, other industries, including the medical, restaurant, and agricultural industry are eager to expand their use of foreign labor.

While many of the legal immigrants were educated at least partly in Japan (and in the cases of Chinese and Koreans, their families may have been in the country for 3 generations or more) and lead normal, middle class lives, the conditions for illegal workers in Japan can be downright dreary. A recent government-produced documentary depicting the daily activities of immigration officials features a scene in which the “Immigration G-Men” break up a textile operation in a small Tokyo apartment that was making handbags for local consumption. The workers are Korean, speak poor Japanese, and look like they rarely leave their work stations. Even among legal residents of Japan, many are “trainees” at manufacturing companies whose “training” consists of full time work on an assembly line for low pay.

The regular publication of statistics like these, and the regular, adversarial reporting of developments in this issue, should remind the public as well as the authorities that real “internationalization” based on economic interests, rather than the abstract concept of peace, cooperation, and English study that is usually associated with that term, has already arrived in parts of Japan, making it necessary to adjust and respond. Recently publicized cases of some issues facing foreign laborers, such as abuse in the “trainee” system the difficulty that children of foreign residents face in getting an education, have resulted in increased attention by the authorties, and even some incremental reform. Justice Minister Nagase is heading efforts at the ministry to provide a legal framework to tap unskilled workers, a move that would give legal credibility to the current practice but at the same time would give the foreign workers rights and proper status. The Ministry of Education has begun requiring children of permanent residents to attend school.

These are necessary steps forward, but I feel like the current developments facing foreign residents in Japan have yet to receive the top spot on the agenda that they deserve. Back in 1990, Japan began a program to accept Brazilians of Japanese descent as temporary guest workers. I wasn’t around at the time, but it’s clear that the issue received very wide coverage that I think helped prepare people mentally for the small-scale but significant change in policy. Today, with the foreign population exploding (by Japanese standards), where are the public opinion polls, dramas featuring foreign laborers, rants by unqualified political commentators, etc etc?

Corporate-led Social Revolution

Generally, Japan’s immigration policies are much more liberal than the US - in the rare case that you speak Japanese fluently and have connections within the country. For the rest of the world, Japan’s immigration policies focus on attracting skilled foreign workers in areas such as computer programming where Japanese skills aren’t enough to meet demand. Some industries, meanwhile, are calling for an addition to that policy of allowing more low-skilled workers in to either fill shortages or drive wages down. The most recent victories for advocates of such policies were the “free trade agreements” signed with the Philippines and Thailand, which will allow foreign nurses and chefs, respectively, to work in Japan. However, the Japanese side insisted on language requirements that guarantee virtually no significant numbers will be let in.

This is a radical change for Japan, which has traditionally coddled its low-skilled workers with decent wages and living standards and kept out large numbers of non-Japanese foreigners. Like the US, Japan has a valuable currency and lots of industry, making it an attractive destination for low-skilled workers. Bringing in lots of foreign unskilled labor would make Japan’s immigration structure more like the US, which imports millions of unskilled laborers with poorly enforced immigration laws while making highly skilled jobs very difficult through unofficial barriers such as difficult licensing requirements and tight visa quotas. From the perspective of an average citizen who wants to see the best people in the right jobs, I would advocate opening up the books for all levels of jobs. The US situation is a nightmare for both the illegal immigrants from Mexico who have no prospects back home but must leave their families and live as an outlaw to support their families in the US, and the Americans who have seen low-skilled jobs with decent pay evaporate as a result of the immigration and outsourced manufacturing.

Japan, meanwhile, has relied almost exclusively on what the Japanese government coyly calls “international division of labor” and less on importing labor. Large Japanese corporations are major investors around the world, particularly in China and SE Asia, and employ hundreds of thousands if not millions throughout the region. This decision by the Japanese companies no doubt increases the supply of labor for the companies and allows them to save on wages. But Japan managed to avoid the US situation by maintaining stable employment in domestic industries such as service and construction, sometimes at the expense of efficiency or economic rationality.

But the business community has changed its tone over the years, and now the two top business lobbies, the Keidanren (made up of manufacturers) and Keizai Doyukai (a more brazenly neo-liberal group of top executives), are calling for massive importation of labor to avoid a drop in GDP due to the shrinking native work force that will accompany Japan’s population drop to 100 million by 2050.

No more – Economic analysts have been pointing out for years that Japanese consumer consumption is low relative to other developed countries, and that poor consumption is holding back Japan’s GDP growth. The low consumption is blamed on two factors – deflation that makes people delay large purchases, and stagnant wage growth – the latter of which Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach argues stems from the “powerful global labor arbitrage that continues to put unrelenting pressure on the labor-income generating capacity of high-wage industrial economies.” In other words, Japanese labor is in competition from foreigners, a prospect that means money for the global corporations but hardship for the domestic workers.

Japan’s media has been sensitive to this issue, if a bit reluctant to blame it on globalization. Economic disparity between the rich and poor (known succinctly as “kakusa” in Japanese) has been a persistent buzzword over the past 2 years. A host of phenomena – growing income disparity, the collapse of stable employment and the rise of fluid ‘temporary’ employment, a jump in the welfare rolls, the rise in prominence of a new wealthy class, the bankrupt finances of local governments, the near-collapge of the social insurance system, low economic growth for more than a decade, a shrinking/aging population, and on and on – have given average Japanese people the sense that the future looks rather dim.

Now the manufacturing interests, among others, are calling for more foreign labor to come to Japan, and as we’ve seen above it is on its way, putting perhaps more pressure on the average worker. But in my opinion this is only a problem if only labor is allowed to be fluid while corporations with stable management and shareholders reap the profits. Highly skilled laborers such as lawyers, doctors, professors, journalists, and especially corporate managers/investors should be allowed into Japan. Allowing a full spectrum of business opportunities into Japan, which with a highly educated population, peaceful society, and hyper-developed infrastructure, would allow for a wealth of more business and labor opportunities.

But of course that’s a silly proposition. The stewards of Japanese society will continue to hoard the top positions and continue making hypocritical appeals to racial harmony out of one side of their mouths when it comes to reform of corporate boardrooms while pushing for internationalization of cheap labor from the other side. Like it or not, the choice average citizens have is how to deal with the situation that’s been thrust upon us.

Where East and West meet

It’s easy to see a disconnect between, say, the interests of English teachers, IT workers, and businessmen that make up the bulk of Japan’s semi-permanent Western population, and those of the “low-skilled” world of immigrants from Asia.

But that would be wrong. Apart from entry requirements and visa stipulations, Japanese law treats all foreigners basically the same. And while perceptions of foreigners is different based on skin color and culture, the rights of foreigners and the level of their acceptance in Japan will depend on the experiences of other populations. There are already many examples of this connection. The question of whether zainichi Koreans will be accepted as a distinct “Japanese-Korean” identity or whether they will end up mostly assimilated and forgotten will decide how future populations will be dealt with. And if human rights activist Arudo Debito is successful in his campaign to get a national law passed banning racial discrimination, that legal framework will be enforceable for the entire foreign population.

At the same time, the bad deeds of a small group of people can ruin things for everyone else, fairly or not. Crimes committed by foreign nationals are often highly publicized thanks to a xenophobic police force that I suspect is in search of a scapegoat to help market security equipment and grab bigger budgets. Whatever the case, the anti-foreign crime campaign has resulted in bothersome ID checks and humiliating signs warning citizens to watch out for suspicious foreigners. And as limited as its impact was (thanks mainly to successful protests that cut its shelf life to mere months), the “Foreign Crime File” book, a despicable, short-lived multimedia diatribe against the foreign population in Japan, did not distinguish between Asians, Africans, or Westerners in its cheap attempts to cast foreigners in a negative light.

My biggest worry is that without proactive efforts to make this immigration smooth and easy, Japan will start to experience something like the US illegal immigration problem, with all the poverty, crime, and mistrust that goes with it. Occasional statements from high-level politicians, like Education Minister Bunmei Ibuki’s statement that Japan is a “homogeneous nation,” should remind people that race consciousness and nativism are not dead and work as appeals to a conservative voter base. The time to lay the groundwork is now to prevent a backlash against foreigners that would prove a major headache for the entire foreign population, and a loss of the culture of tranquil co-existence with neighbors that has defined Japanese society.

Buried in the second half of a Japan Times story about Japan’s dogged pursuit of resolution over the North Korean abduction issues was the following.

A Japanese citizens group is one step closer to getting approval to air Japanese-language programs intended for Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea.

The International Telecommunication Union, a Geneva-based body set up to standardize and regulate international radio and telecommunications, informed the government Monday that it is prepared to allocate a shortwave frequency band to the group, sources said.

 Seriously? They want to actually broadcast programs specially prepared for a population which is at most 8 people, but which North Korea claims is actually zero? Personally, I have always suspected that North Korea was being entirely truthful when they said that the remaining abductees are all dead, but that they are probably trying to cover up the circumstances of their deaths, whether by suicide, execution, starvation, or whatever unpleasant means it was.

But even if North Korea was lying and the 8 are still alive, this is still an absolutely mind-stunningly dumb plan. First of all, there is the fact that short-wave radios are entirely banned in Korea-the only radios permitted for non governmental use can only be tuned to government preset stations, which presumably does not include “Japan Abductee News.” And think about the staggering inefficiency of this plan. How much effort exactly do they propose to spend on preparing radio broadcasts that have a virtually zero chance of getting to the intended audience, which let us remember is only eight people to begin with! I can sort of understand the enormous efforts to actually retrieve or at least discover the fates of kidnapped citizens, but why send out messages that a: probably no one will here and b: even if they did, no-one back in Japan would ever know that they had heard it.

Remember my recent post praising Asahi’s Japanese website for getting better and better? Well I take it all back. Asahi’s website is about to get worse.

Mere days after I lauded Asahi for making their Japanese-language website more useful, the site has decided to take a huge step back.

According to a Feb 26 news release, they will no longer offer the “Today’s Morning Edition” service as of March 4. The feature gave a full list of the day’s print edition headlines and offered one (almost) full-length article in each section per day. It was a great way for people who can’t get access to the paper to ascertain what is making news in Japan.

But no more. Editorials and the front-page column “Tensei Jingo” will still be available going back 1 week, but otherwise you have to go to fee-based sites such as Asahi Perfect to get access. No other explanation is given.

The Morning Edition section wasn’t started all that long ago (I can’t seem to find a reference to when they started it), but I’m presuming they started it on a trial basis to see if offering one free article per section would attract sufficient interest in the fee-based services. I’m guessing that they didn’t generate enough interest, not that the feature was marketed all that well (I didn’t notice it existed until I decided to check the editorial section one day).

If this decision is one made by the new editor that asahi.com was looking for, I humbly request they reconsider. Offering more of Asahi’s flagship content online will only attract more interest in the site and would not hurt newspaper sales.

I can understand why Asahi, the number 2 newspaper in Japan, is reluctant to take the plunge into offering more free content. Japan’s newspaper circulation has been falling much more slowly than their American counterparts. In particular, the Asahi’s circulation has declined by only 2% from 1996-2006, though that slightly outpaces the industry-wide drop of 0.5% for the entire industry (1995-2005, all figures in absolute terms). Though I can’t be bothered to dig up roughly comparable statistics, this 2005 Washington Post article indicates that US newspaper circulation has been plummeting for 20 years, due to restrictions on telemarketing and competition from the Internet/cable TV, 3 problems that have not proven major obstacles for the Japanese industry.

Still, I’m shocked that they’re just pulling the rug out from what was a great service (I mean, you wanted to read the full report on recently unearthed diaries by Major General Taro Utsunomiya describing the March 1st uprising in 1919 colonial Korea, didn’t you?). Ah well, none of this will matter come April when I’ll more than likely become a print subscriber anyway.

From Bloomberg:

South Korea, Japan to Limit Liquids on All Overseas Flights

By Seonjin Cha

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg)—South Korea and Japan will expand restrictions on carrying liquids on board international flights from Thursday, to thwart terrorist attacks.

Passengers on all international flights from South Korea, including transit flights, will only be allowed to bring in liquids, gels and aerosol items in containers no larger than 100 milliliters (3.38 oz.), which must be placed in transparent plastic bags, the Ministry of Construction and Transportation said yesterday on its Web site.

The same restrictions will go into effect for all international flights from Japan, the country’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said on its Web site on Dec. 19.

The move is an expansion of current restrictions on flights to the U.S. and EU countries that began last year based on guidelines from the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Korean ministry said.

Food for infants and medicines will be exempt from the restrictions but must be reported to security staff in advance, the ministry said.

I thought the “liquid bomb” theory was already discredited! There needs to be some kind of multilateral negotiating body where cooler heads can veto very bad ideas like this liquid rule and infinite copyright term extension.

As someone who reads far too many news articles for his own good, I may be somewhat more sensitive to media cliches than your average news consumer. For instance, I have a whole category on this blog for “kabuki” metaphors.

But today I want to talk about another of my pet peeves in the English-language news world: when the reporter flips things all around and makes him/herself the focus of a story. While some people might be interested in the daily life of some freelance writer who rides his bike around town, probably most of us don’t want to read about what substantively is no different from following a homeless man around all day and writing about it (though wait, that would be a good idea). And speaking of homeless people, I almost broke my mp3 player in outrage when I heard this pointless “report” about a man who decided to write out of a storage unit in New York. He should have tried that in DC - he’d have ended up getting arrested if he was lucky, but more likely had his ass handed to him like the rest of the crackheads who try that stunt.

Or consider the reporter who freaked out when he was deemed unworthy of a Wikipedia entry for lack of notability. He spent a full two pages on the subject, and once published the article apparently made him immediately eligible for an article again. This naked display of the writer’s fragile yet gargantuan ego leaves me almost speechless but I will say this: You use Slate to whine to the world that you’re underappreicated, and then that whining (intentionally or not) simultaneously pressures the source of the perceived slight to recognize you once again? You should be ashamed of yourself! (I am not mentioning the writer by name or linking to the article in the hope that he won’t ever find this and have a mental orgasm over seeing his name in print because of something I wrote. I wouldn’t be able to touch the keyboard again).

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Journalists can be pretty egotistical, and as writers they no doubt have a burning desire to tell their story. Or perhaps sometimes they’re just dicks (“I got Bill Clinton to threaten me!”). Foreign correspondents especially seem eager to put themselves in the reporting, which is usually justified (“My convoy got hit with an IED!” “I got kidnapped!”) but too often an unappealing by-product of the expat experience (“Look at me, I am getting paid to walk around China!”). And often it’s less about autobiography than it is a cheap stunt (“Look at me, I got waterboarded!”). Whatever the case, it just doesn’t sit right with me when there are real things to report about. Much like nonbinding resolutions directed at foreign governments, these articles seem to be lost on their way to somewhere else.

Since I haven’t been around for very long, I am going to assume that this practice has been around for a while—HL Mencken seemed to like writing about himself for one thing, and you can see traces of Hunter Thompson in a lot of these kinds of projects. But at the same time this practice seems like some unholy amalgamation of gonzo reporting and the Today Show with Katie Couric meets livejournal, which would make its growth more recent.

There are better ways for a reporter to talk about him/herself as part of the story than to simply say what is happening and then try to link that to some cosmic truth or the zeitgeist or whatever justification you use to get printed in a news publication. The best use of personal narrative that I’ve seen in recent reporting is Nicholas Kristof, who has used the sheer power of his reporting to play a pivotal role in keeping alight what little focus the US has placed on resolving the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, not to mention his efforts to force people to take a hard look at the state of child prostitution in Cambodia from a much more dynamic perspective than almost any other source would have the guts to give. That might be setting the bar high, but I think it has to be pretty high or else we’ll never hear the end of Budding Journalist’s Amazing Tales of Public Transportation.

Put these two men in a room together and magic happens:

And please, read on to learn of this historic meeting of the minds!

Abe, Cheney Reaffirm Unity On Abduction Issue, Iraq

TOKYO (Kyodo)—Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney agreed Wednesday to boost the bilateral alliance and cooperate to resolve the issue of North Korea’s past abductions of Japanese citizens as a common matter of the two nations.

Cheney expressed U.S. understanding over Japan’s policy of not offering energy aid to North Korea due to the abduction issue, while Abe gave reassurances over Tokyo’s support for U.S. efforts in Iraq and its commitments to promoting missile defense and U.S. military realignment, Japanese officials told reporters.

OK, I’m asleep now. I fell asleep just reading this article. Could there be a less relevant visit to Japan by an American leader? I mean, sure Cheney isn’t going for no reason at all, but he and his staff are just decidedly disinterested in making his visit media-friendly. I guess we can wait and see if Cheney is trying to get anything concrete out of Japan in terms of Iraq support, or if he focused more on easing so-called “tensions” in the security alliance that are so slight as to be almost figments of the media’s imagination in their struggle to wrap some narrative around this dull, dull official visit.

My own theory on why Cheney’s there: he’s actually trying to reaffirm US-Japan unity in the six-party negotiations amid accusations that the US is pressuring Japan to back off on its insistence that North Korea make progress in resolving the issue of NK abductions of Japanese citizens before Japan provides NK with any aid. Cheney will be meeting with the parents of abductee Yokota Megumi tomorrow, which will probably be the highlight of media coverage on the Japanese side. Meanwhile, the American media-consuming public will be subject to images of Cheney strolling off the plane and addressing a crowd of adoring troops on the USS Kittyhawk. And conveniently enough, the Scooter Libby trial is about to end, so some attention can be deflected from the torrent of negative press the trial has given Cheney and his shady attempts to manipulate the media. Or more likely still, the longer Cheney’s out of the country, the longer he can avoid answering questions about Libby etc. Thankfully, Cheney will return to his now-famous undisclosed location after the trip is over.