Month: October 2005
“My Japan”
A conversation with a friend last night reminded me of this incredible WWII propaganda film. It was made to sell U.S. war bonds in the final months of the war, and it features an American actor playing a Japanese narrator, explaining why the Americans will never win the war.
During the first couple of minutes, it’s abysmally stupid, as the narrator talks about flowers and bunnies and “Mount Fujama” (a mispronunciation of “Fujiyama,” itself a mistransliteration of “Mount Fuji”). By the middle, though, the film is brutally effective at its aim: terrifying the average American, who was almost sure that Japan had no chance of surviving, into thinking that Japan might pull through and deal incredible damage to America in the process. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the war era.
(There are a few nauseating racial stereotypes in the film, but not the kind you’re probably used to seeing in WWII propaganda. In fact, the film goes out of its way to debunk some of the classic images of short, bespectacled “Jap” soldiers, and that adds to its effectiveness.)
Japan Politics Links
So suddenly I can’t get enough of Japanese politics. Hey, must be the money!
But in the course of my studies I have come across some great resources for those interested in following every goddamn word these politicians say:
Prime Minister’s movements. All newspapers and major sites offer this, but I prefer Nikkei’s because they have little news stories covering the PM’s major statements of the day. Like today was Koizumi’s big day to celebrate as his pet project, postal privatization, finally became law, so everyone’s favorite henjin decided to refer to himself in the 3rd person:
“This is a miracle in politics,” Koizumi said before a TV camera Friday afternoon at the Prime Minister’s Official Residence. “This miracle has been realized thanks to people who have supported Koizumi.”
In Japanese that’s not grammatically incorrect or anything, but it does take some balls for a man in his 60s to pull a Jimmy like that.
Continue reading Japan Politics Links
Google and Taiwanese sovereignty
I originally started writing this post in response to this post on Ridingsun and never quite got around to finishing it, but now that Google has announced they are changing their designation of Taiwan from “Taiwan, province of China” to merely “Taiwan,” I figure I’ll just publish it.
The official US position is stated in the Taiwan Relations Act, passed in 1979, and has never been changed since.
Don’t forget Taiwan’s government is still known as the Republic Of China, and according to its constitution still considers itself a claimant to sovereignty over all of China, of which Taiwan is just a single province.
If you look at the actual text of the ROC constitution, Article 2 states
“The president and the vice president shall be directly elected by the entire populace of the free area of the Republic of China.”
By limiting voting to the populace of the “free area”, i.e. Taiwan and the surrounding islands, the implication is that mainland China is “unfree territory of the Republic of China.”
Article 11 also states
“Rights and obligations between the people of the Chinese mainland area and those of the free area, and the disposition of other related affairs may be specified by law.”
again, making clear that Taiwan still legally considers itself part of China (although apparently the best part).
If constitutional interpretation is too dry, you can follow the reasoning at the blog Those Who Dare.
Or simpler yet, they can just look at the vehicular traffic on Taiwan’s roads and take note of the license plates that read Taiwan Province.
Yes, the current president’s party (I hesitate to say ‘ruling party’ since they control oly a single branch of the government, all branches of which are basically stuck in deadlock due to partisan bickering) endorses formal independence from China, but unless they succeed in revising the constitution and changing the country’s official name, it’s very unrealistic to expect foreign businesses to do so.
Incidentally, I would be thrilled to see the ROC officially change its name to Republic of Taiwan, so don’t think that I’m actually in favor of reunification. Just try and realize this isn’t just a matter of Taiwan’s independence not being recognized internationally, it stil isn’t even recognized domestically.
So there was this guy in my high school class…
(For those of you wondering who I am, hi! I’m Joe. You might know me from my blog. Mutantfrog invited me to come over, so you’ll see me blogging around here from time to time.)
Anyway, as I was saying, there was this guy in my high school class, back when I was on exchange at a shady municipal school in Osaka. His name was Taro (no, not really). He was an interesting fellow for a number of reasons, but the first thing that would probably strike you was his size. I was the tallest person in our school at around 185 cm (including the basketball shoes I wore around because stock school shoes wouldn’t fit me). Taro was very close to my height, but was solid muscle. He wore his uniform shirt open to drive this point home.
He was captain of the judo club and appeared in kendo club from time to time. In judo class, I was his partner. I was never sure why: maybe because we were about the same height, maybe because the teacher secretly hated me. Whenever Taro threw me into the mat, I suspected the latter.
Once you got to know him, you realized that Taro wasn’t just a brick. No, he was also certifiably insane. For one thing, he was the only person in the school who never spoke to me in Japanese: he would only speak guttural high school English. To humor him, I would speak English back.
We were standing in line one day with our shirts off, waiting for a doctor to give us a quick stethoscoping, and I couldn’t help but notice that Taro had a giant red swastika-shaped scar on his right bicep, with a solid red circle right above it. I realized that he must have dug these into his arm with a sharp object. He realized that I was looking at his body art, so I hazarded a question. “Um, do you like Hitler?”
“Yeees!” he answered, with a big smile. “I llllove Hit-la! And Yamamoto, do you know Yamamoto?”
He read books on Chinese close-combat tactics in class, and one time on a field trip, in between random sexual harrassment of our cute homeroom teacher, he turned to me and said: “I AM SAMURAI!”
To which I replied: “Samurai? So where are your swords?”
“I can’t carry!” Taro said. “There’s a law!”
Five years later, I went back to Osaka and met some of my classmates, as well as the aforementioned cute teacher. There were stories about kids who had become truck drivers and graduate students, and one five-foot-tall girl from the art club who had joined the Self-Defense Forces (!). But no mention of Taro. And I’m disappointed, because I want to know if he’s off driving a speaker truck somewhere.
Numismania
We’ve known for years that North Korea has been printing counterfeit money, but the BBC reports that we finally have proof.
The United States has formally accused North Korea of forging millions of dollars of high-quality counterfeit US dollar notes, known as supernotes.
A US court indictment said seven men, including senior Irish republican Sean Garland, distributed the fakes, which all had a face value of $100.
There is still no word on whether or not North Korea has been accused of counterfeiting the new US ha’penny coin.
Kabuki update
Continuing from the first installment.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo gives us this confused example:
One interesting dimension of this Kabuki theater exercise is that it’s not even completely clear which part of the Republican caucus open defections could come from.
Josh, if you have no idea how it’s going to turn out, why are you calling it Kabuki?
John G Scherb, of PeaceJournalism.com, slips his reference into an essay on the Taiwan arms deal question.
And no one, save for a few
wizened China experts, really cares about it because nothing really
changes. It’s a Kabuki dance, an elaborate ritual that benefits a few,
ups the world tensions a notch or two, and then is quickly forgotten.
The web site claims to be based in Nepal, whose citizens, being far closer to China than the typical clueless Westerner would seem to be in a position to know enough about Chinese culture to realize that a: Kabuki is from Japan and not China, and b: that Kabuki, while highly scripted, is not what I would call a ‘ritual,’ and is a rather awful metaphor for what he’s discussing. After all, if it were ‘quickly forgotten,’ why is it the metaphor of choice for creatively braindead political columnists?
I don’t want to knock PeaceJournalism.com too much though-after all they do have this pretty awesome proposal for THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT ACT, to be enacted by the US Congress.
The last entry for today is courtesy of Wayne Madsen at Global Research.ca, writing about the Plame/Rove/Darth Sidius scandal that’s gripped the imagination of the most boring people in America. Madsen actually describes two different situations as Kabuki.
Not surprisingly, the White House spin Kabuki dancers, fully expecting a Friday announcement from Fitzgerald, altered course and announced that Bush would not name a replacement for O’Connor until some time next week.
While Mr. Madsen is guilty of yet another horrifically bad Kabuki metaphor, at least he gives us this rather amusing photo collage to illustrate his lack of a point.
The White House Kabuki dance with Patrick Fitzgerald
What is the alternative? How can reporters possibly describe politics without the richness of inappropriate metaphors?
Take this photo, which was plastered all over the front page of every newspaper in Taiwan yesterday. The typical American political reporter or pundit would probably describe this as the result of a Kabuki dance, or possibly, if they considered themselves more of an elitist prick (i.e. a George Will, or Christopher Hitchens) perhaps even a Noh play. A more accurate description, however, would be to say that Chang Sho-wen got the shit beat out of him, and that Taiwanese legislators routinely beat the shit out of each other.
Of course, not all mention of Kabuki in the press is inherently gratuitous. For example, take this brief news item from The Japan Times.
Mitsukoshi Ltd. and Shochiku Co. said Tuesday they will form a business alliance to develop kabuki-related products.
The department store chain and Japan’s major movie distributing firm will jointly set up a project team to share their strategies on the kabuki business, including developing souvenirs, planning play-watching trips and selling play tickets to customers of each company.
Shochiku has positioned the traditional performing art as its core business since its foundation in 1920, while Mitsukoshi has been organizing various kabuki events with the film distributor’s support since 1946.
“Endless Rain” by X Japan is 500 times better than THE ENTIRE BIBLE
OMG it’s true. Anyway, all hail guard dogs:
Panty Thief Forgets Bag, Gets Self Arrested because of Dog that “Wasn’t there before”
The Fukuoka Pref. police, Kasuya Precinct arrested a part-time factory worker of Koga City on suspicion of theft for stealing a woman’s underwear. They confiscated 220 pairs of women’s underwear that were scattered about his apartment.
According to the Fukuoka police’s investigations, the man is suspected of entering the female company employee (25)’s apartment through the unlocked front door, upon which he stole one pair of underwear.
The man ran off in a hurry after being barked at by the woman’s pet canine. The woman, who was in the bath at the time, dialed 110 (Japan’s 911) after she noticed the trouble. It became clear that the crime was the suspect’s doing after receipts for public utilities were found in a bag left at the scene.
According to police, the suspect had infiltrated the woman’s home a few times before since she was the man’s type. He was surprised at the presence of the dog, which had not been there before.
Thanks again ZAKZAK for making me feel better about myself.
Great article on history of Taiwan’s architecture
The Governor-General Hot Springs
During the onsen’s construction, Japan invaded China after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937. The Japanese authorities urged Taiwanese to use bricks in camouflage colors to hinder air raids. These colors–light green, beige, and brown–were often used from the late 1920s through the early 1940s. A kiln in Peitou specially produced bricks of these colors, known as “13-channel bricks” for their rippled surface, designed to reduce buildings’ visibility to enemy aircraft by reducing the bricks’ reflectiveness.
Representative buildings from that period include Taipei City Hall (now Zhongshan Hall), Taipei High School (now National Taiwan Normal University), and Taipei Imperial University (now National Taiwan University). Those buildings were all the work of Ide Kaoru, the influential chief architect of the Governor-General’s Office who advocated “localization” of Taiwan’s architecture. As the Governor-General Onsen was built with the same sort of green 13-channel bricks as the Taipei City Hall, which was completed in 1936 and was also a public building, it is assumed that Ide had a hand in its design.
This article is highly recommended, particularly for language students, as the text is presented in English, Japanese, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.