Month: August 2009

Measuring earthquakes in Japan

On Sunday night, a large earthquake struck underwater off the coast of Japan and gave the entire Tokyo area a good shake. Then, on Tuesday morning, the Tokai region was visited by a much closer earthquake which damaged the main expressway between Tokyo and Nagoya.

Both quakes were around 7 on the Richter scale, which sounded catastrophic to my friends in California, but they would not have been quite as panicked if they were using the Japanese scale. This is because the Richter scale measures the power of an earthquake at its source (magnitude), whereas the Japanese shindo scale measures its power at the surface (seismic intensity). The Japanese scale basically breaks down as follows:

  • 1 = Barely noticeable
  • 2 = Noticeable but not scary
  • 3 = Rattles unsecured objects
  • 4 = Knocks unsecured objects over
  • 5 = Damages rickety buildings
  • 6 = Damages earthquake-resistant buildings
  • 7 = The Earth cracks open; demons emerge; everyone dies

Each location would therefore report a different number from the same earthquake, based on the effects on the ground there. The Japan Meteorological Agency publishes a map showing the seismic impact of each earthquake at various locations, as well as its epicenter. Around Tokyo, Sunday’s quake was around 3 or 4 on the Japanese scale, largely as a result of the quake being deeper underground and farther offshore; Monday’s quake was even weaker for us, but folks in the Izu Peninsula area got to experience seismic effects in the 5 to 6 range.

The foreign media, being sensationalists, still love to use the Richter scale for everything, despite the fact that it serves little practical purpose other than scaring my parents.

How to outwit a police investigation, Kyoto-style

I am currently reading Discrimination and Power (差別と権力), Akira Uozumi’s fascinating biography of Hiromu Nonaka, a former LDP heavyweight and cabinet minister known as a member of the burakumin, a minority outcast group who have suffered discrimination due to their historical role in feudal Japan as leather tanners and undertakers, vocations considered unclean. MFT readers will remember him as the man a New York Times article characterized as Japan’s version of Obama, as he too was a minority politician who rose to become a powerful politician.

I will post more on the book later, but for now I just want to share the following episode:

Just four months after Nonaka’s first successful bid* for the Diet’s lower house in 1983, the Kyoto Prefectural Police arrested the head of his koenkai (support association, kind of like a political action committee) for violating election laws. But Nonaka and associates were mostly able to beat the charges. Here is why:

You see, when Nonaka was first elected to the lower house he was already 57, a very late start for an LDP politician. But before that he had already made a very large name for himself in Kyoto prefectural politics as an anti-Communist conservative at a time when Kyoto had a Communist governor for more than two decades.

Part of the secret of Nonaka’s success was a questionable election tactic – when election season came around, construction executives friendly with Nonaka would mobilize housewives associations and other support groups to visit houses and run “get out the vote” campaigns in Nonaka’s home district of Sonobe and surrounding areas of Kyoto. Under Japanese election laws it was (and remains) illegal for politicians or their staff to visit people’s homes to ask for support, as it’s (correctly) assumed bribes will be forthcoming during such visits. However, Nonaka was able to get away with this for years as the construction executives ostensibly acted independently.

Eventually, police found evidence that during Nonaka’s first bid for the Diet, the voter mobilization efforts were in fact illegally run directly by the campaign. That’s when they moved to raid Nonaka’s offices, arrest the head of the koenkai, and question two leaders of the koenkai‘s youth bureau.

However, the charges never stuck due to a lack of evidence or confessions (subordinates were prosecuted for minor offenses but the investigation never spread) thanks to a flurry of expert moves by Nonaka’s people to undermine the investigation before, during, and after the fact. They included:

  • Keep the top guy out of the loop. The ostensible head of the koenkai was in fact a figurehead who was never fully informed of the details.
  • When all else fails, act like you’re too sick/crazy to answer questions. The two leaders of the koenkai‘s youth section (青年部) questioned on suspicion of deep involvement proved uncooperative in answering police questions. They would refuse to attend interrogation sessions by claiming to have diarrhea. If they did attend a session and the cops started to get the upper hand, they would go wild and start banging their heads against the wall to disrupt the proceedings.
  • Destroy evidence. Koenkai membership lists and other relevant documents somehow got destroyed.
  • Stay informed. Nonaka used his contacts inside the police force to get daily updates on the status of the investigation. A closely allied prefectural assemblyman actually stationed himself inside the office of the Kyoto police force’s second in command to hear reports from detectives. Uozumi’s source described the process as “just as if [the police] were teaching [Nonaka] how to respond as they investigated.”
  • Keep them on their toes. At one point, Nonaka himself showed up at the Sonobe precinct and shouted at the lead investigator to release his koenkai youth section chief if he was not yet formally charged.
  • Don’t forget to use some carrots along with your sticks. By keeping careful records of police administrators’ promotion status, Nonaka was able to bribe police bigwigs with cushy post-retirement positions at railroad companies and elsewhere (early in his career Nonaka worked for the national railway in Osaka). According to Uozumi, far from weakening Nonaka, the investigation ended up actually strengthening Nonaka’s political ties to the police.

From the beginning, the top brass in the police were hesitant to rock the boat since the politicians have a hand in deciding the police force’s budget. I can’t help but think they were a little prescient.

*from Kyoto’s 2nd district; he ran with (or more appropriately, against) Sadakazu Tanigaki and they each won a seat in the two-member district.

In America, try not to kancho your friends

(Updated)

A few weeks ago NYT ran this great article about the difficulties of raising a son in both Japanese and American cultures:

My Un-American Son

By KUMIKO MAKIHARA

Getting Yataro ready for his first sleep-away camp overseas is turning out to be much more than counting T-shirts and towels. I’m having to review the way children interact here to see which behaviors would go against American codes of conduct. American parents have higher standards than Japanese when it comes to acceptable behavior among children.

Take “kancho” for instance, a popular prank where kids creep up on and poke each other with pointed finger in the behind, shouting “kancho!” or enema. That would likely have the camp counselors in America alleging sexual abuse.

Kancho certainly isn’t encouraged in Japan — a friend of mine is convinced her daughter failed a preschool entrance exam because she playfully jabbed her mother in the rear during the interview. But Japanese parents usually bestow only a mild rebuke.

Please head on over to NYT to read the original article!

Other differences mentioned:

  • In Japan, racial epithets directed at her half-white son tend to be tolerated (and he is apparently not fazed by them), but in America they would be a cause for great concern.
  • In sports, coaches and other players tend to use positive reinforcement, while in Japan when her son makes a mistake he is told to “stop screwing up.” This might mean her son could take praise far too seriously and not understand where he needs to improve (his English language skills, in this case).
  • As someone from a country where communal bathing is common, her son might not understand the more chaste attitudes toward nudity and privacy in America.
  • Her son has never been given truly “free” time or open-ended choices, while the summer camp he is to attend consists of almost nothing but free time and freedom to choose.
  • In Japan she wouldn’t think twice about scolding using insults to scold her children, but American parents who see that behavior might think it’s abusive.

All these observations ring very true, though obviously your mileage may vary. I thank my lucky stars every day that I’ve never been kancho’d.

What I like best about this piece is that she resists the temptation to theorize or lecture about which society has the better practices. That’s the right approach because proclaiming one country’s education/child-rearing regime to be superior to the other’s does nothing to help Yataro navigate his new summer camp. By talking from her own experiences as someone who has had to navigate both societies (and offering some speculation about how Americans at the summer camp will react), she is able to shed light on cultural differences without getting into ultimately unhelpful broad conclusions. And in the process she has given us an entertaining and enlightening case study in the form of her own son. I look forward to the follow up article to hear how Yataro fared.

(A Google search for “Maki Katahira” “Kumiko Makihara” reveals several other articles about her son and life in Japan, along with this right-wing conspiracy theorist who implies she must be a CIA agent and part of the Trilateral Commission‘s plot to control Japan because she was married to former Newsweek Japan bureau chief William Powell (though apparently they divorced) and once worked as an executive assistant for a firm partially owned by private equity group Ripplewood. I don’t want to lend any credibility to this crackpot, but even if she is working for the man, this is still a pretty great article)

House sharing in Japan

Continuing my recent real-estate kick…

One thing that surprised me when I first came to Japan as an exchange student was the extraordinarily low rate of apartment or house sharing among college students and other young, single people. Having just come from such an arrangement myself, I would have assumed that students in Japan would be similarly into sharing had I actually even stopped to think about it at any point. While I did meet a handful of Japanese students at Ritsumeikan who lived with friends, they were mostly (although not exclusively) in the group that had studied abroad, or were at least highly social with the foreign and international crowd.

But this is not to say that Japanese people never have roommates, only that it’s relatively rare. For example, after coming to Kyoto University last year, I met quite a lot of Japanese students living in share arrangements, which I believe to be directly related to Kyoto University’s higher rate of “bohemian” type culture, as well as the fact that unlike Ritsumeikan, Kyoto University actually has a few dormitories open to Japanese students (as opposed to the “International Houses” that many Japanese universities provide for exchange students, and shorter term foreign students), many of whom become accustomed to group living and decide to continue after moving out of the dorm.

How might one find a room to sublet, or a subletter to live in one’s spare room in Japan? It has been pointed out that “there is no culture for classifieds in Japan, which means an instant success for a “Japanese Craigslist” is next to impossible to achieve.” This is indeed true, but the sister-sites Roomshare.jp and Roomate.jp seem to be off to start, albeit in a specific arena.

While all sorts of arrangements exist, and the range of normality is probably not so drastically different from other countries I’d like to leave with one particularly unique “share mate” (as the term goes in Japanese) recruitment ad.

Hello.

I run a counseling business that I started. However, due to the poor economy I’ve had trouble getting clients. Well, that’s just how it is. However, now I am looking for someone who seriously wants to do a job in mental care.

Rent (with space for sleeping, internet, phone, everything needed for normal life) is free!

However, there are the following conditions.

  1. A woman with the appearance (mood of) of a counselor.
  2. A warm personality
  3. 20~35 years old.
  4. Someone who really wants to study ‘mental’ topics.

(It’s fine if you don’t have any other job.)

I have not posted this as a joke.

Anyone interested should please get in touch.

The poster does not say anything else about themselves, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a middle-aged guy with some sort of odd therapy fetish. It definitely seems like a setup for a movie though. Is this the start of a quirky romantic comedy, or a psycho-thriller?

BTW, thanks to Benjamin for pointing out this ad to me (and thanks to me for telling him about the site!)

The history of Japanese text direction

Most of our readers are aware that, when written horizontally, Japanese is generally read left to right. When written vertically, as was the traditional method, paragraphs start on the right and each line is read down the page in order from right to left. Traditionally, though, Japanese and Chinese were both read right to left at all times, even when written horizontally.

The history behind this is kind of interesting. Here’s a timeline culled from the Japanese Wikipedia article on the subject.

* Traditionally, Japanese was written vertically, and lines were read from right to left. Horizontal writing only appeared on signs, and in those cases it was also read from right to left.
* Horizontal writing first appeared in print in the late 1700s as Dutch books were reprinted. (Dutch traders in Nagasaki were the only Europeans allowed in Japan at that time.) In 1806, a Japanese book was published in Japanese hiragana characters skewed to look like Latin characters and printed from left to right.
* In the first foreign language dictionaries printed in Japan, foreign words were written horizontally from left to right, while the Japanese words were written vertically from top to bottom. The first dictionary to have both foreign and Japanese words written horizontally came out in 1885, and both were written left to right.
* Japan’s first printed newspapers and advertisements had headlines and call-outs written horizontally from right to left.
* In July 1942, at the height of World War II, the Education Ministry proposed that horizontal writing be from left to right rather than from right to left. Although the left-to-right standard was showing up in some publications at the time, switching over entirely was a controversial idea which didn’t make it past Cabinet approval.
* The military also tried adopting left-to-right as an official standard during the war, but many people viewed this as too Anglo-American and refused to switch.
* Because of the patriotic zeal surrounding text direction during the war, there were cases of stores being pressed to switch text direction on their signage, and cases of newspapers refusing to print advertising with left-to-right text.
* After the war, Douglas MacArthur’s occupation team pushed for left-to-right text as an education modernization reform measure, along with the abolition of Chinese characters and other more extreme ideas.
* Yomiuri Shimbun was the first newspaper to switch text direction in its headlines, making the changeover on January 1, 1946. The Nikkei switched over by 1948.
* Japanese currency was first printed with left-to-right text in March 1948; before that, it had been printed right-to-left.
* Asahi Shimbun conducted some internal design experiments around 1950 to switch its front page to an all-horizontal, left-to-right format, but this never made it past the drawing board.
* In April 1952, the Chief Cabinet Secretary adopted a guideline that all ministry documents be written from left to right using horizontal text. Despite this, the courts kept vertical writing until January 1, 2001–the bar exam was also written vertically until that time–and the Diet itself continues to use vertical writing when publishing draft bills.

Right-to-left writing is still found in certain contexts. Sometimes it is used simply to appear more “traditional”: Wikipedia cites soba shops as a common culprit in this category. Another common context is vehicles such as trucks and ships; there, Japanese is often written from front to back, so on the right side of the vehicle it is written from right to left. Here’s an example which I spotted on a right-wing sound truck outside Odakyu in Shinjuku during my first trip to Tokyo, way back in 2000. Note that the text 愛国党, or “Patriot Party,” is written right-to-left on the side of the truck, but left-to-right on the back.

"Kick some Communist ass!"

(Thanks to our commenter Peter for suggesting this topic.)

Fuzzy sentencing: can lay judges beat the computer?

This came out as a coda to a Yomiuri report on the first lay judge trial:

The Supreme Court has introduced a system for searching past sentences handed down for reference when determining appropriate punishments. The use of this system is the focus of considerable attention.

Terminals installed in district courts and their branches across the nation allow data to be retrieved on about 2,300 sentences handed down since April last year. The data are organized into 10 categories, such as whether the crime was premeditated and the types of weapons used. By entering information via a terminal, similar cases and a range of appropriate punishments are displayed in a bar-chart format. Prosecutors and lawyers also can access the system. […]

The Supreme Court’s position on the use of the search results is that they “do not act as a restraint on sentencing, but rather generate material for further discussion.”

Though the information may help lay judges hold active discussions about an appropriate punishment, it may also prevent sentences being handed down that differ widely from similar cases.

Two immediate thoughts:

  1. This highlights yet another distinction between American jurors and Japanese lay judges. In the US, jurors don’t get involved in sentencing at all; that’s left to the judge. In fact, jurors are usually not allowed to know what the punishment is, lest it interfere with their judgment of the facts.
  2. This is a hell of a way to impose sentencing guidelines–basically sentencing by bureaucratic inertia.

To be clear, I think that the opposite extreme can be ridiculous. By “the opposite extreme,” I mean the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines. This is a point system which binds judges to a narrow range of possible sentences based on facts which have been proven in the case–the nature of the offense, the aggravating and mitigating factors present, and the criminal history of the defendant. It’s kind of like doing your taxes: you have income and deductions and a variety of funky calculations to complete. And like tax returns, there is software to do all the calculating, which is worth a try to get a feel for the system.

There are several motivations behind reducing the judge’s discretion. One is to minimize discrimination in sentencing (though if you play with the online calculator, you will find that crack dealers really do get much worse sentences than coke dealers; also note that this is a concept which would probably fall upon deaf ears in the Japanese Diet). Another is to keep convicts from appealing the propriety of their sentences, which is a major administrative burden on appellate courts even when relatively clear rules are in place. Yet another (which would probably get the highest popular approval rating) is to prevent judges from giving lenient sentences to egregious offenders out of emotional pity.

Still, there is something which seems inherently wrong about judging by computer: the person in the defendant’s seat is a human being, and if the system is supposed to somehow “correct” them, some more serious consideration of their personal state by human eyes is probably necessary. The Federal Guidelines are good at keeping people in jail but not particularly good at giving them a responsible future.

Is the new Japanese method better? Maybe. The problem I see is that it could perpetuate the common practice in Japan of looking to the status quo for guidance, even when it clearly isn’t binding.

The lay judges seem to have avoided that trap in their first deployment. In the first lay judge trial, which was decided this afternoon, the pro-am bench handed down a guilty verdict and a sentence of 15 years, slightly less than what the prosecutors wanted (16 years) and well outside the range of past sentences dug up by the defense lawyer (3 to 10 years). So there’s some evidence of critical thinking in this new system, although it’s hard to guess what might happen in future cases.

緊急提言：報道機関による裁判傍聴制度の乗っ取りを許さない　Media stealing people’s right to observe trials due to ridiculous court rules

(Today’s post about how my chance to observe the lay judge trial was stolen is in Japanese only. For an overview of my experience in English, please check my photo album here. Feel free to leave comments in English!)

8月4日（火曜日）、全国で初めての裁判員裁判を傍聴しようと、朝早くから東京地方裁判所へと出かけた。ニュースで聞いていたとおり、傍聴希望者が数百人来ていて、大きな行列ができていた。報道陣も大勢来ていて、目の前の人にも「なぜ傍聴に来た」と取材していた。

基本的に、裁判の傍聴はアポなしでもできるが、注目が集まるような事件となると希望者が傍聴席の約60席を上回るため、抽選で傍聴券が配布される。当日は並んでいる人に整理券をくばり、9時になると当せん番号をホワイトボードに掲載し、整理券の番号と一致した場合は当せんとなる。

残念ながら、私は外れた。裁判所の前で「惜しい」と悔やんでいたところ、不思議な光景を目撃した。それは次に述べるように「報道機関による裁判傍聴制度の乗っ取り」である。

まず、裁判所の前は報道陣のカメラマンなどであふれている。それに、報道陣から当選者らしき人に対し指示を出し、一つの場所に集めようとしている。

そして、道を渡って警察庁本部の前に行くと、また別の行列ができている。並んでいる人全員が整理券を手に、誰かに渡し、マニラ封筒を受け取る。

封筒を受け取る様子を見てやっとわかった。この人たちはおそらくアルバイトで応募して、当選した場合は報道関係者に傍聴券を譲渡する。当たりでも外れでもお金がもらえるので、抽選の後で封筒入りの現金を渡していたようである。

これを見て、本気で憤りを覚えた。動員されたアルバイトがいればいるほど、その分まじめに傍聴しに来た人が当たる確率が低くなり、その機会が報道機関の動員によって奪われたからだ。

改善策

裁判には報道関係者の立ち入りが禁止されているらしい（利害関係者などは別の傍聴席があるようだ）。その状況下で、なんらかの方法で取材しようとすることが、ジャーナリストとして当然の行動である。しかし、傍聴制度は国民のために設けられ、その権利を奪ってはいけない。

もちろん、バイトの人たちが悪いと思わない。

一番責任があるのは、こんな非効率なルールを作って裁判所の関係者たちである。この状況を改善するには、裁判所に対していくつかの提言を述べてみたい。

１．傍聴券を譲渡不可にする。お金目当てでの傍聴券の入手を防ぐために、傍聴券を第三者への譲渡を禁止すべきである。これによって、「報道機関の乗っ取り」による不公平をなくし、一般人が傍聴しやすくなる。

２．一定の傍聴席を報道機関に優先的に枠を作る。報道陣はどうしても取材したいし、国民の関心のある事件の場合、その社会的価値も高い。法廷のスペースに制限があるので、一般人の傍聴席を少し減らして10席ほど設ければいい。事情により報道機関の立ち入りを一時的に禁止する必要も考えられるので、その場合は枠を作らないで、一般人の傍聴も禁止すべき。

この慣行が何年も続いているので、提言したところで改善すると思わないが、裁判員制度が始まった今、国民の司法に対する関心は高まるに違いない。

以上の二つを実現すれば、傍聴制度は利用しやすくなり、本来の目的を果たすことを期待している。

Be the foreign media

Since we’ve been ragging on foreign reporters so much recently, here’s a want ad which may be of interest to those of you who think they can do better.

Reporters for English-language newswire (Tokyo-Japan)
Date: 2009-07-15, 12:05PM JT

A well-known news agency’s Tokyo branch is looking for reporters to write for the English language wire service.

Job description:
The position involves reporting and editing major political, economic, science, corporate news items in Japan. It also involves writing in-depth report or news analysis on some topics given by editors.

Qualifications:
Fluent in Japanese and native-level in English. Experience in journalism will be a significant advantage. A broad knowledge about Japan’s politics or economy is preferred.
Office hour is not needed. Pay will be based on workload and there is no base salary.

Direct contact to xhsdjfszp@gmail.com is ok.

Raymond Burr, where are you?

Travels to Tsushima, Part 1: There and Back Again

In April of 2008, I took a trip to Tsushima island for several days with a close friend, and we spent a long weekend traveling around the island by bicycle. By popular request, here is a brief travelogue of my trip, split into three parts.


大きな地図で見る

What is Tsushima?
Tsushima is an island situated almost perfectly between the Korean Peninsula and the island of Kyushu, but which has been in the Japanese cultural sphere for all of recorded history (since at least the Kofun period). The Mongols invaded the island twice on their way to Japan, slaughtering many of the inhabitants. After their departure, it once again became an independent Japanese province under the control of the So Clan, who ruled the island for seven centuries. The So Clan maintained relatively friendly relations with Korea, and often acted as an ipso facto advocate for Korea domestically in Japan. Today, it is part of Nagasaki prefecture, despite its geographic proximity to Fukuoka.

It has a very small population — despite being Japan’s sixth largest island, it is home to only 34,000 people. (By comparison, the smaller Sado Island off the coast of Niigata has a population of 63,000.)

Continue reading Travels to Tsushima, Part 1: There and Back Again