Author: Adamu

Roger Cohen does Japan

After working out with Yoko Ono’s lawyer and crossing the street outside the Imperial Palace, Roger Cohen is ready to tell us what he thinks of Japan: a sad place where the only way to have fun is develop unhealthy obsession with cartoons:

My sense is that four factors have contributed to [over-the-top hobbyism and high-tech obsession in Japan]: wealth, postmodernism, conformism and despair. Japan is rich enough, bored enough with national ambition, strait-jacketed enough and gloomy enough to find immense attraction in playful escapism and quirky obsession.

As Tokyo Reporter noted in comments in my last post, Cohen uses some ridiculous examples to make what is ultimately a pretty valid point. There is a definite “ennui” here that, like much of the world, leads people to pursue escapism. Where I differ with Cohen the most is that I don’t think Japan is any more advanced in its escapism than America, just different. Here was my comment to the nytimes.com site that focused mainly on the silly parts of his column:

In common usage, “otaku” usually refers not to “geek-like obsession” but to actual obsessed geeks, which make up a pretty small proportion of Japan’s population (probably not much higher than the ratio of Americans who obsess over their hobbies). I would agree that “we’re all going a little otaku” as you defined it but that statement applies equally to most Japanese as it does to Americans.

I would also like to point out that Yoko Ono’s lawyer gave you some bad information. Unless you were using some new model of treadmill I am unaware of, those pictures tell you how many calories you are burning, as you suspected. It’s a neat feature I think American runners would like as well.

Sure, Japanese attention to detail, cuteness, and what have you are obvious to any outside visitor, but what does that have to do with Japan’s international standing? Does a lack of cute images on American treadmills signify the decline of the American superpower?

One bonus nitpick that I didn’t tell the Times: that area in front of the Imperial Palace is closed to traffic so they can open it up to bicycles. The traffic guards are there to make sure no one is run over by an out of control tourist. All the same, I think anyone who has been there will agree the old men directing traffic (who work for a travel agency) are extremely power-drunk and over-earnest in making sure no one jaywalks.

Lightening up

Lisa Katayama has a piece up at BoingBoing about how people like us should keep our sense of humor when she writes about weird stuff in Japan:

…writing about my own country’s quirks has its downside. I strive to tell each story objectively without condescension or sensationalism, but every time I write an article about, say, the engineer who has a body pillow girlfriend or the grad student who married a Nintendo DS character, I get hundreds of racially-charged comments from readers, long ranting responses from defenders of Japanese culture (ed: Hey, is that a dig at me?) , and dozens of emails from people at big media outlets who want to find out more about these “strange” phenomena.

Why do so many love to gawk at this mysterious, foreign “other” that is Japanese culture? There are plenty of strange things going on in the US too, but when it happens in Japan, it’s suddenly incomprehensible, despicable, awesome, and crazy. This fascination doesn’t just end with angry commenters, either. Over the last couple of decades, it has spawned a huge industry of magazines, blogs, and products themed around Japanese culture marketed to Westerners by Westerners who are also obsessed with Japanese culture.

My friend Joi Ito and I talk about this a lot. He, like me, is Japanese and was brought up with both American and Japanese influences. This question resonates not only with the work that we do, but with our personal identities. While we do our fair share of sitting around analyzing Japanese culture, it’s also deeply personal to us when someone criticizes our country or our opinions of it.

…

Overriding all this Japanalysis, though, is the fact that none of this is meant to be taken seriously. One important premise of Japanese popular culture is the commitment to have fun and not take offense. Japanese humor works on many different levels and its nuances can be hard to explain to people who didn’t grow up with it.

…

…you just don’t get it. You’re not in on the joke. You’re the one taking it too seriously, and you might be imposing your own biases and hang-ups on someone else’s situation.Being majime (too serious) is not cool in Japan; likewise it is important for voyeurs of Japanese culture to recognize that most everything pop-culture-y that is exported to the West comes at us with a wink. If you’re all up in arms about it, then maybe the joke is on you.

On the outside, guys like Sal9000 (the guy who married his DS girlfriend) and Nisan (the guy with the body pillow girlfriend) may seem “weird” or “crazy.” But they’ve really just found creative ways to toy with amorphous concepts like love and romance that complement their own unique lives.

I wholeheartedly agree that light-hearted content about Japan should be allowed some breathing room. In fact, I agree with that even for those who sell junk and run for-profit blogs focused on Japan Weird stuff.

Where I would draw the line is when an influential publication like the New York Times trots out this stuff in the service of their tired narrative of an inscrutable, backwards, and weak Japan. Call me a “defender of Japanese culture” if you want, but it’s a line of thought that does more to obscure than enlighten (See the recent silliness from Roger Cohen). The NYT would benefit just as much as the rest of us from “lightening up” as Katayama suggests.

I would have a much easier time accepting this premise from someone who isn’t in the business of producing Weird Japan content that’s intended to be taken seriously. If this piece signals a change of heart, that’s great. But if it’s true that most of the stuff is tongue-in-cheek, shouldn’t she be telling the readers instead of writing an essay about it afterward?

As writers, shouldn’t we be trying to help people understand, instead of chiding them for not getting it?

Adam J. Richards disappointed in court decision in favor of Borat

From Bloomberg:

News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox Film won an appeals-court ruling affirming the dismissal of three lawsuits filed by people who claimed they were emotionally harmed by appearing in the “Borat” movie.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in New York upheld the dismissals from last year in an order today. People who appeared in the film, including those in a dinner-party scene in which the protagonist presents a bag of feces, also sued for fraud and unjust enrichment, according to the ruling. They argued the ambiguity of “documentary-style film” in signed releases meant the lower court couldn’t rely on them to dismiss the litigation.

“While the character ‘Borat’ is fictional, the film unmistakably tells the story of his travels in the style of a traditional, fact-based documentary,” the appeals court wrote. “Indeed, the film’s stylistic similarity to the straight documentary form is among its central comedic conceits, employed to set the protagonist’s antics in high relief.”

…

“It’s disappointing,” Adam J. Richards, a lawyer for six of the seven plaintiffs, said of the ruling in a phone interview. “It allows well-financed parties such as Twentieth Century Fox to outright lie to people and rely on, in my opinion, an ambiguously worded document to get by the lies.”

…

The appeals court found the plaintiffs couldn’t claim the filmmakers fraudulently induced them into signing the releases because they didn’t try to verify what they were told by, for example, asking to meet the “reporter” or learn his name.

“They would have lied to him,” Levine said of his client Psenicska. “To use clear language like ‘mock documentary’ or ‘mockumentary’ would have given the game away. They were clearly trying to use obsfucation.”

While I agree that the plaintiffs should have maybe had a little common sense before jumping in front of the camera, I really hope Sasha Baron Cohen remains the only one making these obviously subversive movies. They work, but only because the makers are doing things everyone knows are completely wrong.

Wendy’s Japan to close by end of December!

Suddenly and unceremoniously, Zensho, the operator of Wendy’s Japan, has announced it will discontinue its licensing deal with the Wendy’s parent company and shut down all 71 restaurants under the hamburger chain’s brand by the end of this month.

There is a brief statement on the chain’s website announcing the decision (the URL oddly misspells “Wendies”) thanking everyone for their service and patronage and inviting everyone to visit a Wendy’s before it’s too late. But it doesn’t exactly tell us why this is happening. The Nikkei Shimbun and Wall Street Journal pass on statements from officials at Zensho stating that while Wendy’s had started to turn a profit, they wanted to focus management resources on their mainstay business, the Sukiya beef bowl chain.

The closure means 1900 part time workers will lose their jobs. According to the Nikkei, Zensho is offering to help them find work at neighboring stores, though in this tough environment I am sure many will have trouble finding new work immediately.

Although I rarely ate at Wendy’s, knowing it was there was comforting as an expat American. Also, at various points in my stay here Wendy’s has served as a meeting place and landmark. It will be very sad to see it go! One can only hope Burger King, which has made a recent return to Japan, will take over some of the former Wendy’s locations.

Bloomberg on mechanical tomb operator Nichiryoku

index_title

Bloomberg has an interesting article on Nichiryoku, a business offering “mechanical tombs” in Japan (and possibly Hong Kong in the near future):

Secretary for Food and Health York Chow was in Japan last week to visit Tokyo-based Nichiryoku Co.’s mechanized columbarium, as facilities used to store urns are known. Families swipe a smart card and the ashes of the deceased are lifted mechanically within 60 seconds from an underground vault, with 8,545 tomb spaces, to one of 10 viewing areas.
…
The seven-story building in central Yokohama, a port city 16 kilometers (10 miles) from Tokyo, uses less space per urn than a facility where all are on permanent display. Each tomb can hold as many as three urns and 95 percent are taken.

The Yokohama columbarium, built by Shimizu Corp., Mitsubishi Corp. and Murata Machinery Ltd., was the first of its kind, according to Nichiryoku. Since then, the company has built three more in Japan, and rival companies are doing the same, according to employees who guided York’s tour.
…
“Usually these things are handled by local priests and temples, and in our case we also cooperated with a local temple to open this facility,” said Hisayoshi Teramura, the company’s president. “It’s been a very successful venture for us and we’re getting interest from other cities.” A delegation from Shanghai visited last year and this year, he said.

Nichiryoku’s shares have gained 17 percent this year, against a 3.4 percent rise in the benchmark Topix index. Shares in the only Hong Kong-listed provider of funeral services, Sino- Life Group Ltd., have more than doubled since their debut Sept. 9. The company operates in Taiwan and is expanding into China, where growing wealth is fueling demand for traditional funerals.

At the Nichiryoku’s 24-hour Yokohama columbarium, urns are stored in a “tomb” box that slots into one of the designated viewing areas, decorated with a backdrop of floral designs including cherry blossoms, snowdrops, cosmos and roses. People can bring food and flowers, which must be removed when they leave — in contrast to the tradition of graveyards in China.

If people are supposed to bring offerings back home with them when they leave the columbarium, that’s not just different from the Chinese tradition, it’s a lot different from the typical Japanese graveyard as well.

But I quibble. I’ve never heard of anyone using such a facility, but I did just see an ad for Nichiryoku this morning. It’s a cheaper option than getting a family plot at a graveyard, so I can see why some would go for it.

I am kind of amazed that a tomb operator is listed on the stock market, though. Maybe as Japan gets older the death business will get more and more lucrative.

Adamu and Garrett sound off on Japanese politics in 2009

Here I am with Garrett of Trans Pacific Radio at the Pink Cow in Shibuya the on Tuesday. We had a discussion about some of the biggest stories of 2009. Watch here!

Topics covered:

– The Noriko Sakai scandal and the arrest of Tatsuya Ichihashi: Sakai received more media coverage than the election. The two cases illustrate how police can hold a suspect for weeks and try and press for a confession.

– The new DPJ government: Adamu is a little on the fence about the government’s new way of doing things but supports them on balance. A point that I didn’t quite get to articulate as well as I wanted: once the DPJ eliminates some of the institutions, they will have to fundamentally re-organize the personnel policies of the bureaucracy so there won’t be so many senior bureaucrats who feel entitled to post-retirement jobs. Such reforms could even prove a model to creating a less rigid private sector labor system as well.

[Edited to move video after the jump, as it autoplays on some computers.]

Continue reading Adamu and Garrett sound off on Japanese politics in 2009

North Korea devaluation aimed at confiscating private wealth

Interesting move by NK to crack down on the burgeoning market activity in their country:

North Korea revalued its currency for the first time in 50 years and strictly limited how much old money could be traded for new, moves that appear designed to confiscate much of the cash people earned in market activities the country’s authoritarian government doesn’t like.

The action triggered chaos, according to news outlets in South Korea that specialize in obtaining information from the North, as people rushed to banks and offices of the ruling Workers Party to get information, make exchanges or trade existing North Korean won for euros and U.S. dollars.
…
Initial reports indicated the government would allow only 100,000 old won to be exchanged for new. That would potentially wipe out the holdings of people who have earned and saved in won from market activities for years. Those who have saved in foreign currencies — which, though not illegal, is difficult for ordinary North Koreans — would appear unaffected.

According to an account by NKNet, a Seoul-based Web service focused on North Korea, people in Pyongyang on Monday night pressed party officials to allow more money to be exchanged. In response, according to the report, the officials lifted the exchangeable amount to 150,000 won in cash and 300,000 won in savings accounts.

While the revaluation could simply be aimed at inflation – Vietnam recently devalued as well – the really low per-person limit seems all but certain to wipe out most private wealth. Because in Stalinist North Korea money spends you!

New and changing traditions – skillet apple pie

Mrs. Adamu and I are in Connecticut for Thanksgiving this year. It’s the first time we have been back at this time of the season for several years and I must say it’s been refreshing. New England is cold at this time of year but the air is crisp and the night sky very clear. I do not remember seeing this many stars for a very long time.

I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR on this trip and was inspired by hearing this story on Morning Edition about popular Thanksgiving dishes that have come and gone. So inspired, in fact, that I tried to make one of the dishes, skillet apple pie. I highly recommend listening to the whole story as it gives you an interesting feel for how different Thanksgiving must have been in generations past. Anyway here is what the dish is supposed to do:

Apple pie is an essential dish for Thanksgiving, yet it’s perhaps the hardest dessert to master: making two layers of pie crust; getting flavor into the apples; making the filling sliceable but tasty; making the bottom crust crispy instead of soggy. Here’s our quick and easy answer to the Apple Pie Problem.

While this wasn’t a vintage dish (it was an invention of the person interviewed for the story), it sounded pretty damned good. I’ve never had apple pie with apple cider and maple syrup before. My own variation on the dish did nothing to solve the “apple pie problem” however. I transported the sauteed apples back into a traditional pie plate and used a top and bottom crust. I haven’t tried it yet so we shall see if it works out. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

How to get out of jury duty, Japanese-style

It’s been six months since the official kickoff of Japan’s lay judge system (roughly equivalent to a US jury), and about 4 months since the first trial began. Already, 84 people have helped adjudicate 14 criminal trials.

So far there have been hundreds of thousands more – 290,000 to be precise – who have received notices telling them they may have to serve (presumably this includes both people who were excused and those still in the selection process). Asahi Shimbun has a feature article (in the Nov 17 print edition) on the ups and downs of the selection process. According to a provided flowchart, the process typically goes something like this:

  1. People are randomly selected from the roster of eligible voters and must fill out a questionnaire about their eligibility, which they can then deliver in person or mail in. Many can get out of showing up for an interview at court for a variety of reasons – those 70 or older, those who have not completed middle school, people with “critical matters” to attend to, and those who have been sentenced to imprisonment are among those who do not have to serve.
  2. Of the 40 or so who are asked to come to the courthouse, about five stragglers will fail to appear and face a fine.
  3. Then it’s interview time. The head judge, the prosecutor, and the defense will hold a speak privately with each candidate. The judge will excuse around three people for the above legally permitted reasons mandated by law. The prosecutors and defense can then excuse up to seven people each without giving any reason. The judge can also suggest to either side that they let someone go. The article quotes a defense attorney explaining that he tends to excuse old people and women because they tend to throw the book at violent offenders. Another defender tries to pick mothers with children the same age as the defendant. A prosecutor let a woman go for keeping quiet and looking at the floor all the time. One judge asked a defender to let a woman go who looked too weak to fully participate (the defender agreed).
  4. After the initial selection process, the remaining candidates are decided by lottery. Six people are selected as lay judges, with two others chosen as backups. Those who are not chosen do not know whether they lose the lottery or if the lawyers in the case wanted them out.

Basically, it sounds like otherwise eligible people can get out of lay judge duty by acting unenthusiastic or fatigued because the lawyers want people who will be engaged and interested.

One complaint voiced a man who was excused: if you show up at the courthouse and are chosen as a lay judge, you’re immediately sequestered for about four days. That forces everyone to plan on being away for a few days even though most will be able to go home. The man suggested scheduling the trial a week after the interview day so the lay judges can make arrangements for an extended time away from home. That’s basically how it works in the US, if I recall correctly.

A woman who cares for her ailing mother full time wrote in her questionnaire that she would like to be excused, but the court called and told her she should come anyway. She had to pay for a home helper out of pocket to show up at court. She ended up not being selected, but since there was no way to plan she ended up having to pay for an extra day of care that she didn’t use.

Sadly this story was relegated to the back pages of the Asahi. This scheduling issue is a careless oversight that threatens to undermine the already shaky public support for this new system. Once chosen, almost everyone seems to feel the process was worth it, according to a survey. The next step is lessening the hassle for those who don’t get chosen.