Author: Adamu

Most Congressional hearings are now “kabuki”

Click here to watch some wrinkled political blowhard casually dismiss an entire branch of government with our favorite tired cliche:

(The BP hearings are) not a forum where we can expect answers. It’s kind of a “kabuki drama” if you will, like most congressional hearings.

You can leave comments on the BP oil spill under this post. Bill Maher said that even he is too depressed to read the news these days, and I agree. It seems like such devastation for so much of the gulf I am tempted to block it out of my mind, which is the kind of tactic I usually reserve for the suffering in third world countries.

(Borrowed the fun image from Google. Bloomberg’s Youtube channel doesn’t allow embedding)

Zainichi players on the North Korean soccer team

With all the World Cup excitement in Japan right now, I just thought I’d link to this Bloomberg report on the two players from Japan on the NK soccer team:

North Korea, the lowest ranked team in the soccer World Cup, faces five-time champion Brazil tonight with its hopes pinned on two players from Japan, as football is one of the great games you can watch play and enjoy, of course there are other games like pickleball which you can learn to play it if you get the pointing system in pickleball and why is important.

Japan-born striker Jong Tae-Se and midfielder An Yong Hak, who both play in the J. League, will represent the communist nation in its first World Cup match in 44 years, playing at 8:30 p.m. local time in Johannesburg. Ladbrokes Plc, a U.K. oddsmaker, rates North Korea a 1,000-to-1 chance to win the tournament.

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This is the first time players from Japan are representing North Korea at the World Cup, according to Ri. Jong, 26, who plays for Kawasaki Frontale in the J. League, and Omiya Ardija midfielder An, 31, were named in the national team last month.

The two players attended North Korean schools in Japan, hold North Korean passports and have no problem communicating with Pyongyang-based teammates, Ri said.

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North Korea, playing in its second World Cup since reaching the quarterfinals in 1966, has no professional teams. National team players earn about twice the average laborer’s salary, according to the North Korean football association.

I am hoping for a US-Japan championship match, but of course that isn’t realistic. Alternatively, for those who are into other sports such as the one which mentions a bowstring, they can look elsewhere for better information.

Yes he Kan? Kan faces early test – postal votes, or the people’s?

New prime minister Naoto Kan has to make a major decision that will likely characterize his style of leadership going forward.

The decision revolves around the current postal reform legislation – the bills, which would reorganize Japan Post to ensure greater government control and a firmer mandate of universal service, have already passed the Lower House but must pass the Upper House to become law. But there isn’t enough time in the current Diet session to get the job done in the Upper House. Kan has the option of extending the Diet session to get the bills passed, which would postpone the looming Upper House election. But should he?

The postal bills are incredibly divisive, potentially dangerous as policy, and have been crafted to pander to special interests without much serious thought to Japan’s long-term future. Bending over backwards to get the bills passed would be a clear sign that the DPJ-led government needs to rely on postal worker support to stay in power. He and his party govern in a coalition with the PNP, a small party with the postal workforce making up the bulk of its support base. The PNP has threatened to leave the coalition and deny the DPJ an outright majority in the upper house unless the bill is passed early.

On the other hand, not postponing the Diet session would imply Kan is opting for an early election, in other words he could capitalize on the support of the general public afforded him in the wake of his appointment as PM. Sure, this option might lose him the PNP, but he might not need them come July if things go his way.

So which will it be? Kan has apparently promised to decide on this tomorrow morning. I eagerly await his decision.

Wherein one MP’s senioritis has potentially enormous consequences


The devil made him do it.

Anyone remember this story from last month?

Masatoshi Wakabayashi resigned from the Upper House on Friday after he was admonished for pressing an electronic voting button of a fellow Liberal Democratic Party member seated next to him.

The Democratic Party of Japan submitted a motion to discipline Wakabayashi, 75, a former farm minister, to the chamber on Thursday.

LDP President Sadakazu Tanigaki urged Wakabayashi to take responsible action Thursday to avoid causing problems ahead of the Upper House election this summer.

If you’re like me, you probably shrugged it off as a joke, a non-story. He explained in Japanese 魔が差した which means “I don’t know what got into me” but could be literally translated something like “a devil made me do it.” Wakabayashi had already announced his intention to retire at the end of the Diet session, but this has got to be the worst case of senioritis ever. A seat in the Diet is nothing to take lightly, even if you’re in the less powerful upper house.

But with the ruling coalition’s majority so thin, this is actually kind of a big deal, especially now that the DPJ/PNP/SDP ruling coalition has broken up.

This weekend, PM Hatoyama fired Mizuho Fukushima from his cabinet over their disagreement on relocating Futenma air station. In response, Fukushima’s Social Democratic Party decided to quit the coalition. This development probably has some serious implications for PM Hatoyama, but for this post I just want to focus on how it affects the coalition’s standing in the Diet as the session nears its end.

This shrinks the DPJ/PNP’s upper house majority shrink to just two seats right at the end of the legislative session. The coalition is currently rushing to pass bills that would alter the course of reforming Japan Post, among some other initiatives aimed at the election in July.

With 122 seats together, the coalition now has a thin two-seat majority. However, it would have been even smaller one seat majority if Wakabayashi were still around.

I have no special information on the state of Diet negotiations and debate, but a one-seat majority can have all sorts of potential consequences. One situation I could think of is the American Democrats’ “super-majority” in 2009 as they tried to pass health care reform. Basically, any upper house member could have threatened to defect, delay, or vote against the party to extract some concessions.

But now that they don’t have to worry about such annoyances, the DPJ should probably call Wakabayashi to thank him (or maybe Tanigaki for pressuring him to quit).

Since he was elected in a prefectural district (Nagano) instead of proportional representation and there is not enough time to hold a special election, it seems that according to the rules Wakabayashi’s seat will remain open until the upcoming election in July.

(Thanks to Curzon for the idea)

Hello Kitty owner turns things around by licensing anything and everything


Source: Pop Crunch

I’ve long been a detractor of Sanrio’s policy of licensing Hello Kitty’s image to appear on just about anything (and some offerings have been downright questionable [NSFW]). But apparently, if you throw hundreds of darts at the board over ten years, you’re eventually going to hit a few bulls-eyes:

Sanrio Co., the Japanese owner of the Hello Kitty character brand, may boost profit after arresting a 10-year slide in sales by slapping its logo on wine, wallpaper and minicars.

The popularity of Hello Kitty, a white cat with a red bow and no mouth, with celebrities including Lady Gaga and Paris Hilton, has led the company to focus on licensing and to pare its retail and restaurant businesses (Sanrio intends to shut 40 of its 260 gift shops in Japan over the next three years).

Sanrio almost doubled overseas licenses last year and counts clothing chains Hennes & Mauritz AB and Inditex SA as customers. President Shintaro Tsuji, 82, plans to set up an office in Dubai this month to grow in the Middle East.
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An appearance by Hilton, a reality TV player, at Sanrio’s 35th birthday party for Hello Kitty, and by Gaga, a pop singer, on Japanese television holding a stuffed toy, helped the company boost fiscal 2009 sales 0.8 percent from the previous year, the first annual gain since 1999.

“Hello Kitty’s Zen-like calmness and faceless expression are the major reasons for its appeal across age groups and markets,” said Martin Roll, chief executive officer of Singapore-based consulting firm VentureRepublic.

Note that a major part of the strategy is to “expand beyond Europe, North America, and Japan” — in other words, the developed world might have had enough of Hello Kitty, so now it’s time to endear her to the rest of the world. Click through to see Lady Gaga in a Japanese TV appearance, decked out in Hello Kitty everything:

Continue reading Hello Kitty owner turns things around by licensing anything and everything

White American pop singers marketed in Japan

Update: They are apparently not managed by Johnny’s.


Every girl’s fantasy English teachers?

Meet the EastWest Boys. Assembled by Johnny’s Entertainment Sony Music Japan through an audition process, the group, dubbed a “5 in 300 million miracle,” is being solely marketed and promoted within Japan, where they are competing for the hearts of teenage girls.

For their latest single “Take Me There,” they have entered a promotional tie-up with fashion brand Peach John (whose president was mired in scandal last year over a dead woman in her apartment). They are on the cover of the latest catalog and lucky viewers will be able to catch their song on TV ads.

Here’s a YouTube video of a single that recently got some play on Japanese TV, “This Time”:

Sure, I have seen dozens of cheap, poorly produced Japanese pop acts, and some pretty bad American pop groups as well. But watching Americans run through the exact same half-baked dance routines as SMAP produces a special kind of cognitive dissonance.

Johnny’s has made sure to add a few bells and whistles to maximize appeal – the songs are in simple English, and the melody has enough of a pop-punk/emo feel to seem kind of foreign. This was the tune I saw on a few morning shows promoting the group as a new kind of pop act. Girls attending promotional appearances looked overjoyed to hug their new idols.

The music gets much worse when you watch the videos for songs that people didn’t pay enough attention to. “Yesterday’s Hero” was obviously filmed in the exact same warehouse, and the song is 100% cookie-cutter J-POP – no halfway-redeeming nods to American emo to be found. Are they wearing primary colors to make them look like Power Rangers?

While there’s not much to compare, a much, much more listenable American entrant into the Japanese pop world is Jero, the African American enka singer.

The group’s videos are hosted on an official channel, which is kind of a departure for Johnny’s who until recently had a strictly Internet-phobic PR stance. By offering some of their content for free on the web, they are clearly trying to save some PR money by generating buzz online. The upside of that strategy is it gives us a lot of information on these guys that is usually not available on your typical J-pop group.

Continue reading White American pop singers marketed in Japan

Right wing new-age cult party lands a Diet seat

Troubling news:

The Happiness Realization Party, the political wing of new-age religion Happy Science, has scored its first seat in Japan’s legislature. Yasuhiro Oe (pictured), a proportional representation member of the upper house, has announced his intentions to change affiliation. The move comes after Oe chose not to join his comrades in the Japan Renaissance Party (改革クラブ) as it transformed into former health minister Yoichi Masuzoe’s new Nihon Rennaissance Party (新党改革). Oe commented that he joined because he shares most of the same conservative principals as HRP.

In a blog post, Oe writes that HRP had approached him last year about running with their backing in the 2009 lower house election, but he did not know enough about the group to accept. However, he has since learned that party leader Ryuho Okawa is a man with strong beliefs, the party shares his views on issues that are important to him, and that Happy Science is not one of those “questionable, strange religions” that forces people to spend money on expensive altars/shrines or makes them beat drums. (According to this anti-cult website, Okawa makes most of his money by making followers buy his published works). Add to that the recent drama with his former colleagues, and that was enough to make the switch. He is apparently not a Happy Science adherent.

I had not heard of Oe before now, but according to Wikipedia he has a history of switching affiliations. The Wakayama native first became an upper house member in 2001 as a PR candidate on the LDP ticket, then as a DPJ candidate in 2007. He later joined JRP as a founding member in 2008, citing problems with the DPJ’s methods. In terms of policy, he has adopted some typical right-wing positions – he’s pro-Taiwan, a firm Nanjing Massacre truther, and a vocal supporter of the victims of North Korea’s kidnapping program. He comes up for reelection in 2013. As Happy Science’s go-to man in the Diet, Oe will have the power to question government officials to try and get them on the record on issues relevant to the party. At the very least, you can probably expect some fairly bizarre formal written questions to the cabinet coming from Oe’s office.

HRP Update

The Happiness Realization Party was founded in May 2009 ahead of last year’s election season, fielding candidates for the Tokyo prefectural assembly and then in the historic lower house election in August on a radical program of major social upheaval and fiery neoconservative bluster. They failed to win a seat in any of the races, which cost them a lot of money in lost candidacy deposits. There have been organizational setbacks, too – weeks before the lower house election they announced they were pulling out of the race entirely before reversing themselves just three days later. And in its year of existence the party has had a total of six leaders (even worse than the LDP’s turnover rate!).

Money and bumbling will not stop these people, however – they just might be here to stay. Wikipedia says a candidate HRP backed in Machida-shi won a city assembly seat, which is a tangible success. The posters are still around Adachi-ku. Their website is packed with content and activity, including official commentary on the scandals of the day, ranging from the Ozawa scandal to Princess Aiko’s bullying troubles (their typically hard-line solution – radical reform of the teachers’ unions and a sweeping “bullying prevention law”). And they have already announced more than 20 candidates for the upper house elections this July.

If they can’t manage to actually win elections on a national level, convincing sitting members to switch parties like this might be a good way to get their foot in the door, especially in this time of party realignment.

For more info on what the Happiness Realization Party stands for, check out my post from last year’s election season.

(via J-Cast)

PS: This is my first in what will hopefully be a regular series of posts on the upcoming election. Stay tuned!

Mainichi announces new, Twitter-enhanced dead-tree edition

National news daily Mainichi has announced a new dead-tree version of its newspaper to go on sale June 1. Named Mainichi RT, the daily tabloid will print the most-viewed stories online, along with Tweets about those stories and some other extras. A subscription will cost Y1980 a month, which would come out to around Y100 on newsstands assuming they only print weekdays. It’s somewhat similar in concept to Sankei Express, a concise Y100 edition of Sankei Shimbun released a couple years ago, and the many free newspapers distributed in major metropolitan areas in the US (except of course, those are free).

Could there possibly be a less useful idea? Are people supposed to buy it to see if their tweets made it in? If you know all the stories are already online, why bother picking up a newspaper? Someone please tell me what I am missing.

(found via J-Cast, cross-posted from Google Buzz)

Japan Times on Geos collapse – read Adamu’s UNCUT commentary

Richard Smart writing for the Japan Times has an article looking at the Geos meltdown in detail. I am quoted with my take on how Geos handled its demise and the outlook for eikaiwa employment.

Adam Richards, a 28-year-old translator and writer on Japan at the Web site and travelogue Mutant Frog, argues that the G.communication takeover has in some ways made the best of a bad situation.

“Geos seems to have done relatively well by students and teachers by finding a backer before announcing the bankruptcy,” he says. “That said, Nova’s messy bankruptcy was such a nightmare Geos can’t help but look better by comparison.”
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Japan Economy News’ Worsley agrees that the eikaiwa schools need to change to survive.

“The industry itself will continue to shrink as does the population and number of younger people in Japan. In order to avoid disappearing, language school operators are going to have to embrace new technologies, diversify their products and services, and appeal to new market segments,” he says.

This, argues Richards of Mutant Frog, is likely to lead to worse conditions for newcomers to Japan.

“It really looks like the era of easy employment is over, though it seems like there are still opportunities out there,” he says.

In the interest of context, here is what I commented to Richard in response to his questions:

I obviously don’t know exactly what happened, but a multitude of factors have conspired against the eikaiwa industry – cutbacks in consumer spending, corporate belt-tightening, cuts to government subsidies, and tighter regulation are the big ones. It seems like Geos was unable to shrink down to size fast enough to adapt to the changing environment. Geos adopted a somewhat similar strategy to Nova – grow large and bring in lots of new students. Then, in April 2006 a Supreme Court decision led to a swift change in the regulatory environment – eikaiwa schools suddenly had to set up sensible refund policies (and in Nova’s case front a flood of refund requests), and this made the economics of a large chain less attractive. Geos apparently weathered the change relatively well, but once Nova failed so spectacularly it did serious damage to the reputation of eikaiwa as a service. This, combined with the economic downturn starting in 2007, probably did Geos in as their sources of cash dried up.
It really looks like the era of easy employment is over, though it seems like there are still opportunities out there. Berlitz and ECC seem to be hiring. Generally, I would recommend applying for JET or even teaching English in a different country, but if you have your heart set on working in Japan and don’t mind the salary levels, then why not?
There is a danger the Geos bankruptcy will continue the downward spiral that Nova set in motion. When there is a bankruptcy, you inevitably have students with contracts that are either broken or not satisfactorily fulfilled, and you have teachers who find themselves either out of a job and possibly unpaid or thrust into the arms of new management that may treat them differently. The general dissatisfaction gets reported in the media and spread by word of mouth, fueling the perception that eikaiwa is a scam or otherwise not worth the trouble. However, Geos seems to have done relatively well by students and teachers by finding a backer before announcing the bankruptcy. That said, Nova’s messy bankruptcy was such a nightmare Geos can’t help but look better by comparison.
Japanese people want to learn English as much as they ever did. All are required to study it in school but most never come within a mile of fluency. They spend their childhoods being fed the idea that speaking English is the key to success yet they never get there! So as long as the public education system keeps creating this demand, I think there will always be supplemental learning options like eikaiwa.