DEBITO SELLS OUT: CITES DIRE POVERTY FROM ACTIVISM
The Japan Times, April 1, 2010(Sapporo) April 1: Activist Debito Arudou announced in a press conference today that he will be hanging up his gloves and quitting activism.
“It sucks to support the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Debito was quoted as saying. “I’m tired of being a poor, huddling mass breathing for free.”
Debito claimed dire poverty. “Money (that’s what I want),” he said, citing the Beatles.
“From now on, I’m going to be a Japanese government shill, representing our incorruptible, self-sacrificing, and endearing bureaucrats as a bridge to explain our country’s noble and altruistic motives to the rest of the world. We are unique, after all. That line pays better.”
Clutching two burlap bags with dollar signs on them, he said, “Pay me in yen next time.”
When asked if this was not a departure from the standard Debito Doctrine, Debito said, “I’m a Japanese citizen now, so call me by my last name with a -san attached! Or I’ll sue you.”
Debito refrained from further comment, except to say, “Kora! I thought I just told you to call me ‘Arudou-san’!”
Author: Curzon
A Tragic Comedy in Ass Surgery
Some narative was inaccurate and corrected on the instruction of the author — Curzon
My post from last summer criticizing Japan’s medical system is still generating comments, so I thought it an appropriate time to share this guest post, authored by a friend and reader on his recent adventure through Japan’s medical system.
Back in August, I began to develop a massively painful cyst under the skin situated above my buttock and wanted to see a specialist. The ordeal was a real pain in the ass.
Japan and Oman
Over at ComingAnarchy, I have a post on the unique foreign policy of Oman. In reading about Oman, I read with fascination about the unique relationship that developed between Oman and Japan in the years before World War II.
The story begins when a traveler called Shigetaka Shiga visited Oman during the late winter of 1924. He visited the Sultan’s palace without any appointment, said he was from Japan and wanted to take the opportunity to visit the Sultan, to propose closer friendship between the two countries. After palace servants checked with Sultan Taimur, he welcomed Shiga, and the two had a good conversation about promoting bilateral relations. In this conversation, Shiga later remarked that Sultan Taimur said that Oman, due to its unique history with trading with the Far East, and sitting closer to the Indus River than to Mecca, belonged more in Asia than in Arabia.
Shiga visited as Sultan Feisal was enjoying the last years of comfortable rule in Oman. Born in 1886, he ascended to the throne in 1913, and faced widespread rebellion in the countryside. He was aided by the British, who ultimately brokered a peace that ultimately limited the Sultan’s power to the city of Muscat and the coastal region of the country, and took on great financial obligations to the British personally, which ruined him. He abdicated for financial reasons in 1932 and passed the throne to his son.
After his abdication, perhaps prompted by this chance meeting with Shiga, the former Sultan traveled across Asia to Japan, where he arrived in Kobe. He traveled under a pseudonym and hid his identity to all but top Japanese government bureaucrats. In Kobe, he became acquainted with a young Japanese lady and ended up marrying her in 1936. They settled down in Kobe, and the two had a daughter, Princess Buthaima, who was born in 1937.
During this time, the new Sultan of Oman Sultan Said visited Kobe together with his younger brother, Sayyid Tareq. They visited their father and it was there agreed that, should the new young Sultan die without issue (he did not yet have a son), his younger brother should become Sultan — an understanding that became known as the “Kobe Agreement.”
Taimur lived in Kobe for four years, but he left with his daughter when his wife died, and from there he moved to India. He died 1965 in Bombay, India, but ended his days by commending Japan for providing the highest standards of civilized living.
Sultan Said played an important role in modernizing his country but was unable to end the civil unrest that swept through the interior regions for decades. He was finally ousted and replaced with his son in a palace coup, who became the current Sultan Qaboos. Qaboos served in the British Army as a young man, and he visited Japan in 1964 on his way back to Oman after finishing his service in the English Army. This makes Oman the only country in the Middle East where three generations of leaders have visited Japan.
Such it is that Oman and Japan have a certain special relationship that exists, to a limited degree, to this day. Oman was critical in brokering non-military financial support for Kuwait during the Gulf War. Japan was Oman’s biggest trading partner in the early 1990s. And today Japanese investment forms a critical part of Oman’s oil production infrastructure.
Chinese Tourists Need Housetraining
Also posted at ComingAnarchy — please weigh in with comments there.
On the summit of Jebel Hafeet, on the border of the UAE and Oman, I found this graffiti — the characters for “China” spray painted on the rock.
I saw similar graffiti in a natural valley in Sapa, Vietnam, back in 2005. As China grows richer, and its citizens find more opportunities for overseas tourism, I guess we should expect more of this kind of vulgar graffiti to pop up in the natural tourist sites of the world.
I’m happy that China’s economic development has created an upwardly mobile middle class that has the opportunity to travel overseas. I just wish they wouldn’t take out their lack-of-modern-empire-penis-envy frustrations on the natural environment of the world. And Japan, perhaps China’s biggest buggaboo, is possibly the biggest target for this graffiti as more and more Chinese tourists flood in to visit its temples, shrines and other monuments.
(It could be worse — at least the Chinese government doesn’t have management over tourist sites outside China, which would be a real disaster for human civilization).
We’ve seen this one before, haven’t we
Spurned lover’s poisoned curry revenge
Day after day Lakhvir Singh sat in the dock at the Old Bailey, usually with her eyes closed, as family members and her love rival gave evidence against her.
From her arrest – of which a police officer said: “She appeared calm and controlled and did not show emotions” – right up to her conviction, Singh appeared detached from the cruel death she inflicted on a man she professed to love.
The court heard how the 45-year-old mother-of-three had a secret affair with Lakhvinder Cheema, which lasted 16 years.
But two weeks before he was due to be married to Gurjeet Choongh, “lovesick” Singh, laced a pot of curry with Indian aconite, which is known as the “queen of poisons”.
Japanese Names, White Faces
Marmot has a post titled “Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Mr. Fujita…” that looks at the case of Scott Fujita, a 6′5″ 250 pound white football player with a Japanese name who plays for the New Orleans Saints. He’s not ethnically Japanese, or even Asian, but was adopted by a family with a Japanese-American father born in the World War II detainment camps. He reportedly feels Japanese in his heart and is a fan of mochi ice cream and Pocky.
Reading the post and the comments reminded me of my meeting with Sailor Nathan Nakano, resident on the USS Kitty Hawk, when I visited as a guest of the Tiger Cruise in Yokosuka in 2006, seeing US military hardware and life on board an aircraft carrier, courtesy ComingAnarchy reader Eddie.
Curzon and Nakano, September 2006
I remember asking Nakano: That’s a Japanese name! What gives? And if I recall correctly, his father’s father was either Japanese or half-Japanese, making him one-fourth or one-eighth Japanese. You can read a news story that quotes Nathan here.
I wonder how many Westerners there are with Japanese names in the world? Marmot’s commenters have a few stories relaying similar stories about white kids with Japanese names due to adoption or stepfather relationships. There’s also a (sorta) opposite case, Haruki Nakamura, the current United States Chess Champion — he was born in Japan to a Japanese father and American mother, but his parents divorced, his mother remarried a Sri Lankan, and his stepfather, FIDE Master and chess author Sunil Weeramantry, taught him chess. So he’s got a Japanese name, but has only non-Japanese parents.
ドバイ巻き and an Overview of Dubai’s Japanese Restaurants
Sushi outside Japan has take on a number of different mutations. From the California Roll developed in Los Angeles in 1963, a number of “special rolls” have become popular in the Japanese restaurants of the world. Some are just ordinarily special, like the Dragon Roll (California Roll plus unagi eel), to the exciting Bronco Roll (California roll with salmon and tuna on top) and the amusing Disco Shrimp Roll (California roll with spicy sauce and baked shrimp on top).
Not surprisingly, an innovative Japanese restaurant in Dubai called 弁当屋 (Bentoya) has come up with the “Dubai Roll” — tuna, salmon and cucumber (with “spicy sauce” added to give it some bite).
Sorry for the poor resolution and lighting — this photo was taken with my phone.
Why the contents of tuna, salmon and cucumber? The joke among my Japanese colleagues at the restaurant was that, since Dubai is constantly pushing to be number 1 at everything, the Dubai Roll has to have all the top sushi ingredients in one bite.
As many readers may know, once you’re hanging out with Japanese overseas, there’s an overwhelming trend to going to Japanese restaurants, and I’ve now been to them all in my 10 weeks in Dubai. Bentoya is the oldest Japanese restaurant in the city, but it’s pretty disappointing cuisine. The other notable Japanese restaurants are:
* 喜作 Kisaku: Kisaku is the most authentic Japanese restaurant outside Japan you could conceive. It was founded and is managed by Chitoshi Takahashi, a Japanese chef who started in the Middle East twenty years ago working in-house for the Iran branch of a major trading company, and who is such a fixture of Japanese cuisine in the Middle East that he was recently featured as the first person profiled in the book 中東のクールジャパニーズ. This restaurant serves everything — real sushi and sashimi, yakitori, and basically anything else you’d find in a standard izakaya fare such as shiokarashi, ika natto, and daikon sarada. Not only are all the chefs Japanese, so are most of the waitresses, and more bizarrely, at least two Filipino waitresses working in the restaurant also speak Japanese fluently (I spoke with one, and she apparently worked in Nagoya for five years before moving to Dubai).
* 菊 Kiku: Kiku is the leading competitor to Kisaku for authenticity, with possibly better sake but certainly inferior food (note: some Japanese friends disagree with me). The biggest letdown to this place is that the menu is in Japanese, the food is real, yet the Filipino waitresses don’t speak a word of Japanese. That may sound silly, but coming from Kisaku, it feels incomplete. Speaking with Japanese friends, eating Japanese food, the illusion of being back in Japan by the real Japanese food is ruined when I have to say, “A plate of hamachi sashimi, please… yes, that’s yellowtail.”
* 都 Miyako: Miyako is a lifeline for many of the Japanese who are in Dubai neither by choice nor desire. It is situated in the Hyatt Regency, which has an entire residence wing of hotel apartments that is full of Japanese people. It has a sushi bar, but is more of a standard teishokuya You can read a Japanese review here. There are a number of Japanese people who, given the option, won’t even leave the Hyatt Regency complex on weekends, part of the phenomenon I mentioned previously on MFT here.
* Nobu: The Dubai branch of the signature restaurant by world-famous L.A. Japanese chef Mitsuhisa Nobu is situated in the lowest floor of The Atlantis. Some might say that Nobu is not genuine Japanese food, it’s designed for the Western, not Japanese, pallet, and it’s absurdly overpriced, but I could never say such a thing publicly.
* Zuma: Zuma is apparently conceived by a Japanese chef but the cooking and wait staff are all non-Japanese international, from Filipino to Kenyan to Chinese to Belarussian. The food here is pretty close to being authentically Japanese but it’s missing a certain zest. Or said otherwise, Nobu is Japanese food made for Western people, where as Zuma is Japanese food conceived by a Japanese chef but made by non-Japanese. A comparison between the two can be read here.
Dissolving a Local Assembly
There’s a rumble in Nagoya as the mayor is clashing with the assembly over a reduction in local taxes, and commentators are mulling over the possibilities of what could happen next. Will the assembly pass a no-confidence resolution against the mayor? Could a citizen petition demand the dissolution of the city assembly? Or will the assembly dissolve itself?
In Kasumigaseki, the central government is a classic example of a parliamentary system. The people elect their representatives to the Diet, which in turn selects the prime minister. A chief characteristic of this form of government is that the parliament and prime minister have their hands around each others throats: the parliament can pass a motion of no-confidence in the Prime Minister with a mere simple majority vote and force resignation or an election at any time, just as the prime minister has the power to dissolve the parliament at will (but which is not as straightforward as you might think).
Local governments are structured differently. Under the Local Autonomy Law (地方自治法) passed in 1947, Japan’s local governments follow a more republican form of governance that incorporates direct democracy. The voters elect not just the members of their municipal and prefectural assemblies, but also the mayor of the municipality in which they live, and the governor of the prefecture. In addition, the people have the right to petition to dissolve the assembly or force a vote to have the mayor or governor resign. The relationship between the governor or mayor — let’s call this person the “Executive” — and the assembly is more distant than relationship between the Prime Minister and the Diet. For a no confidence resolution to pass in a local assembly, 2/3rds of all assembly members must be in attendance, and 3/4ths of all attending members must vote for the measure. Once the chairman of the assembly delivers the resolution to the executive, he has ten days to either dissolve the assembly or resign. This is the only case when an executive can dissolve a local assembly.
The Local Autonomy Law, passed during the American occupation, did not grant the assembly the right to dissolve itself, because that’s not in the arsenal of an elected assembly in a republican government. But it wasn’t long before the Diet came under intense popular pressure to recognize the right of a local assembly to dissolve itself and call an election. So eighteen years after the passage of the Local Autonomy Law, the Diet passed in 1965 the “Special Measures Law concerning Dissolving the Assembly of Local Governments” (地方公共団体の議会の解散に関する特例法). The law is noticeable for its brevity at a mere two articles long, and yet the first article states the law’s purpose in a long-winded statement which shows, I think, how reluctant the scholars of political theory in Kasumigaseki were to meddle with the direct democracy of local governments:
Article 1. This law sets out special measures to the Local Autonomy Law regarding dissolving the assembly of local governments, following the trend of public opinion concerning petitions on dissolving the assembly of local governments, so that such assemblies can dissolve themselves and hold elections to listen to the opinion of local residents.
The second and final article goes on to set incredibly high standards for dissolution: 3/4ths of all assembly members must be in attendance, and 4/5ths of all attending members must vote for the dissolution. I do not know of any other elected assembly in the world that has such a steep threshold for passing a resolution. Consequently, you might think that this is an obscure procedure that exists under law, but which is never practically used.
Not so — a mere month after the law passed, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly dissolved itself after public and opposition pressure following an LDP bribery scandal (refereneced previously by Adamu in this post on Tokyo’s local elections). And the next year the Ibaraki Prefectural Assembly dissolved itself. Prefectural assembly dissolutions have been just about unheard of since, but dozens of municipal governments have dissolved as well, usually following the revelation of fraud or gross illegality during an election.
Panasonic in Mecca
Panasonic has quietly been a top topic in Japanese news stories concerning the Middle East this month by winning a contract to put up the first corporate billboard in the holy city of Mecca. The billboard will be near the airport and will be for consumer goods aimed at pilgrims.
I note that this has been published in a few media outlets in Japan, where the press release was issued in Japanese, but I cannot find news stories that report this in English and see no evidence that the story was published in Arabic.
A thread at 2ch brings up some interesting points that should have given Panasonic pause: “Isn’t this like breaking the prohibition on tall buildings in Kyoto?” and “I’m sure this is fine because they were speaking with Muslims on the deal, but I wonder what the extremists will think.” On the one hand it’s great that Japanese companies are breaking ground and leading the way as they push into new markets, but I hope they’ve done their cultural due diligence.
Sending Papers
Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010
Nudes land photographer in trouble
Kyodo NewsPolice plan to send papers to prosecutors shortly on photographer Kishin Shinoyama on suspicion of public indecency for shooting photos of nude models in public spaces for a book, sources said Saturday.
The police are consulting with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office on sending papers on the 69-year-old photographer and two female models, the sources said.
“Send papers to prosecutors” is a crude (but accurate) English translation of 書類送検 or shorui souken, a word frequently seen in Japanese news stories with no statutory basis or definition. What does it mean, and at what stage is Shinoyama in the criminal prosecution procedure?
“Sending papers” describes a situation where police officers have not arrested someone, or initially arrested them and released them, and then send the relevent evidence that identifies the suspect with the criminal offense. The word “sending papers” is not actually used by the police or prosecutors and does not appear in any criminal procedure legislation, but is a correct explanation of what happens — Article 246 of the Criminal Procedure Law obliges the police to promptly send all papers and evidence regarding the suspect and the incident (and information regarding confessions). Prosecutors can, and do, designate that some minor crimes be up to the discretion of the police to process independently or to decide at their discretion whether or not to send papers.
The background to Shinoyama’s case is that the photographer shot nude photographs of his two adult models in Tokyo in twelve public places, including a church and the Aoyama Graveyard, between August 16th and October 15th, 2008. The police received several complaints during this time and investigated one incident on September 7th, but Shinoyama responded by submitting a document to the police stating that his models were wearing swimming suits. When the photographs were published in his latest collection “NO NUDE” in September 2009, police felt compelled to proceed with a formal investigation.
Shinoyama’s public statements on this began with a defiant tone (“In my fifty years as a photographer…!”), but he has since taken a much more concilatory tone (“I’m sorry. I meant to consider my surroundings, but I was not careful enough”). That’s because in Japan’s apology-based criminal justice system, he still has time to avoid prosecution. Once the prosecutors receive the papers, they make the decision of whether or not to prosecute the case, under Article 247 of the same law, and have the option of deciding to not prosecute, under Article 248. At this point, the police are still “consulting” with prosecutors as to how and what to send them so as to be in compliance with their legal obligation. And the biggest issue with Shinoyama is a combination of the fact that he took public pictures of the nudes, that numerous people called 110 to complain, and Shinoyama’s denial of this fact at the time. If he apologizes enough, this appropriatly aged photographer could still avoid the most serious sanctions — or as one article in the Mainichi concludes, “it appears the goal of sending papers here is to put the brakes on similar acts.”