Author: Joe Jones

Coming soon: Europe to Haneda?

It looks like the legal framework is now in place for flights between Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and the Netherlands. As mentioned in this space last year, the Japanese government has been pushing the notion that Haneda can replace Narita during late night and early morning hours as the capital’s terminal for long-range international flights, and this pairing seems to be the first beneficiary of the idea.

For those detached from the airline industry, KLM (the Netherlands’ main airline) is now owned by Air France, and has been partnered for something like 15 years with Northwest (the #3 international carrier in Tokyo) which is now owned by Delta. Haneda-Amsterdam service could be a boon for the AFKLDLNW bloc in securing a more solid position among frequent business travelers to Tokyo. JAL might be interested in the route as well, but they wouldn’t have the benefit of intra-European feed that KLM enjoys.

The original fortune cookie

This may shock you, but fortune cookies are not Chinese food, nor are they really Chinese-American food. They started out as a Japanese product, and were copied by Chinese-Americans in San Francisco decades ago to form the dessert staple of cheap Chinese restaurants across the US. (This was detailed in a New York Times article last year, and linked by Roy in a post which I somehow missed; I learned of it from watching the author of said article, Jennifer Lee, give this fascinating presentation on the evolution of Chinese food outside China.)

The predecessor of the Chinese-American fortune cookie is the tsujiura senbei, a cookie made of flour, sugar and miso which is sold at certain shrines. According to Wikipedia, it comes from the Hokuriku region. But after some Googling, I found out that these are still made and sold at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, and since I was visiting the city anyway, I decided to track some down. Sure enough, they were being sold in a few shops near the shrine, including one shop where they were being hand-made by an old fellow with a cast iron machine (as per the NYT article, which I didn’t discover until later).

As you can see, it’s larger than a fortune cookie, and the fortune (omikuji, actually) is held by the cookie’s fold rather than inside the cookie itself. In fact, there’s another surprise inside the cookie:

Those are dried soybeans, which serve to give the cookie a pleasant rattle as you shake it around. Hence the alternative name suzu sembei or “bell cookie.” I’m sure this was intended to please a hard-of-hearing Shinto deity, or something like that, but to me it was just an interesting modification on the fortune cookie style I grew up with.

The actual fortune looks like this:

And I’m pretty sure that it’s funny when you add “in bed” to the end. Some things are simply constant across cultures…

[Updated by Roy]

Unfortunately I had forgotten to charge my camera battery that day, but I got a few shots of the cookie making process before it died. They aren’t great, but I think you can get a fair idea of it.

What Joe forgot to mention-and this is critical information-is that they are miso flavored! There was a sign in all the shop windows saying this, and advertising that no eggs are used. Trying for the vegan market?

Shimamoto v. United and Japan’s legal attitudes toward alcohol

One of the odder legal stories of 2008 may have been a certain lawsuit against United Airlines by a certain Yoichi Shimamoto and his wife Ayisha. FlyerTalk had a big thread on it. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:

The Shimamotos were on a United flight from Japan to the US in business class, where alcohol is free and generally quite readily dispensed. Mr. Shimamoto became thoroughly trashed on the flight, and apparently a little belligerent. After deplaning at their first stop in San Francisco, while the couple was waiting in the immigration line, they got into an altercation of some sort and Mr. Shimamoto started beating his wife in public. He was arrested for assault, tried and convicted, and sentenced to probation in California followed by deportation to Japan.

Then it gets really weird. First, Mrs. Shimamoto successfully petitioned to have Mr. Shimamoto’s probation transferred to Florida, where Mrs. Shimamoto had a house. Then, with Mr. Shimamoto safely parked somewhere around Orlando, the couple sued United in Florida for Mrs. Shimamoto’s physical injuries and Mr. Shimamoto’s legal expenses, claiming that United should not have served more alcohol to Mr. Shimamoto while he was obviously wasted out of his mind. After a couple of weeks of spirited online discussion between armchair pundits, the Shimamotos withdrew their case. Perhaps United offered a settlement of some kind–the news reports do not say.

* * *

Although the gut reaction of most is to say “Ah-ha! Frivolous American litigiousness strikes again!” it’s actually quite easy for a booze server to incur tort liability because of their drunken patrons’ malfeasance. Every US state has some sort of “dram shop act” which imposes this sort of liability. Sales to minors are pretty much universally a basis for seller liability, and sales to the visibly intoxicated can lead to liability in many states.

Extending this general concept to an airline is not that illogical, although perhaps inconsistent with the fact that airplanes don’t really fall under a particular state’s jurisdiction while in flight (although the airlines themselves, which are tied firmly to the ground, might). Another hurdle is that most international flights fall under the Warsaw Convention, which caps the carrier’s liability for physical or property damage to passengers.

Of course, the real oddity in the Shimamotos’ case is that it wasn’t just the battered wife who sued–it was also her husband, who wasn’t really hurt except to the extent that he got himself in legal trouble. Still, the question of making airlines responsible for cutting off their patrons is an interesting one, and it may someday be solved in court by a more credible group of litigants.

* * *

A few posters at FlyerTalk have raised the question of whether Japanese law (and, by extension, society) condones or even encourages the practice of passing blame to the liquor or its server.

To some extent, this idea is actually getting traction in Japanese law, at least as far as The State is concerned. Anyone who eats out regularly in Japan has probably noticed the growing number of establishments that proudly state they will not serve alcohol to customers who come by car–this is largely because Japan’s revised Road Traffic Law of 2007 makes it a criminal offense for a restaurant or bar to provide alcohol to a person “at risk of” drunk driving. Another example is serving booze to minors, a crime under the “Fuzoku Eigyo” Act (which governs the nightlife industry generally) which can land the proprietor in jail.

Civil liability between private parties is a different story, though. It’s pretty well known that Japan is not a very litigious society–depending on which expert you ask, this is either because of cultural reasons (aversion to argument) or economic reasons (filing fees in Japanese courts are based on claim amount, so big lawsuits on a marginal basis are uneconomical to file, whereas the US system of charging flat filing fees encourages outlandish claims that can be whittled down through negotiation). So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that suing the bar for the drunkard’s acts has been less of a question in the Land of the Rising Nama.

It does come up, though. The scariest case for the bartender must be a 2001 case in Tokyo (noted in the Japanese Wikipedia article on drunk driving) where a group of friends drank for seven hours straight, got in a car and ran over a 19-year-old girl. The driver got seven years in prison, but his friends were found civilly liable to the tune of 58 million yen for having the guy drink while they knew he was getting behind the wheel. But in a more distant commercial context, there seems to be some reluctance to extend liability like this. Take one case in Saitama last year where families of victims of a drunk driving spree demanded that the barkeep’s criminal responsibility was as great as the driver’s. The judge handed down a suspended sentence for the alcohol providers, claiming that “there is no evidence that [they] expected the driver to act so recklessly (運転者の常軌を逸した暴走行為まで予見していた証拠はない).”

What’s the conclusion? Japan has a looser attitude toward alcohol in many ways (when’s the last time you’ve been carded here?) but its system can be pretty harsh on people who completely ignore its dangers. Thankfully, Mr. Shimamoto wouldn’t have much legal support under either system: the only tangible difference between the two countries in his case is that he can actually afford to waste the court’s time in the US.

Making a future for corporate aircraft in Japan – maybe using airports you didn’t know existed

Japan has long had an aviation policy which favors airplanes as a mode of mass transit, and favors big carriers like ANA and JAL. You can view this as populist or pro-corporate, or perhaps both. But one thing is for certain: private aviation has never been able to take off here, despite all the wealth and business available to support it.

As late as the mid-90s, long-haul private jet flights had their pick of five daily slots at Narita which were shared with charter flights, making it impossible to fly in and out of Tokyo without a couple months’ notice — enough to make US biz-jet industry representatives complain to Congress. Even for domestic flights today, the flight plan must be filed with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport a week or so before the flight, making it impossible to just jet around the country at short notice.

Another key problem is the lack of available facilities. Most huge cities around the world have airports with little or no scheduled service which can serve private planes almost exclusively: New York (Teterboro and Westchester), London (Luton and Farnborough), Paris (Le Bourget), Los Angeles (Van Nuys), Miami (Kendall) and Atlanta (DeKalb) have all gotten it right. The closest thing in Tokyo is the tiny airport in Chofu, which isn’t big enough to handle business jets and can’t be expanded due to the surrounding city area. (The situation is easier in Japan’s secondary cities, though–Osaka has the giant Yao Airport and the new Kobe Airport, and Nagoya’s old Komaki Airport offers many slots for private flights now.)

It isn’t even practical to keep a business aircraft on the ground in most parts of Japan because of high landing and parking costs. The Japanese business jet charter industry, inasmuch as it exists, largely relies on planes and crews based in Guam or other cheaper locales which are close enough to be halfway practical.

Still, Japan has an active Business Aviation Association which has been lobbying to make the government’s policies more friendly to small planes. Just last month, JBAA sent MLIT’s aviation bureau a request to upgrade Tokyo’s airports for easier use by private aircraft–mainly focusing on better facilities at Haneda and more slots at Narita.

The most interesting component of JBAA’s efforts is their proposal to upgrade of a third Tokyo airport for use by business aircraft. There has been much-publicized talk over setting up a big third airport to serve commercial traffic as well, but if the third airport’s role is downscaled a bit, more options become available. One thing you might not know about Tokyo is that it already has a ton of airports–at least ten within a couple hours’ drive of the city center. A good handful are enormous and can theoretically accommodate planes of all sizes. The only problem is that most of them are used for military/defense purposes. Here’s a Google Maps mashup I threw together to illustrate the options available.


View Larger Map

The JBAA has centered its lobbying efforts around the four largest military bases: Yokota, Kisarazu, Shimousa and Atsugi. Each is about as far from Tokyo as Narita (in the 50-90 minute range) and fairly well-situated for access by road (assuming someone who can afford a jet will at least spring for a limo to the airport).

Of course, there are problems inherent to any such proposal. These fields would have to be vacated or at least significantly ceded by defense units which seem to like their digs, and which might do more for the neighborhood economy than a collection of Learjets and Cessnas would. There’s also the ongoing presence of community protesters to consider–the same folks who forced Itami Airport to stop accepting 747s could easily derail plans to keep a vacated defense facility alive. And, of course, we live in a time when private jets often seem like an unacceptable luxury for many of the businesses which used them with reckless abandon just a couple of years ago.

Sean Connery vs. Japan: “Rising Sun” and “You Only Live Twice”

The man himself
The Man Himself

In a rare instance of parallel lives with MF commenters (who were doing the same thing in the replies to this post), I got into a spontaneous fit of impersonating Sean Connery’s Japanese last weekend. When my girlfriend started demanding the original article for comparison purposes, we decided to have a private screening of Rising Sun, where SC speaks a lot of Japanese, and You Only Live Twice, where he actually “becomes” Japanese.

Continue reading Sean Connery vs. Japan: “Rising Sun” and “You Only Live Twice”

Cause and effect in the Japanese office

Nice argument from Noah Smith, guest contributor at Observing Japan, which I would like to forward for our esteemed readers’ comment.

I am in a position to know that Japanese white-collar labor productivity is substantially lower than most other rich nations (including Asian nations such as Taiwan and Singapore). That means that whatever is getting done in all those long hours Japanese people spend in the office, it’s not as much as it could be. Any physics student will tell you that work equals force times distance*; Japanese workers put in a lot of force without getting enough distance.

Japan’s leaders should recognize this distinction. We all know the story of how government protection of Japan’s domestic service sector has left it inefficient, but it’s important to realize the real impact this has on the lives of Japanese people – parents who can’t go home to be with their children, salaries that are lower than they could be, exhausting hours of work put in with not enough to show for it at the end of the day. Maybe Aso should take a clue from King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 4:14, and help the Japanese people to work smarter, not harder.

MY COUNTERARGUMENT: Much to the contrary, the “inefficient” 18-hour day is probably based more on being the easiest way for husband and wife to survive many of the bizarrely fractured marriages that prevail in Japanese society. If husbands had to come home earlier in the evening, for whatever reason, there would be a lot more chopstick-throwing and perhaps some instances of “hot ochazuke”. (Note that I’m generalizing here — there are many women in the workforce these days and more than a few “stay at home dads” — but the traditional structure still prevails.)

THE QUESTION: Even though I think the insane Japanese workday is self-imposed for the sake of the mismatched couple’s sanity, there’s almost certainly a long-term benefit in giving more Japanese boys a regularly-present and halfway-conscious father. What’s the appropriate policy response to move Japan closer to this outcome?

Hiroshima’s airport syndrome

E-mail from a friend:

I look at the map and there’s a great airport right by the bay of Hiroshima. Great I think. Just like Fukuoka, an airport right in city center, nice and convenient.

But no, that’s the “Hiroshima West Flying strip.” The actual airport is, of course, up in the f***ing mountains, 50km and an hour bus ride away from Hiroshima.

How the f*** did this country get trains so right, and yet planes so wrong?

Check it out on Google Maps. You have to zoom into Hiroshima City to see the smaller airport.


View Larger Map

Hiroshima West was Hiroshima’s only airport from 1961 until 1992, when the new Hiroshima Airport opened outside the city. For a while Hiroshima West stayed alive as a hub for small regional prop plane flights, sort of like Sapporo’s Okadama Airport, but nowadays its operations are limited to a couple of podunk destinations, and everyone else has to either take the Shinkansen or subject themselves to the hour-long bus ride from the new airport.

Japan’s trains lucked out — they were set up (for the most part) before 1920, back when it was easy to find and expropriate land for lines and stations. Japan’s airports are much more recent creations. There are only two significant Japanese airports which predate World War II: Tokyo Haneda and Sapporo Chitose. Most of the major airports of the early postwar era were built as military bases during the war (Itami, Komaki, Fukuoka, Okinawa) and didn’t get civilian operations until the 1950s, by which point they were starting to be strangled by their neighboring cities, right when runway and terminal extensions were needed to handle the new generation of jets. This is how we ended up with inconvenient monstrosities like Narita and the new Hiroshima airport.

(The biggest postwar rail development, the Shinkansen network, is not coincidentally also an inconvenient one in places like Yokohama and Osaka, where they had to stick the terminal in the middle of nowhere for lack of better options.)

To Japan’s credit, most of the big-city airports here are now multimodal, with direct rail connections into the city. There are two rail lines that pass right by Hiroshima Airport — the Sanyo Shinkansen and Sanyo Main Line — and there have been a multitude of plans to connect one or both of these lines to the airport by a spur line, monorail, maglev, ropeway or any number of other mass-transit means. So why hasn’t this happened?

Both of those lines are JR lines, and Hiroshima is one city where JR has an ironclad grip on domestic travel. Tokyo-Hiroshima is 4 hours by Shinkansen: by plane it’s 90 minutes, but the transfer from Hiroshima Airport to the city takes 60-90 minutes depending on how long it takes for the bus to show up, and another 45-60 minutes to get to Haneda and check in makes flying a bigger hassle than it’s worth on this heavily-traveled route. The airlines can stay competitive in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka thanks to relatively convenient airports, but the inconvenience of Hiroshima Airport works in favor of the one company that has the power to make it more convenient.

Halloween in Tokyo

Apparently the Halloween party train on the Yamanote Line went off without a hitch:

This year’s story is rather interesting because of the crazy 2channeler element — check out the organizers’ assertion that the police showed up to protect the drunk foreigners from crazy organized otaku. Guess the latter get more scrutiny than the former these days.

Rated “MOO+”

This passage illustrates part of the reason why banks bought so many crappy mortgages:

In one email, an S&P analytical staffer emailed another that a mortgage or structured-finance deal was “ridiculous” and that “we should not be rating it.” The other S&P staffer replied that “we rate every deal,” adding that “it could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”

(source)