Author: Joe Jones

Money for the blind

A high-level US court just ruled that American paper money must be redesigned so that blind people can distinguish bills by denomination. Other countries accomplish this through subtle tactile differences or different bill sizes, but all US currency feels more or less the same, at least when it’s fresh off the presses.

When I went to Albany in February to be sworn into the New York bar, I had a number of odd experiences, among them:

  • Drinking Chinese state-brewed beer in a sketchy hotel room while discussing what would happen if they went to war with Japan (this would have led to nothing good had the sole Chinese attendee not decided to “go to bed” early)
  • Sitting in a crowded waiting room next to a lawyer who works literally within eyeshot of my office window in Tokyo
  • Touching a girder from the World Trade Center

But probably the weirdest experience was when I bought a pack of gum inside the New York state government Cloud City.

Everything was normal until I went to the cashier. I put the gum on the counter. The cashier said “Hi, what are you getting today?” For many people, that would merit some kind of sarcastic response. As usual, I bit my tongue, which was probably a good thing because the cashier was blind.

I tried to act as un-shocked as possible, and said “Umm, a 5-pack of Doublemint.”

“OK,” she said, and started pushing buttons on the register. The register read out the numbers as she pushed them. “POINT SIX NINE ENTER. SEVENTY-THREE CENTS.”

“That’ll be 73 cents,” she said.

I handed her a five-dollar bill.

“Out of how much?” she said.

“Uhh, out of five.”

Anyway, I wonder whether she works there all the time. Maybe they just put her there on bar admissions day as an ethics test for new lawyers. Or maybe people really work on the honor system in Albany. Who knows. At least her job will be a bit easier in a few years’ time…

Google fails

No definitions of Bitchin were found in English

Definitions of Bitchin on the Web in Spanish:

* Bitchin’ es un EP de We Are Scientists, grabado entre 2001 y 2002 y lanzado el 30 de septiembre de 2002 por la propia discográfica de la banda …

I hope my friends do not use Google to translate my Facebook wall posts. Especially the Spanish-speaking ones: they will be even more confused.

Pacifist lawsuits: not just for Japan any more

It seems like every few months there’s yet another court ruling as to the constitutionality of Japan’s defense forces. Apparently, Americans are following suit with regard to the Iraq war.

New Jersey Peace Action et al. v. Bush, represented by the Constitutional Law Clinic at Rutgers University Law School-Newark, alleges that the war violates article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which assigns to Congress the authority to declare war.

Clinic director Frank Askin said the framers at the 1787 constitutional convention denied war-making powers to the president except in response to sudden attacks when Congress might not have time to react quickly.

“The founders were very clear that only Congress could make that awesome decision,” he said in a statement. “They [members of Congress] were not permitted to delegate that power to the president and thus be able later to disclaim responsibility for a decision gone bad.”

Interesting (but, I suspect, futile) arguments in the full article.

How does a samurai kill a duck?

I’m sure you can visualize many possibilities in your head, but if you go to Hamarikyu Gardens in Tokyo you can get an idea of how the shôgun did it back in the day. The general process sounds like it belongs in an ethnic joke book:

  1. Build a pond and a creek.
  2. Raise ducks in the pond.
  3. Hide an iron door and a giant net in the bottom of the creek.
  4. Lure the domesticated ducks into the creek using the sound of wooden boards. (I don’t know why ducks like this sound, but maybe that’s why we eat them, and not the other way around.)
  5. Wait for wild ducks to follow the domestic ducks into the creek.
  6. Pull up the door, scaring the bejeezus out of the ducks.
  7. Pull up the net, catching the ducks.
  8. Laugh heartily and retreat for wild escapades with concubines.

If you don’t believe me, check out the posted explanation in Japanese and Engrish:

Bad-ass

This guy would not be amused.

Hong Kong taxis and their Japan connection

During my New Year’s trip to Hong Kong, I managed to ride in a taxi only once. I was at Hong Kong International Airport and I needed to get to Mui Wo on the other side of the island of Lantau, where I was spending the night. This required a fairly expensive ride up and down a giant mountain in the middle of the island, but fortunately I got to split the fare with a friendly Cathay Pacific pilot who didn’t want to wait for the next elusive blue taxi.

You see, in Hong Kong, there are three kinds of taxis. In central Hong Kong and Kowloon, the most developed parts, you mostly see “red taxis” which are licensed to serve the urban center. In the New Territories to the north, you see “green taxis” which are limited to the New Territories. Lantau likewise has its own fleet of “blue taxis.” If you are traveling solely on Lantau, your only option is the blue taxi: a red or green taxi is not allowed to carry you. Which is a shame because there are a LOT of red taxis at the airport.

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I ended up calling a dispatcher (after waiting for a few minutes to see if a blue taxi would show up at random). Ten minutes later, a blue taxi showed up, and the pilot and I began a long trek across Lantau.

Most of the island is undeveloped mountains and hills, and the road crossing through the middle is in a never-ending process of being widened to two lanes. I learned from my traveling companion that driving is tightly restricted on Lantau, and even if you have a car there (which requires a special permit) you can’t drive it around during the day–only at night. The poor throughput on the mountain road was enough to convince me that said policy was justified. If you need a vehicle for personal or business use, there are used cars in el cajon that may fit your needs.

Our journey gave me plenty of time to notice something odd about the cab. It used to be Japanese, and in fact it still had a few Japanese stickers in the window, including a peeling and somewhat outdated fare quote in yen.

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It turns out that, at least according to Wikipedia, “almost all taxis in Hong Kong are Toyota Comfort“–the same model as the boxy taxis and police cars found all over Japan. After spotting this example, I spent quite some time getting intensely interested in Hong Kong taxis, and I noticed that this was not a one-off: many other Hong Kong taxis carry Japanese markings here and there. In some taxi windows, I could see spots where the stickers had been removed.

What led to this practice? I can’t say for sure, although I can give some plausible reasons.

  • One is that cars lose value pretty quickly in Japan because of stringent roadworthiness testing (“shaken“) requirements which make older cars prohibitively expensive to keep. As a result, exporting is a big business: a person who doesn’t want to pay for the inspection is often happy to sell their car to an exporter for a bargain price. Then the exporter can ship it to Australia, Russia, Hong Kong or elsewhere, sell it to a local and collect a tidy profit.
  • Hong Kong is also the closest left-hand drive territory to Japan, which makes it a natural market for used Japanese cars: they fit right in, much moreso than they would in Korea, Taiwan or mainland China (where people drive on the right).
  • Hong Kong shares the crowdedness and hilly terrain which Japanese taxis are (I assume) well designed to handle.

I’m sure there’s some funky tax or regulatory reason for this as well, which some friendly commenter will point out.

Anyway, Mui Wo, my final destination, was an odd corner of civilization, and it served to show me that even Hong Kong, the most modern and developed part of China, still has its little pockets of Third Worldliness.

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Who knew Bhutan could be so kinky?

While reading about Asia’s newest self-proclaimed democracy I did a double-take at the following factoid:

Bhutan’s first democratically elected prime minister will be Jigmi Thinlay, a charismatic politician who has portrayed the DPT as the party of ordinary Bhutanese. His rival, Sangay Ngedup, leader of the rival People’s Democratic Party (PDP), is the brother of the previous king’s four wives, all sisters.

(Note to readers: I know my last couple of posts have been frivolous. Many apologies. This stuff is just too amusing not to blog.)

Green solidarity? Emphasize the white

One of my best friends in college was a Taiwanese guy firmly in the “green” (pro-independence) camp. We had many conversations about the symbolism of green in the independence movements of both Ireland and Taiwan. We were also both into vexillology, the study of flags, and we often compared the evolution of Irish flags to the evolution of flags in Taiwan.

Fast forward a few years. Today was the St Patrick’s Day parade down Omotesando in Tokyo. Much to my curiosity, there were a couple of elderly Taiwan independence protesters out with their green Taiwan independence flags, which made for an interesting comparison with the Irish tricolors hung from flagpoles farther down the avenue. It was also an interesting contrast with the typical crowd of subculture groupies and bemused foreigners that hang out by the entrance to Yoyogi Park.

Green nationalist solidarity

Despite being color-coordinated for the occasion, they seemed rather lonely at their posts. Apparently getting Taiwan admitted to the UN is not high on the political priority list of most Tokyo residents.

Taiwan independence movement

For whatever reason, green is an underused national flag color once you go east of the Indian subcontinent and the extensive Islamic influence in that half of Asia. Macau has a nice green flag (as does Tokyo), but the nations of East and Southeast Asia have generally adopted red, white and blue in varying proportions, with yellow stars sprinkled here and there.

The consensus among books I’ve read and people I’ve spoken to is that green became associated with Ireland (and its native Catholics) simply because Ireland is a very green country–they don’t call it the “Emerald Isle” for nothing. (Although green is prominent in the flags of other Catholic countries–Italy, Portugal, Mexico and Brazil for instance–it doesn’t have religious significance in the stories behind any of these flags.)

Wikipedia’s explanation for the Taiwanese independence movement’s use of green is that the Democratic Progressive Party adopted green because environmentalism was a major part of its agenda, and the color eventually became associated with everything else the DPP advocated.

In both cases, it seems that green took on another meaning: it drew a sharp contrast to powerful adversaries who flew red and blue flags, namely the British in Ireland and the communists and Kuomintang in China and Taiwan. Then you have the United States, where the Green Party is the most popular (if you can call it that) alternative to the “red” and “blue” parties.

I’m not sure if there is really a point to these parallels, besides that people will find ways to divide themselves by color even when they’re all the same color to begin with. The Irish flag acknowledges this in its own way–it stands for peace (the white mid-section) between two opposing sides (the green Catholics and orange Protestants). Ireland eventually got this peace after a few decades of faking it. Who knows where Taiwan is headed–all I know is that I will support a green flag in Asia, because this part of the world is crying out for vexillological diversity.