Author: Joe Jones

More boats, please

Quoth the Bloomberg:

Japan’s Coast Guard has sought a 68 percent increase in its budget to buy additional boats and planes to boost patrolling in the East China Sea and Senkaku Islands, the coastal defense agency said in a statement today.

The coast guard plans to spend 24.2 billion yen ($201 million) on new patrol vessels and airplanes and on increasing inspection in the year ending March 2007. Next year’s plans include buying 21 new patrol ships, 3 airplanes and 4 helicopters, the statement released in Tokyo said.

The Sankei newspaper today said the coast guard will spend 350 billion yen during the seven years starting April 2006 to conduct more patrols, including 24-hour monitoring, in the East China Sea and around Okinotorishima Island, the nation’s southernmost island.

Quite a turn considering that the JMSDF has been slowly downsizing over the last decade, thanks to the end of the Cold War and a perceived lack of nearby threats. Assuming this budget increase is approved by the government, it could signal that Japan’s Asia policy is harder than just uncompromising words. They’ve got seaman ship, too!

Memoirs of a Geisha: If it isn’t one inauthenticity, it’s the other

Curzon pointed me toward Tom Barnett’s take on the new movie, citing it as evidence that Barnett “is a complete git.” Let’s quote:

Unfair to have Chinese playing Japanese? About as unbelievable as having Brits and Aussies play Americans? Or Americans playing English? Or Canadian Mike Myers playing Austin Powers?

Puh-leeze. Marshall went with these three ladies because they’re simply the biggest best stars available. Globalization, baby.

The hubbub over Chinese actresses playing Japanese characters is a bit misplaced, I think. It’s not directly comparable to Mike Myers playing Austin Powers: it’s closer to, say, Patrick Stewart playing Jean-Luc Picard. When it comes down to it, almost all of the visible differences between Han Chinese and Japanese are in language, mannerisms, and (often) dress. A well-coached Chinese person could play a Japanese person convincingly enough, but probably not with their default skill set. So Barnett’s take… not quite “git” in my book.

What bugs me more than the movie’s lack of racial purity is that the characters, who are supposed to be in old-school Kyoto, speak horribly-accented English for hours on end. And the Chinese actresses are speaking in Chinese accents… totally different from Japanese accents. I can’t foresee sitting through the whole movie without throwing things at the screen. Maybe it’ll be tolerable on mute.

On a related note, this is a snippet from a conversation I had with Adamu concerning the HBO series “Rome,” which, I should add, Curzon really likes.

[10:20] Adamu: does everyone have a british accent
[10:20] Joe: yup
[10:20] Adamu: good then its authentic

Japanese Peruvians: the rest of the story

The recent Fujimori ruckus reminds us of the often-forgotten diversity in Latin America. Besides Native Americans (yes, they live in South America, too), there are about 90,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in Peru.

Japanese immigration to Peru started in 1899 with a boatload of 790 people, arriving in Callao to make a new living as sugar plantation workers. But, as in the United States and other American countries, immigration ended in the early 20th century, and a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment swept the country in the 1930s (when Fujimori’s family entered the country), culminating in mass riots in 1940. Although Peru waited until 1945 to declare war on Japan, the government froze Japanese assets immediately after Pearl Harbor, confiscated Japanese-owned property, and deported some Japanese individuals to U.S. concentration camps beginning in 1942. Even after the war, it was not until 1955 that assets were un-frozen, and Japanese could not enter Peru until 1960 (and were even then subject to strict quotas and eligibility requirements).

Of course, by then, the job market in Japan was much better than in Peru. But Peruvians in Japan were few and far between… until 1987, when Tokyo began issuing visas for ethnic Japanese in South America to return to Japan as workers (a practice called dekasegi). And the Peruvian population swelled in response: from 500 in 1985 to 10,000 in 1990. Despite the unimpressive Japanese economy of the 1990s, Peruvians in Japan quadrupled in number between 1990 and 2000. Brazilians grew by a similar proportion.

Now, there are 55,000 Peruvians in Japan, making them the #5 foreign nationality after Koreans, Chinese, Brazilians, and Filipinos. Since most are ethnic Japanese (or at least pretending to be), they are hard to distinguish from natives, especially when they speak the language and have Japanese names (as they commonly do). There are enough in the major cities that you’re likely to meet a few if you hop around enough bars and clubs.

So while Fujimori’s story is far from usual, finding a Japanese in Peru or a Peruvian in Japan is far from unusual.

Happy turkey day

Some thoughts from Christopher Hitchens in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (print edition, which I only read when travelling by air):

Considering Thanksgiving, that most distinctive and unique of all American holidays, there need be no resentment and no recrimination. Likewise, there need be no wearisome present-giving, no order of divine service, and no obligation to the dead. This holiday is like a free gift, or even (profane though the concept may be to some readers) a free lunch—and a very big and handsome one at that…

It is the sheer modesty of the occasion that partly recommends it. Everybody knows what’s coming. Nobody acts as if caviar and venison are about to be served, rammed home by syllabub and fine Madeira. The whole point is that one forces down, at an odd hour of the afternoon, the sort of food that even the least discriminating diner in a restaurant would never order by choice.

You know, he’s right on that last part. Facing a cooler of cheesecake and pumpkin pie at Costco the other day, I picked the pumpkin pie with no deliberation. And although pumpkin pie is tasty, I would have picked the cheesecake on any other day of the year, again with no deliberation. That’s cultural brainwashing at work. Not that I’m complaining; pumpkin pie is like autumn leaves, the sort of thing a year wouldn’t be complete without.

The economics of language learning

Following up on the last post, chew on this: although there are plenty of languages that seem useful, there is no rational reason for you to learn most of them.

Of course, it’s very rational (in fact, often unavoidable) to learn a language when you have no choice—if you live or work where that language is all that’s spoken. That’s part of the beauty of exchange programs and cross-cultural romance. But beyond that, you’re better off hiring a translator or interpreter when you need one: it’s much cheaper, and likely to be just as effective.

That’s why Americans rarely learn foreign languages: the benefits simply aren’t there. That’s also why children learn languages “more easily” than adults: they have much less choice in the matter, especially if their peers are speaking a different language. Adult professionals, like the aforementioned lawyers in Tokyo, can just outsource their language needs, and save a lot of time and money by doing so.

So what accounts for those of us who learn languages for the hell of it (including the authors of this blog)? Basically, we’re nuts. Not thinking things through. I love knowing Japanese and I keep learning more, but it hasn’t been particularly useful in my life, except when haggling with electronics dealers in Den-Den Town. Yet I keep learning it, probably because the amenities in Japan are so tempting, and, like most Westerners who know Asian languages, I have way too much fun flaunting the skills (what Jay Rubin calls the “look, Mom! I’m reading Japanese!” effect).

On the other hand, a professor of mine, who loves Japan enough to spend a few months teaching there every other year or so, has stopped bothering with language classes. For him, there isn’t much necessity: his family speaks English, his classes are taught in English, and a couple of lines from a phrasebook are all he needs to order lunch or locate an English speaker. Maybe if he were dropped into a high school classroom in Osaka, he would start figuring out those characters.

One of my favorite analyses on this issue comes from amateur linguist/online ne’er-do-well Mark Rosenfelder, who wrote a nice, meaty article on the “how”s and “why”s of language acquisition, and reached the same conclusion: language learning almost always comes from necessity, and the exceptions can be counted as strange obsession. So before you go off to learn a language for kicks, consider what your obsession is.

On language skills in the Tokyo legal market

If you head to Japan to find a legal job, you’ll realize something pretty quickly: What school you went to, what you did there, and what work experience you have, all trumps your Japanese ability. Easily. A person from a top-20 school who speaks no Japanese at all is miles ahead of a person from a second or third-tier school who’s totally fluent.

That’s not to say language doesn’t matter at all. It can save an otherwise crappy resumé (mine comes to mind), and it can qualify a person for a better job. If you have an Ivy League degree and speak Japanese, the town is your oyster. But it’s not nearly as important as the other qualifications that law firms look for back in the US.

I used to think this was just a matter of priorities: firms value nice schools over language ability, since the schools woo clients more easily, there’s no shortage of translators and interpreters to bridge the language gap, and many Japanese clients don’t expect to see a gaijin speaking their language anyway. No doubt all of these factors play a role.

But I was recently talking to a seasoned lawyer from a big American firm in Tokyo, and he said that language skills can actually be a problem for many clients. That made no sense to me, so I prodded him on. “It’s actually pretty simple,” he said. “In many cases, they don’t want you to know everything that’s happened on their side of the case. If you know Japanese, you have a way of independently finding out. So if you don’t know Japanese, they figure they have more control over you.”

So what’s the best solution? Know the language, but don’t make the fact readily apparent?

Sociopolitical progress goes “moo”

The world explained by cows. A classic. My favorites:

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

HONG KONG CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the right to all seven cows’ milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because of bad feng shui.

Shorter, and therefore less awesome, versions have floated around the ‘net for a while. What can I say, I’m a late adopter.