Author: Roy Berman

Dumbest research project ever?

I think we have a very strong contender here.

Karen, formerly a Hong Kong-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, seeks your input and is traveling around Asia for the next few weeks looking for people to interview.

Give your ideas below or shoot over an email. Here is Karen’s pitch:

Last month I wrote a two-part series for the Post called “Continental Divide” about the problems divorcing when you live outside your own country. I’m now in the region developing this series into a bigger project–both for the paper and as a possible book/film– on expat lives.

Expats live in a parallel universe. While they are culturally fish-out-of-water they can also live glamorous lifestyles. And while it can be a great experience for some, there is also a dark side to expat life. I’d like to further explore the issue by asking the simple question: Can marriages survive the expat life?

I’m looking for both men and women who are willing to share their experiences and willing to talk about the unique challenges they face. Men work long hours, are more stressed at work, and encounter greater temptation in the region. Women often quit good jobs at home, and while they find themselves nicely pampered at home, they often seen their identity slowly slip away as they face long days without husbands, and long months without family members or support systems.

So if you have something to say on the issue you an contact me at karen at mazurkewich dot com

I hope some people do write her with their opinions on this piece of Orientalist fantasy tripe. And this lady wrote for the WSJ? I take back everything I ever said about hoping the big newspapers survive.

Goodbye New Jersey?

From the current NYT:

Dr. Chu faces a variety of conflicting mandates. For example, he said that using more renewable energy is a national priority and thus will require a national electric grid. To help create such a grid, a 2005 law gives the department the authority to designate high-priority corridors, to overrule local objections to new power lines. But Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, complained that the department had designated his entire state, New Jersey, as part of a corridor. Mr. Chu promised to investigate.

Does this mean that our entire state will be paved over? Having all the turnpike jokes come true would be very traumatic.

Who owns these bodies?

Interesting mini article from the Taipei Times a few days back.

WWII graves located

Taiwan’s representative office in Papua New Guinea has located graves that it believes to be those of Republic of China (ROC) soldiers who died in World War II while they were enslaved by the Japanese army on the Pacific island, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. Lee Tsung-fen (李宗芬), deputy-head of the ministry’s Department of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, said that local Chinese compatriots said the graves at Rabaul were first discovered by an Australian pilot. It is thought that more than 1,600 ROC soldiers were captured by the Japanese and sent to Papua New Guinea camp during the war. Many of the soldiers reportedly either died in the camp or on the way to it. Lee yesterday said the Ministry of National Defense would send officials to the island to ascertain the identities of those in the graves, adding that the ministry would decide whether to transport the remains back to Taiwan after consulting with the relatives of the men.

The ROC is of course the official name of the government which now runs Taiwan and its accompanying islands, but during WW2 it was one of the two governments competing for mainland China, along with the CCP, while Taiwan was a Japanese colony. Presumably these soldiers were in fact soldiers from the ROC of that time, i.e. NOT Taiwan, were were fighting against Japan and then captured as POWs. Of course, this brings up the question of who should claim these bodies. Is it today’s ROC, i.e. “Taiwan”, or the PRC, i.e. “China”? While similar questions have come up in the past regarding property disputes between the two governments, this case is complicated by the fact that much of the surviving ROC military moved to Taiwan, along with many of their relatives. Should these remains be brought to:

A: Their place of origin (China, NOT Taiwan)

B: The place held by the successor to the military and government that they fought for (Taiwan, NOT China)

C: The location of their closest living relative (could very well be either Taiwan OR China)

When I think kabuki, I think Iceland

Another usage of the dreaded kabuki metaphor, this time in the midst of a very entertaining Slate.com report from the protests in economically devastated Iceland.

It is an accusation that sits uncomfortably, a reminder that this weird public Kabuki is, somehow, the glint off larger problems.

In this case, I get the impression that kabuki is not being used, as has become traditional, to represent an oft-repeated piece of empty political theatre but simply as a description of meaningful yet incomprehensible political theatre. Of course, a better choice of metaphor would be noh.

Japan as a model for American prison reform?

The Washington Post has a very interesting article on Senator James Webb (D – VA)’s campaign to reform US criminal justice and prisons. Webb seems to be among the few senators who actually realizes how broken the US justice system is, with its obscene incarceration rate and often stiff penalties for minor violations. This is all to his credit, and I hope he succeeds in achieving some level of reform, but this is not the part of the article that caught my attention. Here it is:

Somewhere along the meandering career path that led James Webb to the U.S. Senate, he found himself in the frigid interior of a Japanese prison.

A journalist at the time, he was working on an article about Ed Arnett, an American who had spent two years in Fuchu Prison for possession of marijuana. In a January 1984 Parade magazine piece, Webb described the harsh conditions imposed on Arnett, who had frostbite and sometimes labored in solitary confinement making paper bags.

[…]

In his article about the Japanese prisons, Webb described inmates living in unheated cells and being prohibited from possessing writing materials. Arnett’s head was shaved every two weeks, and he was forbidden to look out the window.

Still, Webb said, the United States could learn from the Japanese system. In his book, “A Time to Fight,” he wrote that the Japanese focused less on retribution. Sentences were short, and inmates often left prison with marketable job skills. Ironically, he said, the system was modeled on philosophies pioneered by Americans, who he says have since lost their way on the matter.

I must admit that I know absolutely nothing about the history of prisons in Japan, and for that matter embarrassingly little about the history of prisons in the US. How much are Japanese prisons really modeled after American theories? Certainly the Japanese court system tends to give out shorter sentences for at least certain types of crime, but is there any truth to the idea that inmates leave with job skills? I could easily imagine that an ex-con in Japan is even more stigmatized in the job market than one in the US.

My best posts of the year

With 2009 almost upon us, I thought I’d try riding the wave of cheesy end of year roundups. Here are my personal favorite five items I posted this year. (Adam and Joe can of course do their own.

  • Visas I have known. Scans of all the visas in my passport (key data blacked out of course) with commentary.
  • Remembering the Railway of Death. A chronicle, in words and images, of the afternoon Adam, his wife Shoko, and I spent at the oddest museum I have ever seen. As a bonus, photographs of the modern state of the nearby Railway of Death itself.
  • Mr. Chang – Mr. Oyama. Notes on a conversation I had with a dying man while passing the time outside a 7/11.
  • A visit to Lo Sheng. A travel diary, with photographic slideshow, of my visit to Taiwan’s Japan-colonial era Leprosorium. Sadly, it appears that the government has (unsurprisingly) gone back on its promise to preseve Lo Sheng and allow residents to remain. Here is some Taiwanese TV news footage of the police breaking up a protest outside. You can see my friend Em being dragged away at exactly 1:00.
  • Tamogami, Motoya, and Abe.  An easy selection for my best post of the year. Also see Tamogami Update and Still More on Tamogami.

Any disagreements? Was there anything else I should replace one of these five with?

IIjima Ai’s meaning to Taiwan

The mysterious death of former porn-star turned memoir author and TV celebrity IIjima Ai has been big news in Japan. I wouldn’t normally mention something like this due to lack of really caring much, but I was alerted to a rather interesting twist in a comment by Taiwanese TV Journalist Michella Jade Weng at Michael Turton’s blog. Weng linked to an a Mainichi article explaining that IIjima’s death has been unusually big news in Taiwan for a surprising and fascinating reason. I’ll give a translation of most of the article below.

Due to the import of adult videos starring Ms. IIjima in the early 90s when Taiwan was democratization and the opening of society were proceeding, Ms. Iijima became a “symbol” of freedom of expression and culture. The [December] 25th edition of China Times, one of Taiwan’s big four newspapers, had a front page article above the fold article which, along with showing a photograph of Ms. Iijima, stated that Iijima Ai “became the common shared sexual dream of Taiwanese men born in the 1960s to 1970s.”

Note that China Times now has a special feature section on their website, under the amusing folder name of “sexgirl.” UDN, another of the big four papers, also put together a special feature on Ms. Iijima, describing her as “a memory of all the men of Asia.”

Assistant Editor of China Times, Zhang Jing-wei, explained this treatment by saying “The period when Ms. Iijima was active overlapped with the period when Taiwanese politics and society were opened up.　We were not trying to be funny at all, and decided that Ms. Iijima’s death has social significance.”

In 1987, Taiwan’s 38 year period of marital law ended, and restrictions on cultural expression such as newspaper publication and songs were lifted. The Japanese adult videos that began pouring into Taiwan in the 1990s were considered a symbol of social liberalization.

Weng also reports that her editor explained it in more direct terms. “In addition, she was the common link between nearly all men born in the 60’s and 70’s, because almost all of them hid in their bedroom and watched her videos at one point or another.” Including her editor.

The Himeji Monorail

I just learned of the existence of the Himeji Monorail, from my housemates who spotted it today when walking around after a castle visit. Japanese Wikipedia has a decent article on it. It opened in 1966, but shut down in 1974. While it was a novelty, it was so expensive that “two people could ride the bus and have change left over” for the same money, on top of fulfilling no practical need in a small city with a decent bus system and low traffic density. After the novelty factor wore off, ridership declined precipitously and it was left running in the red. The final nail in the common was the withdrawal of Lockheed, who had manufactured the system, from the monorail industry. This made further maintenance impractical, particulalry for a money-bleeding system. After years of “suspended” service, it was officially decomissioned in 1979, but most of the ruins survive.

The car depot/terminal station, which still has all the original cars in it, is currently closed to the general public but is scheduled to be converted into a museum by 2011.

This Japanese page has a bit more info on it, but this one has an excellent collection of images, including original tickets.