Japan – Page 53 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Why does Japan need more foreigners again?

The health and labor ministry’s White Paper on the Labor Economy (link) came out last month. It’s stuffed with statistics, but today I would like to focus on what it’s got to say about Japan’s foreign workforce, and then think about what implications a major increase in the amount of foreign workers would have on the Japanese economy.

At the end of FY2006, there were 755,000 legal foreign workers in Japan, double the 370,000 in 1996 (A recent NYT article claims it’s actually “more than a million” in 2006 vs. 700,000 in 1996 but the author does not cite where he got that number… UPDATE: it appears to include the number of foreign spouse visas, which can be found at the justice ministry (PDF)). 180,000 are on “professional” visas and work as engineers, programmers and other specialized fields (This number includes 57,000 here on language teacher visas cultural/humanities visas (I am interested to see what the impact from NOVA’s closing has had on this number…) and 35,000 on technical/engineer visas). There are 35,000 Nikkei Brazilians working in factories, etc. 95,000 are here on the controversial technical trainee program. A whopping 110,000 foreign students are working part-time (15% of all foreign workers in Japan and 90% (!) of all foreign students).
The report points out that Japan’s rules on letting in foreign labor are actually quite liberal in the cultural cultural/humanities (mainly language teacher) and technical (engineer/programmer) categories. 62% work at companies with less than 300 employees, and 45% are non-permanent. 64.8% make an underwhelming 200,000-299,999 yen per month. 61% of technical visas go to “data processors” while 58.8% of cultural visa holders are language teachers or otherwise in education, leading the report to conclude that the country is not utilizing specialized foreign labor in core corporate activities such as development, design, and international trade.
The ministry plans to promote a system to facilitate permanent employment for foreign students after they graduate. A survey of companies found that the biggest reason that foreign students in Japan did not seek jobs was “limitations for foreigners to succeed in a Japanese company” (34.5%). On the other hand, companies surveyed cited a “lack of internal infrastructure (communication issues, etc.)” (44.9%) and a general “negative [stance toward] hiring foreigners” (43.8%) as reasons why they did not hire foreigners. Such companies’ views of foreigners included “strong self-expression” (42.6%) and a lack of “loyalty” (29.4%). Of the mere 10% of companies with experience hiring at least one foreigner, 80% said they would continue to hire foreigners in the future.
Ironically enough, two thirds of foreign students study humanities or social sciences, while two thirds of the labor demand from firms is in the hard sciences and engineering.
Citing larger numbers of foreign laborers as necessary to “bring vitality and internationalization to the Japanese economy,” the report calls on companies to reform their attitudes towards hiring foreigners and the structure of their labor management systems, and colleges to attract more foreign students based on companies’ needs.

In previous discussions on this blog and elsewhere, a general consensus seems to form around the basic lines of the above-mentioned NYT article:

With Japan’s population projected to decline steeply over the next decades, the failure to secure a steady work force could harm the nation’s long-term economic competitiveness.

… experts say that it will have to increase by significantly more to make up for the expected decline in the Japanese population.

I very rarely see an argument in the J-blogosphere to contradict this idea that Japan’s shrinking, aging population is destined to doom economic growth, bankrupt social services, and quite possibly cause social turmoil. Therefore, goes the argument, this situation must be avoided or alleviated by any means – encouraging people to have more children, employing the elderly, and last but not least bringing in more and more foreign workers.

Dean Baker, a liberal-leaning US economist, is critical of this approach:

The focus of the article is a village where Chinese workers are brought in to pick lettuce. Presumably, farmers would have to pay much higher wages to get Japanese workers to pick their lettuce. This could make lettuce growing unprofitable in Japan. The result would be that the land would be used to grow other crops, or it could even be left available for other uses. Since most farming is heavily subsidized in Japan, if land was pulled out of agricultural production, it could mean substantial savings to the government.

One of the other potential problem mentioned in this article is that a chain restaurant may be forced to cut back on its plan to triple its number of stores because it can’t get enough workers.

These are useful examples for showing why a declining population does not pose an economic problem. Japan has no special interest in maintaining its lettuce production, if it proves not to be an economically viable sector. If farmers cannot make a profit paying the prevailing wage to grow lettuce, then there is no obvious loss to the country if the lettuce industry is allowed to disappear. Similarly, Japan has no special interest in seeing this restaurant chain triple in size if the market conditions will not support this growth.

In the Nikkei Shimbun’s Economics Classroom (Keizai Kyoshitsu) column, Mieko Nishimizu, a former vice president of the World Bankand current fellow at a METI think tank, takes this basic line of argument into more detail as she outlines proposals to turn Japan’s demographic crisis into an opportunity to improve the lives of the citizenry. She sees three basic “silver linings” to Japan’s declining population:

Progress in “capital aggregation” will dramatically boost productivity. Labor shortages will put pressure on producers to get more output from each employee. If the producers cannot count on foreign labor to fill that gap, all the better for Japan’s productivity growth. That growth, she says, will come from Japan’s advanced robotics technology as well as scientific and information advances. Knowledge industries will become an important source of economic growth.
The nation will respect its older citizens more. Those over 60 will be seen as vaults of knowledge and experience, elements critical to knowledge based industries. Such pressures will likely end Japan’s system of retirement at a fixed age (65 now). The freedom to work will give the elderly the chance to choose when they want to retire, and those extra productive years will alleviate overall social security expenditures. For this to work in an era of advanced life expectancy, medical technology has to be ready to make those later years more livable, in a manner that’s fairly available to all citizens.
Out of necessity, women will be required to balance work and child-rearing (no mention of men’s role in child-rearing in this essay). But that means Japan will finally need its women to work. If Japan can be a nation where women can exert leadership in companies with flexible management, competition for good talent will break all glass ceilings. In part to facilitate women’s participation in the workplace, companies will grow ever more eager to achieve employee satisfaction, by allowing more family time and permitting telecommuting. She cites studies that a happy home life leads to a more productive workforce. And happier home lives might just produce more children.

As she mentions in passing early in the piece, the implications of this scenario are that immigration as a supplement to the work shortage would just get in the way. To Nishimizu, hastily letting in immigrants poses “more than just an lost opportunity for Japan to make great strides, it would produce immeasurable costs.”

The point of managing an economy is to improve quality of life, she says, not to pursue a certain population number. The important thing is to work toward a society where people feel secure about the future. This will produce a justified feeling of belonging and work to stabilize the country.

To have a successful immigration policy, Nishimizu argues, Japan will first of all need to work toward improving quality of life. But Japan also must be ready to open up, to share its culture in a broader sense. Without that, newcomers will have no incentive for them to develop a feeling of “belonging” to their adopted home. They’ll just feel like unwelcome outsiders. But the desire to get a piece of Japan’s wealth will inspire more people to take citizenship and provide a long-term contribution to society.

Baker and Nishimizu argue that we should be a little concerned about the population decline, but let’s not panic and do anything rash. What are some of the doomsday scenarios of a 20-30% decline in population? Sure we might have to live with one Yoshinoya for every 126,000 people instead of every 42,000. And we might have to start consoldating the dozens of tiny, unproductive businesses that scatter Japan. But why not focus on fixing the problems instead of doing the same old thing again and again?

What the Diet’s been up to lately: revising the law of transgendered people

I’ve been looking at some of the bills passed by the Diet earlier this year, one of which amends a law which I should have known existed but had never seen before: the Act Regarding Special Provisions for the Treatment of the Gender of Persons With Gender Identity Disorder (性同一性障害者の性別の取扱いの特例に関する法律).

So now I can give a legal opinion on how to get a sex change in Japan. It’s a simple enough process to understand, although rather arbitrary. Here are the relevant provisions in full:

Article 2. Definitions

In this Act, “person with gender identity disorder” means a person who, despite having a clear biological gender, is persistently convinced that they are mentally of another gender (“other gender”), who has a desire to physically and socially conform themselves to the other gender, and with respect to whom two or more physicians having the knowledge and experience necessary to properly diagnose this [condition] have given corresponding diagnoses based on generally accepted medical viewpoints.

Article 3. Decision to Change Gender Treatment

A family court may decide to change the gender treatment of a person with gender identity disorder, upon that person’s request, who:
1. is twenty years of age or older;
2. is not presently married;
3. does not presently have children;
4. does not have reproductive glands or has permanently lost the function of the reproductive glands; and
5. has adopted a bodily appearance which closely resembles that of the other gender in the area of the genital organs.

The law also amended the family registration laws to allow a person who has undergone a legal sex change to have a new koseki issued reflecting their new sex.

The new amendment changes item 3 of Article 3 to read “does not presently have minor children.” It was apparently pushed by the DPJ and JCP with the LDP staying completely mum on the issue (per Yahoo Minna no Seiji). The bill passed nonetheless and is effective December 18 of this year.

Incidentally, since we haven’t mentioned it on Mutantfrog yet, Japan happens to have one of the few transgendered elected officials in the world: Setagaya city councilwoman Aya Kamikawa. Kamikawa was first elected in 2003, a year before the transgender statute was passed; while she was legally male at that time, she purportedly refused to fill in her gender on the candidate application form, and thus appeared on the ballot as genderless. She completed the family court process in 2005 and is now legally female. (I am an Aya fan, if only because she has a comical domain name and an equally comical physical resemblance to Ann Coulter.)

A visit to Losheng

Update: Photo gallery added on 9.23.2008. The new Flicker flash gallery has a fullscreen mode which is excellent for photos like these. Also added some additional comments by Mr. Chang.

I had meant to write a few days ago about what I’ve been doing in Taiwan, but my friend’s house mate forgot to pay the DSL bill and so I haven’t been able to get online all that easily, so tonight I finally broke down and paid the NT$100 (about US$3) for a 24 hour WiFly (WiFi service in every Starbucks, McDonald’s, KFC, etc. in Taiwan) access card.

So, today I visited Taiwan’s famous Losheng Sanitarium (樂生療養院), a leper colony built by the Japanese colonial government in Xinzhuang City, Taipei County. As in leper colonies throughout the world, Taiwanese victims of Hansen’s Disease were forcibly imprisoned in Losheng by the government, as they were in Japan by the government there. Although the leper imprisonment order was lifted in Taiwan in the 1950s (I believe someone today told me 1957), they have for the most part remained. With modern medicine the patients are no longer inmates, and no longer contagious, but nothing can de-cripple them or regrow their missing fingers and stumpy limbs. And they have nowhere to go, and no way to survive except by public welfare of some sort.

I had first heard of Losheng perhaps a couple of years ago, due to the wave of protests to the government’s plan to demolish the entire complex to make way for a train depot, as part of Taipei metro’s never-ending expansion plan. Although there are naturally no opponents to MRT expansion itself, there have been severe doubts regarding the sense of building the depot in this particular location, which apparently requires the leveling of mountain to create flat ground which naturally occurs elsewhere and is widely suspected of having been chosen to satisfy local political interests before practical considerations of engineering.

Primary opposition to the plan however, is due to a desire to preserve Losheng. The adage goes something like, you never really appreciate something to it’s gone, and it is born out time and again in the history of urban preservation. New York City’s historical preservation regime was established in the wake of the foolhardy and abhorrent demolition of Penn Station in the 1960s, and throughout the world preservationist activity is often triggered by the threat of imminent loss. The government’s plan to demolish the place made people realize for the first time that it was worth preserving, and recent protests have spurred a surge of interest in the hospital site and its residents that has gone beyond simple preservationism to community organizing attempting to integrate Losheng, which for most of its existence was in principle as isolated as a prison, into the surrounding community. This has led to large numbers of non afiliated visitors spending time with the patients for probably the first time in many years, if not ever.

Since I cannot process the files from my digital camera until I get home to my desktop computer, words will have to suffice for now in describing Losheng. it turns out that from the articles I had read in The Taipei Times, not to mention the briefer pieces I saw in Japanese media I had no idea what it was like. When I read about a hospital/leper sanitarium being destroyed to make way for MRT construction I had for some reason imagined a cluster of shabby old buildings on a city street corner. But of course a leper colony could not be in such a place, and is in fact built on slightly elevated and up-sloping terrain on mountain foothills of a part of Taipei county that, at the time, was mostly farmland. Less a modern style hospital or a prison, Losheng is actually a sprawling and rather pleasant, almost collegiate-looking, campus with abundant greenery and attractive brick buildings. The main hospital building looks properly medical, and the general sense of design reflects its Japanese period origins, with semi-exposed corridors reminiscent of the older buildings on the Japanese Imperial Universities of the early 20th century, such as today’s National Taiwan University or Kyoto National University (the two examples whose architecture I am familiar with). Most other buildings are also in the pre-war Japanese style common in Taiwan, with a few notable exceptions. The least Japanese buildings in Losheng are probably the Buddhist temple, which is in standard Taiwanese style, and the now shuttered Catholic Church, which is perhaps the most spartan Catholic church building I have ever seen, with only a spare cross on the roof and no writing of any kind on the outside, but with a green Chinese roof, oddly complete with dragon tiles on the corners, and outer walls painted in the Chinese temple fashion. It reminds me of nothing so much as the far more elaborate Tainan Catholic cathedral, which is constructed and painted completely in the manner of a Chinese temple, if you do not look too close at the paintings. Of particular interest are the residence buildings for patients (originally, remember, inmates) from particular parts of Taiwan, such as Penghu or Tainan, donated by the governments of that region.

I mentioned above activity integrating the Losheng campus into the greater community. This consists of various activities, such as holding lectures and community meetings inside Losheng, or educational programs for children. As chance had it, I happened to go on a day which was particularly active. Community activists are currently running a summer camp for children from various elementary schools in the area, using various Losheng buildings for different activities. I was taken to see the room being used for a week-long Japanese language class run by a Japanese woman studying a PhD in Urban Planning at National Taiwan University, in the room of the hospital building where the sickest patients were brought, connected by a locked iron door to the much smaller room where they were taken to die. This is either morbidly incongruous beyond belief, or an excellent symbol of the way in which the space is being reclaimed and repurposed from its grim past. But little of that darkness remains. The staff (mostly Taiwanese college students) had cleaned the room fastidiously, and it was festooned with child drawings illustrating various basic Japanese words and phrases.

Then I went to a much larger room, a sort of meeting hall I suppose, where the kids were being led in Japanese songs by some of the old patients who remember their Japanese well. One played the keyboard-no easy task with hands ravaged by Hansen’s Disease, while another sat in front of the stage in his motor chair, leading the children in Furosato.

After the class was over, I spent some time speaking to the old men, who seemed both movingly thrilled and slightly amazed to have so many young people, children, teenagers and 20-somethings, having fun inside Losheng and spending time with the patients as human beings, and not afraid of their no longer contagious disease. As is the case with many elderly Taiwanese, their first language is Taiwanese (aka Minnan, Hoklo, Fukkianese, etc.) Their Mandarin is generally weak and heavily accented, and most of them also speak Japanese to some degree, having undergone elementary education during the colonial period. I spent the most time speaking with one old man, Chang Wen-pin 张文贫 (can’t figure out how to type pinyin with traditional characters on this thing…), whose fluent Japanese was easily the best out of the group.

Mr. Chang, now 81 if my calculations are correct, went to a Japanese colonial elementary school in Taiwan and worked as, I think, a locksmith both under the Japanese and in the early years of the KMT, before he was interned. He was around 20 years old at the time of the 228 incident, and considers Chiang Kai-shek to be the worst thing to have happened to Taiwan.

To paraphrase, translated and from memory:

Taiwan’s history is full of tragedy. After WW2 Taiwan shouldn’t have been given to Chiang Kai-shek, but instead the allies should have occupied it. America, England and Russia should have managed Taiwan and then organized it for independence. If they had done that then we would have avoided the 228 massacre and noone in Taiwan would be speaking Mandarin (lit: guoyu) today!

He went on to mention that he suspected a war between China and Taiwan would involve Japan and the U.S., and expand into not just a nuclear WW3, but literally “becoming the battle of Armageddon as described in the Bible.” He mentioned his strong distrust of Ma Ying-jiu, and his worry that Ma and the other KMT supporters of unification with China would lead to the destruction of Taiwan.

When we were done speaking and I was preparing to leave, Mr. Chang and the others made me promise to come back and visit next time I come to Taiwan, and before I left he made me wait while he went back to his room and brought a copy of the photo and essay book about Losheng assembled by the preservationist activists, which he signed and gave to me.

Countless speakers have said that “A society is ultimately judged by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members.” (Based on a quick search, the source of this quote seems obscure.) The leper has always been a symbol for the lowest in society, and despite having no use for religion myself, I think I can understand why Mr. Chang finds his solace in Christianity, a religion in which the leper is a symbol not of disgust, but of redemption. It says a lot of a society in which lepers are no longer lepers, but patients, and the resurrection of Losheng from a medical prison into a park where children play may be taken as a symbol for Taiwan’s transformation from colony and then military dictatorship into the relatively free and effectively independent country that it is today. But the current metro expansion plan still requires the demolition of something like 30-40% of Losheng’s territory, with some buildings kept in place, a few relocated, and many destroyed entirely. Even the preservationists have abandoned their attempts to save the entire site, with construction of the nearby depot building already well under way, and their best case plan today is the “90% plan.” There is still room for improvement.

We Fear Change

I haven’t been up to much in terms of writing these days, save for one exciting development: my first essay on Neojaponisme.com!

Follow the link to read what I have to say about the SMAPtastic Takuya Kimura’s latest attempt at acting.

Japanese constitutional law quiz

Since I’m running through various Japanese legal topics in preparation to sit some state exams, I thought I would share the pain with all you readers though a fun little quiz:

Who appoints the justices of the Supreme Court?
What “duties” do citizens have under the Constitution?
What are the qualifications to be a member of the Cabinet (i.e. a minister of state)?
What procedures does the Constitution require before someone is arrested?
Name a state action which the Supreme Court found to violate the freedom of religion clause.
What is the procedure for signing an international treaty?
Can a person be convicted based solely on their confession to the crime?
Who determines the imperial order of succession?
When can a person exercise their right to an attorney?
How many Diet members must be in attendance to form a quorum?

Answers after the jump.
Continue reading Japanese constitutional law quiz

The Viceroy’s many connections in the Orient

Two of the three bloggers at Cominganarchy, who go by the online handles of, Curzon and Younghusband, were in the same university in Kyoto where Adam and I did our undergraduate study abroad exchange program while we were there. Curzon, like Adam and Joe, had previously participated in a one year high school study abroad exchange in a different part of Kansai (and a different program from the one Adam and Joe were on), and even before that-12 years ago now-had done a summer program in which he stayed for a month with a host family in Otsu, a small city in Shiga Prefecture located just across the mountains to the east of Kyoto.

Although Curzon spent his first few months of undergraduate study abroad living in the same international students dormitory that Adam and I later lived in (Curzon arrived before us), and which Younghusband had lived in a couple of years earlier, he soon moved out and into one of the very cheap and very old fashioned dormitories that lie somewhere on the continuum of housing between hovel and tenement, with facilities so bare that they would never even be considered a legal residence back in the United States. I say dormitory because while each resident has an individual room-which cost a measly 13,000 yen (around $130) per month-for that price you got just a room, with only a shared toilet and no bathing facilities anywhere in the building. This sort of arrangement used to be typical in Japan, where neighborhood bath houses are still common in many areas, but has understandably fallen out of fashion in a period when most people can afford better.

When I returned to Kyoto earlier this year, I spent the entire month of April living in the spare bedroom of a friend’s apartment, down in Kyoto’s far southern ward of Fushimi so that I would have a base from which to look for someplace else to live. Since I have another friend who was in fact studying with Cuzon, Adam and I back in 2002-03 who will be moving back to Kyoto in September to engage in some other study program, we had decided that, so we would be able to live cheaply and yet still have a decent amount of space, we would rent a house to share after he arrived. However, not wanting to be stuck with a double share of rent for the intervening months, I decided that it would be best to find somplace both cheap and temporary, and if at all possible also located close to campus.

The biggest difficulty here has to do with the way rental leases are often structured in Japan. Even when the actual monthly rent is low, is it typical here to pay an outrageous reikin (often translated as “key money” equal to several months rent, in addition to a month or two of rent upfront, and a deposit equal to a couple of months rent. I considered living in one of those foreigner guest houses for a couple of months, but I visited one and it seemed fairly lame, and I thought I could do cheaper. And I did. I managed to get very lucky and find a place which is very cheap, very well located, and has a contract that I can leave with no penalty. The building is, rather oddly, owned by a monk who actually lived inside the temple on Hiezan, the holy mountain on the NE corner of Kyoto, who is so seriously monk-y that he spent twenty years engaged in a special Esoteric Buddhist meditation where, although he could interact with people, he did not leave the mountain at all. Needless to say, his grasp of modern technology is rather weak.

The apartment is, while old, low-class, and rundown, is however, unlike Curzon’s aforementioned former place, actually an apartment. A small one, to be sure, (a single 6-tatami room and a 2.5 tatami kitchen area separated by sliding doors) but with a (very basic) kitchen, a (Japanese style) toilet, and a bath. What it lacks, however, is a shower. And the bath tap only produces cold water, so you have to fill it up, heat it up with the gas bath heater-that very annoyingly must be turned on from the veranda- and then wash yourself by sitting next to the tub and pouring water on yourself in a sort of poor-man’s psuedo-shower. But, at least there is an air conditioner. While far from ideal, the price was right. ￥25,000 a month, with no reikin, and only a one-month deposit that the monk landlord promises I will get back as long as there is no extraordinary damage. But considering the ragged tatami and old paint that was here when I moved in, the bar for that was set low. I believe that this is the lowest price you could possibly get in Kyoto for a room with private bath, and while on the shabby side, is still a solid two or three steps above the ￥13,000 room.

The landlord occasionaly drops off various gifts, senbei, expensive chocolates, fancy tea, etc. which I find hanging on my door handle every few weeks when I get home from somewhere. These are most likely gifts brought to the temple by parishioners, which the monks then redistribute for some reason. Two days ago I returned home to find a new treat, with an envelope containing the following note attached.

Mr. Roy Berman

It is my very pleasure and astonishment that you and Mr. Curzon my acquaintance should be good friends from the same province.As you know, he stays in Tokyo now, and orders me to serve you as possible!

Koutai

Naturally perplexed, I emailed Curzon to see how this might be, and it turns out that Mr. Koutai (first name) was a friend of Curzon’s host father from his very first stay in Japan, 12 years ago in Otsu. The hostfather had taken the then-teenaged Curzon up Hiezan to meet the monk, and they met again a couple of weeks ago when Curzon visited the old host father in Otsu.

U.S. Finally Gets Around To Closing Last WWII Internment Camp

I think this video is actually a few weeks old, but I just saw it.

How to get a document “apostilled” in Japan

Lately my job has kept me embroiled in legal matters involving civil law countries in Europe, and as a result, I’ve become very familiar with a fun little device of international law called an apostille.

Basically, an apostille is a certificate which authenticates a government document so that the document is effective as a government document in any country which has acceded to the Hague Convention of 1961. (There are a few big countries which haven’t, such as China, Brazil and Indonesia, but most of Europe and the English-speaking world is on board.)

These can be necessary in any number of contexts. Among them:

If you sign a document before a Japanese notary, the notary generally has to attach an apostille to their certification in order to make it valid as a notarized document in other countries.
In the business arena, apostilles are often necessary when a Japanese company is directly buying property or taking a lien on property, particularly in civil law countries where this has to be done through a professional notary.
In the courtoom, apostilles are often necessary when making extradition requests, or if entering a Japanese government document as evidence in litigation.

Apostilles are always issued by government offices, although the exact issuing entity varies by country. In the United States, for example, one can obtain an apostille from any state government or from any federal court. Japan keeps tighter control over the process, and there are basically two ways to get an apostille here if you need one:

1. The neighborhood notary public

All notary offices in Tokyo and Kanagawa can attach an apostille to a notarized document; you just have to ask the notary when you go in to sign. (Note, however, that notaries attached to foreign embassies are not likely to have apostilles on hand; assuming they don’t, you would have to get an apostille from the competent authority in their home country.)

2. MOFA

The other way to get an apostille — and the only way to get an apostille on government documents other than notarials — is to apply directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You can either do this in person or by mail: applications are accepted at the MOFA building in Tokyo (2-2-1 Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda-ku 100-8919) and the Osaka prefectural government building (2-1-22 Otemae, Chuo-ku 540-0008). If you do it in person, you have to leave the document overnight and pick it up the next day. All the details in Japanese are on this page.

There is a special procedure to be aware of when getting an apostille on a Legal Affairs Bureau document, such as a corporate registration certificate or real estate record. The registrar seal printed on the certificate is not enough for MOFA to issue an apostille; you also have to get a separate certification of the registrar’s authority sealed by the head of the bureau. In Tokyo, this is issued from a secluded office buried in the back of the 6th floor.

So much for that idea

Well, I had been planning to take a trip this summer in which I would go by train from Kyoto to Fukuoka, visit a couple of friends there, then head down through Kyushu by train to Kagoshima, from where I would take a ferry to Okinawa, spend a few days, and then take another ferry to Taiwan. Unfortunately, it looks like the only ferry company servicing the Okinawa/Taiwan route has gone out of business. Arimura Sangyo, which had been making the run for decades, is apparently no more. Their website is gone, the phone number is out of service, and an unofficial mirror of their former web page has added a statement informing that they officially ceased service in June, and went into corporate liquidation just on July 11.

So, apparently there is not currently any sea route between Japan and Taiwan, which has probably killed my entire concept for the trip. I may still book a flight for a couple of weeks in Taiwan, and I will probably at some point do the boat trip to Okinawa, but without the ferry connecting Okinawa to Taiwan, there seems to be little point in linking it all into one trip- unless someone reading this has info on another ferry company which somehow doesn’t turn up with any amount of googling.

Although plenty of other ocean routes still seem to be pretty active, ship is certainly long past its prime as a method of passenger transport. But, as fuel prices continue to climb and air travel becomes increasingly expensive after a long period of relative affordability, might we see a resurgence of medium distance (by which I mean a day or two, say between Pacific Islands, but not trans-Atlantic or Pacific) as an affordable alternative?

On a related note, while looking for currently active ferries, I found this rather neat web page on the history of long distance ferries in Japan.

[Update]

Someone posted the following report on Arimura to the Lonely Planet message board.

Arimura Industries, a ferry operator, that is based in Okinawa Prefecture in Japan, plying between Japan and Taiwan, intends to liquidate sometime soon mainly because of the current drastic fuel cost hike. The service has been completely suspended since 6th June. When the operations will resume is uncertain at the moment.

Arimura has been petitioning the Okinawa Prefectural Government to establish a new entity to continuously run the business only to have got an evasive answer. The company will keep on hiring the 120 employees. Its three vessels have been moored idly at Naha Sea Port.

It has been under reconstruction since 1999 based on the Corporate Rehabilitation Law.

Clothing and nekkidness in the Meiji era

I am fascinated by this lengthy narrative of how Japan evolved from a nation where “scant clothing… was mainly an indication of manual labor” to one where “virtually all Japanese wear underwear.” (Warning: Most links in the article lead to old pictures of naked people which are likely to cause problems if viewed at the office.)

It’s an interesting story, not so much because of the scandalous bits (e.g. foreign journalists developing unhealthy fascinations with the neighborhood mixed-gender bathhouse), but also because of the government’s role in forcing these changes on the public as part of the general campaign to make Japan more European.

It isn’t too hard to see how this also helped usher in the current era of WaiWai and pornographic comic books. Standardizing fashion in a modest manner undoubtedly did wonders for the democratization and modernization of Japan, but it also seems to have led to a lot of the sexual repression that generates train groping and hidden camera fetishes today. (Not that I’m complaining: loincloths aren’t my style.)

By the way, there is a wealth of artificially-colorized old Japanese photographs available on Flickr courtesy of one “Okinawa Soba.” Among my favorites: