Category: Japan

Tokyo getting more anal about dual nationality

Japan’s ban on dual nationality is less toothless than it used to be, as the government finds creative ways to keep people from maintaining multiple passports. Terrie Lloyd‘s e-mail newsletter this week quotes an unidentified source who says:

It seems that if you are Japanese and you renew your Japanese passport at your local US consulate, when you go to pick it up you are asked to show your green card or other residency documentation which allows you to be in the US. If you cannot produce this documentation, and you wouldn’t be able to if you held a US passport, they won’t hand over your new Japanese passport. Apparently this is how they are now catching dual citizens living abroad.

To avoid this, I could renew my passport in Tokyo, but if I do, I have to show them my juminhyo. That means I have to re-establish residency and live back in Japan for a few months — which of course is difficult to do when one has a career to fulfill.

Note that this particular procedure only affects people living outside Japan. Dealing with Japanese nationals resident in Japan while retaining a foreign passport is still much trickier to visualize, although with the new fingerprinting and photographing systems, anything is possible…

Jenkins book finally available in English

For those of you who have been waiting for it, the story of the famous Vietnam war era deserter to North Korea, Charles Jenkins, is finally out in English. Normally I would explicitly avoid promoting something I was notified about through spam from the publisher, but I think I can safely say that a clear majority of people who would be reading this blog want to read Jenkins’ story.

I’m sure it’s on Amazon etc. but here’s the official book web page at the University of California Press site.

I can’t wait to read this book. I just hope there’s a special edition, in which Jenkins’ impenetrable southern drawl is transcribed phonetically, like an Irvine Welsh novel.

Raelians in unexpected places

You may remember I posted a few months ago about the highly curious billboard by Nagoya’s central train station sponsored by the alien/free-love Raelian movement. They do pop up in odd places. I was looking through Wired magazine’s gallery of photos from Japan’s “Adult Treasure Expo” and noticed this somewhat curious photograph, accompanied by rather more curious text.

Clitoraid is an non-profit organization set up by the Raelian Movement to help women around the world who have suffered genital mutilation. The Raelians promote an “adopt a clitoris” campaign and claim to facilitate surgical clitoris reconstruction. The woman on the right of the photo is wearing a clitoris costume.

Genital mutilation doesn’t seem to be a big issue in Japan, and the Realians’ adoption of the issue is a mystery. There are several serious nonprofits around the world trying to stop genital mutilation. The Raelians are best known for claiming to have cloned the first human baby, without offering proof.

If you look at Clitoraid’s web site, you can find the following text:

 Following the announcement made by Dr Foldes, OBGYN in France, stating that women and children of all ages who have suffered the atrocities of clitoral excision, or female genital mutilation the equivalent of male castration in its barbarity, now have the possibility to regain sexual pleasure and be whole once again, thanks to medical advances and scientific progress. Rael, the spiritual leader of the Raelian Movement decided to help as many women as possible to regain their sense of pleasure and founded Clitoraid, a private non-profit organization with the aim to sponsor those women who want to have their clitoris rebuilt.

Considering the huge number of Burkinabe women who are candidates to be operated on and as Clitoraid received offer from a few doctors to travel to Bobo Dioulasso and help rebuild the clitoris of all the circumcised women, the Prophet Rael declared: “Instead of using Clitoraid’s collected money to operate on just a few women, we should create the first Raelian Hospital, the “Pleasure Hospital”, and operate on all African women, for free, with the help of Raelian or non-Raelian benevolent doctor”.

While offering medical aid to victims of genital mutilation is certainly a laudable goal, I am slightly disturbed that the motivation is because their space alien-inspired prophet told them to. Then again, how is this really different from any other religion?

Fun economic indicator: Women’s hair styles

Following up my post on the stock market’s effects on Sazae-san viewership, I wanted to show you something fun I saw in the Nikkei:

Friday, February 15, 2008
Women’s Locks Hold Key To Forecasting Economic Outlook

TOKYO (Nikkei)–Women tend to wear their hair long when the nation’s economy is up and short when it is down, a survey conducted over the past two decades by consumer goods manufacturer Kao Corp. shows. As concern grows about a possible economic downturn, will this hairstyle trend repeat itself, or will something new happen?

Kao has been regularly surveying the hairstyles of 1,000 women on the streets of Tokyo’s Ginza and Osaka’s Umeda districts since 1987. In 1991, the firm defined “short” hair as above the chin, “medium” as above the collarbone, “semi-long” as above the armpit and “long” as below the armpit.

Taking the “short” and “medium” categories together as “short” and the “semi-long” and “long” categories as “long,” the long-short ratio for women in their 20s turned in favor of “short” in Ginza for the first time in 1997. The diffusion index of coincident economic indicators, published by the Economic Planning Agency (now the Cabinet Office), reached zero in November and December of that year, the first two-month streak of that kind in five and a half years. The economy is thought to be deteriorating when the index drops below 50%. That year also saw a boost in the consumption tax and a series of major bankruptcies, including that of Yamaichi Securities Co., and in 1998 the economy contracted.

Until 1990, over 60% of women in their 20s kept their hair long. But since 1997, the percentage of women wearing long hair has remained under 10%. That figure has been rising again lately, but without the briskness that would signal a return to past levels.
…
How has the length of women’s hair, assuming a linkage with the health of the economy, influenced related businesses? The market for hairstyling products, such as hairsprays and gels, are estimated to have peaked in 1994 at 102.5 billion yen in terms of shipments. Then it showed year-on-year decreases for a while, along with falling per capita spending on styling products. Although about 80% of women continued to use those products, they used them less frequently, switching sometimes to products like waxes for the tips of the hair. The market hit bottom in 2004 at 59 billion yen, ending a “lost decade” for hairstyling products.

Though the longest economic expansion since the end of World War II has continued, the consumer confidence index fell for 10 months running to hit a record low for six years and one month in January, according to the Cabinet Office’s Economy Watchers survey released on Feb. 8. With many observers talking about a downturn, Kao’s data suggest that women’s hair will likely get shorter again.

“Women’s hair may get shorter, but shorter hairstyles will not dominate,” said Kotaro Nuriya, brand manager at Kao’s Premium Hair Care/Hair Make Group. He bases his view on the fact that a growing number of women are pulling their hair together in the back or up, as in the chignon style. Kao began including the chignon in its survey in November 2002, and its use has risen 10% to about 30% among women in their 20s recently.

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While it might not be surprising to see that women are forced to make choices on which cosmetics to use when they are low on disposable income, it’s funny how predictable this survey makes it seem. Also, this so-called boom time has still been one of low economic growth and has occurred at a time when wages remained stagnant for Japanese overall and growing economic disparity has been an overarching theme, especially in the past two years. With prices rising now during a period of economic slowdown, I’ll have to be on the watch for more faux-expensive hairstyles. They will go great with the cheap clothes/expensive bag look that’s so popular these days.

PS: I wonder if the beehive was the product of a booming economy?

Fuji-san returns

One of the great joys of flying in the front of an airplane is that you don’t have wings or engine exhaust to obscure your view, which makes the window seat a great place for aerial photography. I ran into Fuji-san on a cloudy day in 2006, and finally got a clearer shot of it on my way back from China in 2008.

The not-so-secret “secret” to spotting Fuji-san from the air: Pretty much all flights leaving Tokyo for destinations to the west (including Asia, but not Europe) use an airway that runs over the water south of Fuji-san. This is to avoid the airspace around Yokota and Atsugi, the US military bases on the west side of Tokyo. So when you’re leaving Tokyo, sit on the right side of the plane: when you’re coming to Tokyo, sit on the left.

Adamu update

Now that I no longer have to spend all my waking hours translating, Mutant Frog will soon be filled once again with Adamu posts. Between moving to Japan from Bangkok, adjusting to a new city and a new job, taking on way too much work than I should, getting married, and settling into my new apartment in the ghetto, Mutant Frogging and my other hobbies have been essentially on hold. But now the last of my side work is done (the last two months have been dominated by a project involving a certain Japanese-run bank in Indonesia… more on that later) so I plan on having much, much more free time.

Over the nine months that have passed since I arrived in Japan, my interests have shifted quite a bit. Living in Tokyo and working in the finance industry tends dominate my thinking these days, even if I am anything but a financial expert. I try to avoid issuing opinions on things I know absolutely nothing about, but perhaps you will start seeing more finance related posts. Tidbits from my studies and independent research will also hopefully figure in.

I’ve told some that blogging rots your brain, and to an extent it does (at least my brain anyway). To be honest, I hardly remember many of the posts after I do them. The months I spent blogging the Abe administration from Bangkok are mostly a blur, for example, and at any rate they were little more than idle prattling with no real point. One thing that is different from my previous blogging activities is that my free time, while increased now that I am concentrating on my day job, is quite limited. I want to make sure I blog more time efficiently.

But I have certainly missed the best part of blogging – interacting with readers as a sort of sounding board for ideas and debate. The occasional debates in the comments section are especially edifying and exhilarating. Now that Mutant Frog is entering its third year, I hope we can keep building a fun audience and keep doing what we enjoy.

I still think they taste like cardboard

Everyone reading this is familiar with the tasteless paper-filled, paper-textured fortune cookie right? Long thought to have originated as a gimmick desert in one of California’s Chinatowns sometimes in the late 19th or early 20th century, new research strongly suggests that, despite being popularized by the Chinese, fortune cookies were actually invented by Japanese immigrants, who had gotten their inspiration from snacks sold at a Kyoto bakery. The New York Times has an excellent article detailing the whole story, which I must say I find surprisingly convincing. I think anyone else familiar with the wide range of tasteless Japanese traditional snacks (八ッ橋 anyone ? ), the Japanese love for fortunes, and of the tasteless fortune-filled “fortune cookies” distributed inevitably in American Chinese restaurants will also, upon reflection, find the resemblance highly suggestive.

One foreigner’s perspective on American and Japanese immigration security procedures

Jade OC, a long time reader and commenter of MFT, has graciously posted a detailed comparison of his experiences passing through both US and Japanese airline security and immigration checkpoints as a comment on an earlier blog post on the subject. As I suspect that many of our readers look only at the actual posts and not the comments, I thought I would promote this one to the front page.

As promised, here is my short report on the fingerprinting-immigration process in the US and Japan from the POV of a non-citizen of either (though a resident of Japan).

First big complaint. I never wanted to go to the US at all, at least not the first time. But you cannot bloody transit in the US – there’s no such thing as a transit lounge. Everyone who enters a US airport from outside the country, even if, like me, you are just taking a flight to Canada in about 90 minutes, needs to go through Immigration and Customs. This is seriously Fucked Up.

Continue reading One foreigner’s perspective on American and Japanese immigration security procedures