Category: Media

Say it with me: “Dentsu”

A full report by an independent committee has been released detailing the scandal has embroiled the Abe administration surrounding faked “town meetings.” Since their beginning under the Koizumi administration, the meetings, which were intended to serve as a forum to include citizens’ opinions in the policymaking process for such initiatives as postal privatization and education reform, most of the meetings have been exposed as frauds, with government officials planting questions and paying participants to provide opinions supporting the government’s position. Moreover, massive cost-padding has been discovered in the administration of the meetings, which cost an average 11 million yen to hold and occasionally featured a staff member being paid to operate the elevator.

Conspicuously missing from English-language reporting on this scandal, including at least one report from a Western outlet, is the fact that the contract for administration of the first meetings was awarded to massive Japanese ad agency Dentsu with no competitive bidding. I’m just a little surprised that the angle hasn’t been more fully explored, since no-bid contracts always ripe for criticism and the Western media have had a great time slicing and dicing the Halliburton corporation for its ineptitude in Iraq.

Dentsu involvement is no secret, but so far even the Japanese-language newspapers haven’t done much to pick up that part of the story. The Asahi’s wording is especially strange:

Another revelation in the investigative committee report is that the government likely overspent on some meetings. The report said the cost of holding a town meeting in the first half of fiscal 2001 was 21.85 million yen, not including advertising, whereas in fiscal 2002 and later years the average cost per meeting was between 7.19 million yen and 12.85 million yen.

The reason is likely that in the first half of fiscal 2001, government officials selected companies to operate the town meetings. In subsequent years, the companies were chosen by competitive bidding.

Hokkaido Shimbun, reporting on the investigation results, noted that Dentsu ran the first 16 meetings since the program began in 2001, costing the Japanese government 395 million yen, or about 24 million per meeting. After the meetings were opened to competitive bidding, other companies including Dentsu managed the meetings, and the costs came down to more than half that.

An excerpt from the 2005 book Dentsu’s True Colors: The Media Industry’s Greatest Taboo, indicates that Dentsu was an advisor to the Koizumi administration from the very beginning. Along with other ideas that came to define the Koizumi administration such as US-style “one-phrase” (sound byte) politics, the town meetings were Dentsu’s idea to begin with, and the government left management of them up to the company’s discretion, leading to criticism from then-Nagano governor Yasuo Tanaka:

That was how Dentsu became involved in policymaking not just on the national level but on the local level as well, and tied it into their business.
It looks as though “town meetings” were just such an instance of Dentsu involvement. The office in charge was placed in the Cabinet Secretariat, but Dentsu was contracted to manage the town meetings with a private (no-bid) contract. One reporter commented that he was surprised one time when he went to cover a town meeting in Okinawa:
“When I went inside the hall, staff wearing Dentsu badges were all over the place. And regarding the content of the meeting, I couldn’t understand the meaning of spending money on such a thing, and the statements of the people in attendance were more like petitions than a conversation.”
The fact is, the average cost to hold these meetings was a staggering 60 times greater than what it cost to hold Nagano Governor Yasuo Tanaka’s powwow meetings, which were started earlier on.

It’s been explained by Japan policy academic Robert Angel that the town meeting scandal resulted from a lack of careful attention to the administration of the meetings, and deference to local leadership, “once the novelty wore off,” led to the planting of questions. But the planting of questions has so far been documented to have begun as early as October 2001, while Dentsu was in charge. According to Asahi, “In fiscal 2001, 185 people asked planted questions at 50 town meetings, although there is no information available to determine if the government paid them to do so.” And as e-mail records (PDF courtesy of DPJ lower house member Daisuke Matsumoto) of preparations for the meeting in Hachinohe, Aomori prefecture show, the planting of questions and guidance came from the town meeting office in the cabinet, not local leadership.

Dentsu has a reputation for being a shadowy manipulator of public opinion, and has been accused of a host of dubious accomplishments from swaying sheep-like voters with flashy pro-postal privatization campaign tactics in the September 11, 2005 general election resulting in a huge LDP victory, to staging the entire “Train Man” phenomenon on popular message board site 2-channel to reap massive profits from pre-planned soap opera and movie adaptations. However, according to an anonymous retired Dentsu official quoted in True Colors, Dentsu relishes this reputation and cultivates it: “Dentsu’s public image, as if they have been involved in national conspiracies, has had the effect of making the company look more powerful than it actually is. Dentsu is aware of this and purposefully neither confirms nor denies this role.”

As much as I’d like to see Dentsu dragged through the mud for their role in this scandal, the fact remains that the government led this initiative to deceive the public and drown out actual public opinion. Given the history of the Japanese government, this comes as little surprise, but these days scandals spread like wildfire over the Internet, people are aware and quick to anger at such flagrant ethical violations, hopefully forcing the political leadership, who increasingly relies on public support to stay in office, will start paying attention to what the public really thinks rather than staging horse and pony shows.

The secret of Mino Monta’s success

Japanese TV host Mino Monta was recently inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for “most live hours on the tube by a TV host.” Mino, who according to Japanese media reports was drunk at the ceremony, used the opportunity to declare his intentions to expand his TV appearances to night broadcasts.
That’s too bad for some people, since judging from the reaction at FG and No-sword, foreigners in Japan are kind of sick of seeing the man. Many Japanese (“way to go!“） on the other hand, predictably have a soft spot in their hearts for the bland, Regis Philbin-esque commentator who is famous for giving schmaltzy but stern advice to old ladies who can’t get along with their daughters-in-law every weekday afternoon on his “Bold live phone calls” segment.

Still, one wonders just how he gets the energy to appear lucid for 21 hours a week on live TV. Back in June of last year, Mino-san made headlines after announcing a curious part of his morning routine:

In a back-and-forth with a female announcer, Mino-san made one of his usual health-related comments, “The yeast in beer improves your immune system.” He then admitted to viewers that every morning he drinks a 50-50 mixture of beer and tomato juice every morning to stay healthy.

Now, I’ve never tried this before, but it sounds even more disgusting than Shinzo Abe’s beloved tree kale juice. Adamu’s personal recommendation: a 25-75 mix of Sprite and Corona, preferably taken late at night. It goes down very smooth, though I can’t exactly call something like that healthy.

To close out I’ll post a hilarious video of Mino’s phone call program (in Japanese but can be enjoyed by all the world) that No-sword was nice enough to find on YouTube:

Adamu scoops the Japanese mainstream media

ZAKZAK cites a Mainichi investigation that estimates that the LDP could earn up to 250 million yen in extra public funds allotted to political parties if they act by the end of the year to readmit some of the LDP members who were ousted for voting against the bills to privatize Japan Post. Since the tallies for how much each party gets in this funding scheme are calculated based on the number of Diet seats the party holds at midnight on January 1, the shuffling of party affiliations to maximize the subsidies is a practice that has been going on for years, and was especially fierce during the political turmoil of the 90s when new parties were popping up and fading out constantly.

This year, however, the LDP opened itself up to extra criticism after kicking out the postal rebels, a group of connected, effective politicians whose only crime was to violate party discipline and stick up for their sleazy bloated constituencies. Letting the ones who are really really sorry back in would prove that the move was just another Dentsu-inspired publicity stunt and leaves the less experienced new lower house members who the LDP ran against the rebels with their rear ends exposed. Leaving the rebels hanging means the party not only loses money but also a good deal of political talent that could end up working actively against them. Making it all worse is a divided LDP that can’t decide one way or the other – Secretary General Hidenao Nakagawa met with the rebels’ leader Takeo Hiranuma to help seal the deal, while the new Diet members and their supporters such as ex-LDP sec gen Tsutomu Takebe fight to guard the positions of the “Koizumi children.”

It’s nice that the major news organizations are focusing on a more cynical angle that may motivate the LDP. Too bad I already covered this more than two weeks ago! Remember this post?

(2) As you may know, the deadline for Diet members to register for government subsidies for political parties is the last day of December. As you can see from the fact that the timing for people to join and leave parties has almost always been at the end of the year, it would not be surprising if this recent scandal, too, centers around the money. That’s because if the postal rebels and unaffiliated members were already members of the LDP, then the party’s subsidy, in other words the funding for its activities, would probably substantially decrease. Meanwhile, if the rebels manage to rejoin the party by the end of the year, their party subsidies coming to the LDP will increase. (tr: here he seems to be implying that the postal putsch was a scam to earn more party subsidies)

The only Japanese-language news source that even came close to my level of intestinal fortitude was the Sanyo Shimbun, a Chugoku regional paper that brought up the funding issue in a Nov 7 editorial, noting that not only will the LDP lose money by not bringing them back in by the end of the year, but the rebels themselves would lose possible monetary impetus to go back and could even form a new party themselves. Sankei may have picked up on it last week with some sweet graphics, but I still beat them both. And that’s all that matters.

Looks like these so-called “reporters” should have been listening to DPJ Upper House Dietman Tetsuro Fukuyama (or reading Mutant Frog, as it were). I owe this man a beer.

Inventor of Cool Biz Rewarded with WSJ Picture

HC-GI323_Nakada_20060716084837.gif

This, like my recent translation of the Soka Gakkai-Japan Times article, is from July, but I thought Wall Street Journal’s portrait of the mayor of Yokohama and inventor of Cool Biz made him look especially dignified. You can read the WSJ’s interview with him here. An excerpt:

WSJ: What was your first job and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it?

Mr. Nakada: My first real paid job was as a staffer for the Japan New Party , but I experienced different jobs while I was at the Matsushita Institute. I first worked for three months at a suit factory in the countryside. Then I worked in the seafood section of a supermarket in Singapore for three months. I spent the longest time in waste management, collecting garbage and working at a factory that sorts and prepares garbage for recycling. I learned different things from each job. At the suit factory, I learned what small-to-medium-size businesses are about — their organizational structure and way of thinking. Working in garbage management, I learned about people’s irresponsibility: Sellers only care about selling products and consumers only care about using them. No one cares about what happens to waste. I learned that different players act out of their own interests.

Japan Times infiltrated by Soka Gakkai?

Weekly Friday printed an article in their July 21 issue taking a look at the controversy surrounding Soka Gakkai leader Daisaku Ikeda’s recent series of op-eds in the Japan Times, the “only independent English-language newspaper in Japan.” Let’s have a look:

FRIDAY, 2006.07.21

Indicting Reportage: Internal conflict arises at Japan Times over “Daisaku Ikeda” columns

Field reporters lodge fierce protests, claiming “promotional articles for giant religious group Soka Gakkai”

In our last article, we reported the behind-the-scenes power struggle that is ripping Soka Gakkai apart, but a “Soka scandal” has also embroiled the Japan Times, the English-language newspaper boasting the longest history in Japan (founded 1897).

It all started when the paper started running a serial column by Daisaku Ikeda (78), honorary chairman of Soka Gakkai. This column runs on the 2nd Thursday of each month, with 12 columns planned in total. But Japan Times emloyees have fiercely protested and it has reached a state where they have requested that the upper management cancel the series. A Japan Times employees explains:

“Soka Gakkai has been dubbed a cult in France, and it is united with a specific political group (New Komeito). It is absurd for us to let the leader of a religious group with these kinds of issues to write promotional articles and on top of that give him our serial space. Even from the perspective of journalistic impartiality, it isn’t to be permitted.”
Continue reading Japan Times infiltrated by Soka Gakkai?

What to ask Alex Kerr?

Kerr and InoseOn Nov 20, I’m going to see a lecture by Alex Kerr (pictured, bottom), a businessman in Japan and Thailand and author of Dogs and Demons, one of my favorite books on Japan. He’s giving some kind of talk at the Japan Foundation. Here‘s the promo copy:

Alex Kerr Lecture: “Lost Japan”

Alex Kerr, the East Asia scholar who was praised by Ryotaro Shiba as “a protector of Japanese culture, from America,” continues to express his melancholy at the state of affairs in which Japan’s beautiful scenery is in the process of being destroyed, as well as the need to protect traditional culture. Won’t you lend your ears to the warning bell that Kerr has sounded out of love for Japan and take another look at modern Japan from the perspective of someone who has lived abroad?

As I mentioned, Dogs and Demons is one of my favorites. It’s Kerr’s tale of woe, a follow-up to his previous love letter, Lost Japan, and it criticizes the social, economic, fiscal, and other problems facing Japan. He concludes that a runaway bureaucracy has ravaged Japan’s natural beauty and culture. The metaphor “dogs and demons” comes from this story by Chinese philosopher Han Feizi:

[T]he emperor asked a painter, “What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?” The artist replied, “Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy…. Japan suffers from a severe case of “Dogs and Demons.” In field after field, the bureaucracy dreams up lavish monuments rather than tend to long-term underlying problems. Communications centers sprout antennas from lofty towers, yet television channels and Internet usage lag. Lavish crafts halls dot the landscape while Japan’s traditional crafts are in terminal decline. And local history museums stand proud in every small town and municipal district while a sea of blighted industrial development has all but eradicated real local history.

Kerr goes on to detail initially covered-up river pollution that ended up being so bad they had to name a disease after what it did to people, nuclear reactors clumsily repaired with duct tape, massively wasteful public works spending that robs local areas of the chance to develop a real economy, unconscionable levels of government debt, and countless other examples of Japan’s “policy challenges” circa 1999.

The most effective parts of the book are where he talks about the destruction of Japan’s landscape and city planning, areas that directly affect Kerr personally as an art lover as well as his businesses in dealing artwork and urban restoration. Why are all of Japan’s rivers paved? What is the need for all the noise pollution in public areas? Why was Kyoto’s priceless architecture and urban culture allowed to be put on the chopping block? Why don’t they just tear down Kyoto tower?! OK, that last idea was my own, but he does at least call the tower “garish.”
Continue reading What to ask Alex Kerr?

News to me: Rocky was based on a true story

I was recently reminded of the Rocky movies when I was assigned some translation work related to the new sequel that’s coming out. Don’t ask me what it was, but I’ll tell you one thing: if I never hear the exchange at the end of the trailer again (Boxer: “What it that, from the 80s?” Rocky: “More like the 70s”), it’ll be too soon.

The Rocky movies have been great for their cheesy charm (sweet music), Rocky’s dogged determination and slurred speech (caused by Stallone’s own real-life speech impediment), and finding just the right mix of sports movie cliches to make them work. They inspire me (to the extent that I ever get inspired) in basically the same way as the awesome training scenes in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. That’s why it was especially heartwarming to hear from Ask Yahoo! that there really was a Rocky:

Sylvester Stallone’s signature character was inspired by a real-life boxer named Chuck Wepner.

Wepner, who calls himself “The Real Rocky,” had been a professional pugilist for many years when he challenged Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight title in 1975. An ex-Marine, Wepner was asked before the fight if he thought he had a chance against the Greatest of All Time. Wepner allegedly answered, “I’ve been a survivor my whole life…if I survived the Marines, I can survive Ali.”

In fact, Wepner did more than just survive. In the ninth round, he actually introduced Ali to the canvas. Wepner eventually lost, but he was the only fighter to ever knock down Ali while Ali was the champ.

Stallone watched the fight and soon went on to write “Rocky,” the story of a down-and-out boxer who gets his shot at the heavyweight title and goes the distance against a boisterous and beloved champion.

I’m sure, had I been old enough and cared about boxing, I’d probably be aware of that major event in Ali’s career. Still, it’s news to me. I don’t suppose the real Rocky went on to fight drug-addled supercommunists, though, did he?

So, that’s my message to the Democrats today: go the distance and see try not to lose by decision!

Right wing blog, 2-channel harassing Mainichi reporter of Korean ancestry for left-wing stances, speaking rudely about emperor

Popular right wing nutjob blog murmur mumur, along with his buddies at 2ch, are furious over the behavior of a reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun, a third-generation zainichi (Japanese of Korean ancestry) named Park Chong Ju, at recent press conferences given by the Saga prefectural governor (UPDATE: For the record, murmur’s blog hasn’t commented on the emperor press conference specifically, but he probably will since Park is the subject of a “series” on the blog). In particular, people are angry over a 9/28 press conference given by the Saga prefectural governor announcing that the emperor would be attending a ocean-themed festival (that apparently already took place on 10/29) in the prefecture. Park was rude when questioning the necessity of spending millions of dollars to bring the emperor to the prefecture when govt finances are in trouble. He not only failed to use the proper honorifics when speaking of the emperor and his wife (calling the imperial couple “those two” rather than the formal 天皇皇后両陛下 “their majesties, the emperor and empress”), he questioned “the meaning” of an imperial visit, suggested that the money spent on the imperial visit could be used to help “the less fortunate,” and asked whether people would be forced to wave the Japanese flag, an act controversial among Japan’s left wing. Others were annoyed by his “interrogation” style of questioning, which is actually pretty common from what I’ve observed of reporters. It’s not pretty, but it’s also not something that’s usually publicized since press conferences like this have only recently been posted in full online and by their nature are not that popular to watch.

You can watch the video on Youtube or take a look at the transcript. In Japanese only.

To express his dissatisfaction with Park, Murmur mumurhas decided to use his favorite tactic and put up Park’s personal information, including mobile phone number, business card, and photographs, in an attempt to encourage readers to harass the man and contact his employers to complain about his performance. Consider it the online equivalent of black sound trucks outside a Communist Party picnic.

Basically, Zainichi can do no good in the eyes of the Japanese right wing. Almost anything Koreans do sets them up for ridicule and scorn, or denouncements as spies in their midst. The mere knowledge that a well-known person has Korean blood makes them a member of the Korean conspiracy. Apparently this reporter has an activist streak who thinks of himself as a representative of the people (a more recent incident had the Saga governor informing Park “This isn’t a place for reporters to state their opinions!”). He’s written articles critical of revisionist textbooks and in favor of allowing more government participation for the zainichi population, in addition to his critical stance on using tax revenues on the emperor’s visit.

As another commenter on 2ch pointed out, these stances make Park an easy straw man for those with a more conservative outlook (the majority of 2ch for starters). There have been several threads posted criticizing his manners, politics, and the definition of his own role as a reporter.

I want to say stuff like this makes me feel good about the state of American political discourse, but of course we’re no better, what with our own countless examples of petty harassment.

Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics

If you enjoyed my recent posts on WW2 era comic book covers and are in the New York area, you may want to check out Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics, an exhibition running at The New York Jewish Museum from September 15, 2006 to January 28, 2007. Curated by Jerry Robinson, whose best known creation is The Joker, possibly the best known comic book supervillian of all time, showcases art from the golden age of comic books (from the popularization of the art form in the late 1930s until it came under a period of attack in the early 1950s) in the context of the socio-political conditions of the time. Naturally, since this is The Jewish Museum and the vast majority of early comic book creators were Jewish, there is a strong focus on the relationship that these creators’ Jewish identity had to their art.

Comic book news site Newsarama has a very interesting interview with Jerry Robinson about the exhibit.

NRAMA: Do you have any insight into why Jews were such a big part of the comic book industry in the beginning?

JR: I’ve done a lot of research on this and it’s going to become a book based on the two exhibitions and it will be published by one of the major art publishers in America. Jewish artists and creators have been prominent in New York culture since the turn of the century. A lot of artists, writers, poets, also scientists and other professions were in that first wave of immigration in the 1890’s/1900’s. Then the next wave was due to the rise of Nazism and that wave included a lot of artists, writers and theatrical people. So from that whole first half of the 20th Century, New York absorbed a lot of diverse talent, along with many other immigrants of other nationalities, German, Italian, Russian, etc. But many of them were Jewish and were prominent in their areas. For example, the early movie industry was also dominated by a lot of Jewish actors, writers, filmmakers from Europe. They immigrated to New York and settled in the Lower East Side and at one time there were hundreds of theaters around the country that were showing Jewish plays and performances. The film industry, again, had many prominent Jews such MGM with David O. Selznick, Carl Laemmle with Universal. I can’t name them all.

I was pleased to see that in the interview he also mentioned the exhibit’s collection of covers he chose to include Captain America #1, which earlier this week I called my favorite of the WW2 era anti-Axis covers.

Unfortunately, I will not be back home in the New York area until next summer so I will be missing out on this exhibit, but it sounds well worth visiting for anyone interested in the history of American popular culture, American/New York Jewish history, or comic books at all. And of course, while on this topic I must make a very strong recommendation that anyone with even the slightest, teeniest bit of interest in this stuff immediately get your hands on a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. Don’t let the fact that it won the Pulitzer prize for literary scare you off. This fictionalized account of the careers of a a duo of Siegel and Schuster-esque creators of a Nazi-fighting superhero by the name of The Escapist is amazingly fun to read.