Category: Media

2nd hand electronics sales will NOT soon be illegal in Japan

Update HERE- finally some good news!

Akihabara News, Engadget, and probably a number of other blogs have posted a completely misinformed and alarmist claim that Japanese law will soon make it illegal to sell used electronics. First the alarmist claim, and then the explanation of why it is about 80-90% incorrect.

The second hand marker flourishes over here, and most people take good care of their equipment, so used goods are usually in a very good condition and are sold easily to be replaced by new goods. It’s easy to strike a good deal when buying these second hand goods. But that’s exactly the big problem for manufacturers, because this grey market is not generating them any profit, and they would like to get rid of this phenomenon.
[…]
So from April 1st 2006, ALL electronic products sold in Japan before 2001 will be prohibited from the 2nd hand market! This means that for example a PC like the Vaio U1 (PCG-U1) will be soon not vailable on the Japanese market anymore, since it was sold in April 2002… and you still have about a month to get a Vaio C1! It also seems that a 5 yeas old product (made after 2001) will Face the same problem in the futur.

Gosh, terrifying isn’t it? Reading it I practically wet my pants and burst into tears simultaneously at the prospect of never again being able to pass up the chance of buying a 20 year old vintage game console. (Note: I just play them on emulators anyway.)

But notice something very important: Engadget is merely repeating what Akihabara News said, and Akihabara News doesn’t quote any source at all. So why don’t we try actually looking at a real news source, and see what they say. As it so happans, the English langauge Asahi website has a very thorough article on this topic.

There are a couple of major points that contradict what the Akihabara News post said.

Well, exports are exempt. Some retailers are hoping to find overseas buyers, or set up branch offices abroad. Leases are exempt, too, meaning retailers can simply lease their products for fixed terms.

[One company] plans to lease its used products, an action not restricted under the law.

The firm will charge customers in advance for a fixed time period, and the customer will be able to return the item at any time. When the lease expires, the firm will simply give the appliance away–another action exempt from the PSE rule.

So foreign sales will not be restricted at all. This is no surprise, considering how common sales of used Japanese vehicles are overseas. For example, in the Philippines all of the buses seem to be bought used from Japan. The very first bus I rode as I stepped out of the airport had a plate mounted above the windshield saying that it had been a Kyoto city bus that was refurbished by the Keihan Bus Company in around 1980. Second, companies can use what seems to amount to fake leases to get around the sales restrictions.

But there is more to it. Domestic non-lease sales are not being flat-out banned anyway, they are simply requiring an inspection. So what is the inspection?

By law, a retailer can become a “manufacturer,” authorized to conduct safety inspections and affix PSE labels, simply by registering with the ministry.

Registered “manufacturers” may attach PSE labels after confirming three very simple things: the product looks fine, works properly when turned on, and does not leak electricity at 1,000 volts.

So any retailer of any size will be able to perform the inspections themselves. This is starting to sound less like ban on second hand sales designed to encourage the consumption of new goods than it is a fairly reasonable attempt at consumer protection.

But there’s something else. Notice the final part of the test, seeing how the device operates at 1000 volts. This law seems not to be aimed at electronics per-se, so much as electrical appliances. I think there’s a strong chance that it doesn’t apply at all to computers (including game systems) due to the nature of the safety tests. Notice they check if it functions safely at 1000 volts, well the electronics of a computer generally run on 12 volts, and any more than that will fry it, so the test clearly can’t apply!

No, instead what they would be testing are devices that include such things as heating coils or motors, that draw large amounts of power and can be a serious fire risk. In the case of a computer or game system, the power supply would certainly require testing, but I think that the primary device will suffer no restrictions whatsoever.

In short, it will be rather more troublesome for retailers to sell used electronics, and there may be less small stores doing so. On the other hand, larger stores with the economy of scale to set up a small certification department will be able to carry on with their business, and used electrical applicances will now come with a certification that they work and don’t catch on fire when you plug them in, which will probably make it easier for consumers to return defective merchandise. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see someone set up a new business, designed simply to test and certify used electronics for the hundreds or thousands of smaller stores that don’t have the ability to do it themselves.

What we will NOT see is the dismal scenario that Akihabara News incorrectly imagined when they first heard about this law.

UPDATE: This site includes very precise details about what the law regulates, in both Japanese and English. It would seem that I was completely correct. Computers are NOT on the list of regulated items, but power cords and transformers/power adapters ARE. In a very interesting turn, it specifies that television recievers are to be regulated, but says nothing about the CRT tube itself (including computer monitors). This is a rather strange turn, since a tv reciever is just another radio reciever-a very low power device, whereas the actual CRT is a very high power device that can deliver a fatal charge or start a fire if tampered with incorrectly.

You’re not for me, punk rock girl

Who can forget the classic song “Punk Rock Girl” from 90s novelty band the Dead Milkmen? I remember buying their tape for 99 cents at an Ames.

I tapped her on the shoulder
And said do you have a beau?
She looked at me and smiled
And said she did not know
Punk rock girl give me a chance
Punk rock girl let’s go slamdance
We’ll dress like Minnie Pearl
Just you and me punk rock girl

OK, apparently my memory/hearing is not that good since I always thought it said “looks just like Minnie Pearl.” But, I wondered after listening to the song, what in the hell does Minnie Pearl actually look like? Here is the awful truth:

I guess the Milkmen used the word “punk” in the broadest possible sense of the term.

From the NO KIDDING File: Washington Traffic is REALLY BAD

This report on how retardedly bad Washington traffic is reminds me of how hard it is to believe that Washington Post writers actually work or live in Washington:

Highway congestion has grown so severe that virtually all of the Washington region’s main commuter routes are chronically clogged and unable to move motorists efficiently, according to a regional study released yesterday.

Drivers on some highways designed for mile-a-minute travel are lucky to make five miles in an hour. Freeways that were manageable three years ago, such as the Dulles Toll Road, are now bumper-to-bumper at peak times. Congestion on some highways has doubled in three years, when the last study was released.

At the worst hour, between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. weekdays, a quarter of all freeway lanes in the Washington region are completely congested.

…

“It’s even worse than what we would have expected,” said John Townsend, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic. “This is a template to know where the problems are. For political leaders to have this report and do nothing is akin to doing nothing while Rome burns.”

That picture isn’t even as bad as it gets!

Admittedly, I haven’t been reading the Post every day for about 6 months, but considering the power the WaPo can have over some issues, with traffic this bad in the area they should be running exposes every day. It shouldn’t take an official report to get them to talk about this more often (though one editorial remains dear to my heart).

Let me give you an example: I-66 going into the city from Virginia (where I live) is only two lanes for most of the way. The new governor of Virginia supports expanding it, but as it is now the road is constantly facing volume slowdowns. I get backed up coming home at 10pm on a Wednesday. Even the Beltway, which is 4 lanes most of the way, is more or less constantly backed up. Mrs. Adamu can back me up on this.

Maybe they just never leave the office or take cabs with tinted windows from press conference to press conference, wondering why it takes so long to drive 4 blocks to the White House.

Why MF will never be a business

Slate has an interesting look at the blog market that shows why we should not expect to ever make any money off of MF in the foreseeable future:

There are troubling signs—akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble—that suggest blogs have just hit their top:

  • The Magazine Cover Indicator
  • The Smart Guys Cashing Out
  • The Excited Dinosaurs

    • and

  • The Gullible Latecomers

    • So when the blog bubble bursts does that mean we’ll stop seeing lame Google ads/half-baked merchandizing/personal ads/Amazon Associates and/or J-List tie ins on all these personal websites? Here’s hoping!

    Is the LDP Unbeatable?

    I have been digging marxy’s blog hardcore lately, and his latest posts have inspired a few lengthy rants from me. Since I am so very proud of myself for actually having written something, I’ll repost them here.

    Today we will look at whether there can be a viable opposition to Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which has, with only one brief (but significant) hiccup in 1993, ruled Japan since 1955 thanks at least partly to CIA funding.

    First, marxy’s post, a reaction to Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback:

    Academics are always convinced that the rebirth of Japanese politics is right around the corner, as if the DPJ will suddenly become a viable second party. But check the demographic breakdown: Japan’s most educated white-collar workers are thoroughly apolitical and the working classes depend even more now on LDP pork barrel projects and protection for their job security in the post-manufacturing era.

    The One-Party Japanese State is here to stay, but perhaps Japan can at least cut the American leash in the future, right? Unfortunately for the Pacifist Japanese masses, the LDP only presents two options: remilitarize with a nod to past Imperialist glories or maintain a Japanese pseudo-pacificism under the American protectorate. Politics could offer a third way, but thanks to the gifts of U.S. foreign policy, they don’t have that here.

    And my reaction, slightly edited for readability:

    While I don’t count myself as one of those people who thinks that Japan is always just about to turn the corner, if you look at the elections that have taken place since major electoral reform was carried out (switch from multimember election districts to single-member) have shown that future LDP control of the government is far from certain.

    There is no way to tell how involved the CIA is in Japanese politics right now (though I can more or less guarantee you that the top leaders of Japan have regular meetings with CIA officials). Also at this point, I don’t think that the LDP has any trouble raising funds on its own, and whatever slush funds the CIA set up for it have probably already been laundered somewhere.

    But it is a fact that the DPJ had been gaining seats progressively in each election since its formation in 1998, so much so that it only required the defection of 18 or so LDP members in the Upper House to defeat the postal privatization legislation (though 30 eventually did rebel), which led to the General Election in September.

    That election led to a huge victory for the LDP, but that victory was notable first for American support of a very different kind (Bush’s PR firm) modern PR techniques and for the types of voters it attracted to the LDP — TV-watching urbanites, the same people you (more or less rightly) dismissed as being apolitical. The LDP achieved this by having a charismatic leader with great hair, limiting the scope of debate by staying on message (postal privatization!!!), and orchestrating a riveting drama pitting the reform-minded LDP (and cute new “Koizumi children”) against the vested interests represented by the postal rebels and (somehow) the DPJ.

    Remind you of US-style elections a little? Competing for constituents based on policies and theater is vastly different from the traditional way for the LDP to run an election, which was basically to round up its traditional support bases (as you quite eloquently described) and be done with it. The bad thing is the LDP played the new game to its advantage, but the good thing is that, in theory, anyone could do it, even the DPJ (which at least tried – they had a US PR firm of their own, it just happened to be caught unprepared for the ultra-effective push by the LDP [the ineffectual slogans “We won’t give up on Japan!” didn’t help either]).

    Unfortunately, while the election system has changed, other aspects of Japan’s political landscape – the LDP’s close relationship with big business and the bureaucracy itself- have not. Why is this important? Well, one can see a telling example in the DPJ’s “counterproposal” to the LDP’s resubmitted postal privatization bills in October 2005. The counterproposal was a miniscule 11 pages compared to the LDP’s 500-plus megalaw.

    This just goes to show that the DPJ very simply does not have the technocratic expertise to make policy, which is something the Japanese public understands. The LDP (well, the *governement*) postal privatization bills were formed after months of intense discussion and debate that involved the greatest minds in Japanese policy both in and out of the bureaucracy. The DPJ (or any other party for that matter) could not even begin to hope for such access because, for better or worse, there is no reason for bureaucrats, academics, academia, or even the Japanese people (it can be argued) to work with a party that can’t get things done. It’s a vicious cycle that will probably continue more or less unabated until the next time the LDP gets booted from power.

    A few quick links before a brief absence

    As of today, February 14th, I have exactly two weeks before I fly from Taipei’s Chiang Kai Shek airport back to New Jersey’s Newark. With that deadline pressing on me, I’ve decided to take a week and head to see some places in the south (and maybe East?) of the island that I haven’t yet gotten around to. I’ll hop a bus this evening to Taizhong, look around that area during the day tomorrow, and then meet up with a former classmate from Ritsumeikan in the evening. That’s as far as I’ve planned, but I’ve got my Lonely Planet Taiwan to look over on the bus ride.

    First up is one that I’m amazed hasn’t gotten more attention.

    Japanese sue over disputed history textbook
    TOKYO (Reuters) – A group of Japanese sued over a history textbook that critics say whitewashes Japan’s wartime aggression and has angered Asian neighbors, demanding on Thursday that a local government cancel its adoption of the text.

    Japan’s Education Ministry approved the new edition of “The New History Textbook,” written by nationalist scholars, last April, prompting outrage in China and South Korea, where bitter memories of Japan’s aggression until 1945 persist.

    The lawsuit was filed by eight residents of Suginami, a residential district in western Tokyo that attracted media attention last year when it became one of the few school districts to adopt the junior high school textbook.

    “As a resident, I can’t keep silent over the choice of an unwanted textbook for growing children,” Eriko Maruhama, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, told a news conference.
    Read full article.

    This sounds like a reasonable course of action for local residents to take, since they allege that the school board chose the textbook for political reasons, despite it having been given a poor quality assessment by local teachers. Perhaps this lawsuit will have a similar effect to that of the Dover, Pennsylvania lawsuit which blocked that schoolboard from teaching intelligent design.

    Next is something that I briefly mentioned on in this rather silly post the other day. As reported by the prolific Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times, Tsuneo Watanabe, the publisher of Japan’s conservative Yomiuri newspaper, has recently been reconsidering the long term impact of some of the right wing policies he had promoted, particularly in regards to the international relations, miltarism, and the Yasukuni issue.

    The Yomiuri is the world’s single best-selling daily newspaper, and its impact should not be underestimated. Of particular interest is the fact that Watanabe has actually joined with the Asahi Daily newspaper, Japan’s major left-leaning daily, and the Yomiuri’s chief rival, in calling for a national, religiously neutral, and internationally respectul memorial to replace Yasukuni for official purposes.

    As rivals, it is not surprising that The Asahi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shimbun often adopt different editorial viewpoints. Even so, a recent exchange between the heads of the editorial boards of the two major dailies found some common ground, especially regarding Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s controversial visits to Yasukuni Shrine.

    The following is the abridged version of a discussion between Yoshibumi Wakamiya, chairman of The Asahi Shimbun’s editorial board, and Tsuneo Watanabe, chairman of The Yomiuri Shimbun group, that originally appeared in the February issue of Ronza, the monthly commentary magazine published by The Asahi Shimbun.

    Time Europe has an interesting article about how Olympic wannabes are opportunistically changing their citizenship, often based on tenuous third generation bloodline connections, to qualify for elegibility to participate in that country’s national Olympic team. While I have no interest whatsoever in the Olympic games themselves, I do always like to hear about new twists in conceptions of citizenship.

    hockey’s crossover nationals are hardly anomalies in Torino, where plenty of athletes are competing under the flags of second or adopted homelands. The practice is so common in both Winter and Summer games that International Olympic Committee ( i.o.c.) President Jacques Rogge blasted some of them as “mercenaries” last November.

    And last, but not least, more tragic news regarding our slimy brethren.

    he mountain yellow-legged frog has survived for thousands of years in lakes and streams carved by glaciers, living up to nine months under snow and ice and then emerging to issue its raspy chorus across the Sierra Nevada range.

    But the frog’s call is going silent as a mysterious fungus pushes it toward extinction.

    “It’s very dramatic,” said Yosemite biologist Lara Rachowicz. “One year, you visit a lake and the population will seem fine. The next year you go back, you see a lot of dead frogs scattered along the bottom of the pond. In a couple years the population is gone.”
    […]
    The frog population has dropped by 10 percent a year for five years, Rachowicz said at a gathering last month of 24 experts trying to save the frog.

    三島入門 (An Introduction to Mishima)

    Mishima

    I recently watched Paul Schrader’s 1985 film Mishima – A Life In Four Chapters. The film is a documentary style biographical portrayal of author Mishima Yukio’s final day, interwoven with three highly stylized vignettes of scenes from three of his works, and occasional explanatory flashbacks into Mishima’s past. Below is my brief review of the film, plus alpha.

    Review

    Seven out of ten stars. The concept and design of the film were unquestionably creative. Schrader took the stylization too far at times, but the exaggeration helped distinguish the vignettes from the main story line, as did filming the flashbacks in black and white. The transitions between the three were smooth enough, but could prove difficult to follow for viewers without any familiarity with Mishima. The connections drawn between specific experiences from Mishma’s life and their later distillation into major themes in his work was well done, and Schrader’s division of the film into four chapters – beauty, art, action, and harmony of pen and sword – further supported these themes.

    To Schrader’s credit he shot the entire film, dialogue and narration, in Japanese. The actors in the Kinkakuji vignette even spoke with heavy Kansai accents. No complaints with the score – Philip Glass has yet to disappoint with a documentary soundtrack. Acting generally must be Episode I, II or III execrable for me to take notice so Mishima passes muster. Casting was convincing enough, although Ogata Ken did not much resemble Mishima.

    The extra DVD commentary was informative – Schrader had clearly done his homework – and some of the tales about the trials undergone during filming are fascinating. (ex. Death threats from rightwingers lead to clandestine filming efforts and for a while Schrader, afraid of being stabbed, was even wearing a flak jacket. He was later informed by his Japanese crew that as a gaijin, he would not be a target because there was no way he could know better about his actions.)

    Sexuality, controversy, and politics

    Although nearly twenty years old, the full version of the film has yet to be released in Japan, largely because of a single scene in which Mishima is portrayed drinking and briefly dancing with a young man in a Tokyo gay bar. According to Schrader, he and his crew were initially given full cooperation by Mishima’s wife until he refused to remove said scene. They were also threatened with legal action (and presumably worse) if they depicted anything that could not be substantiated as true. Schrader was able to locate the young man and speak with him about the incident, so the scene could remain, but Mishima’s wife remained intransigent and never returned her support. Consequently, tthe film was not released in Japan at the time of its premier, and to this day the full version including the gay bar scene has yet to be released, distributed, or shown there.

    Mishima biographer and former friend Henry Scott Stokes, addressed some of the controversy surrounding Mishima’s sexuality, including the above incident, in his 1974 work, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. At the time of Mishima’s suicide in November at the Jietai Eastern Army HQ in Ichigaya, rumors began circulating that Mishima had been lovers with Morita Masakatsu, who killed himself immediately Mishima.

    The weeklies ran with these rumors and portrayed the incident as shinju, a double lover’s suicide. In spite of frequent homosexual themes in Mishima’s writings, including the autobiographical Confessions of a Mask, the truth of the matter has yet to be openly proven and probably never will be.

    But what is most interesting about the shinju theory is something Stokes wrote in the 1999 epilogue of the book:

    Years later I realized that the police, like all officials, were happy to see the homosexual shinju theory enlarge, thereby distracting the press form the politics of the Mishima incident.*

    The politics of which he speaks are Mishima’s militant (and I mean this literally—the guy had his own “army”) right-wing leanings, but more importantly the support he received from prominent members of the LDP, including then Prime Minister Sato, then Defense Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, and then Chief Cabinet Secretary Hori Shigeru. These three men possibly helped finance Mishima’s private army, the Tatenokai, and certainly arranged for them to train with and use SDF facilities for training. But, much like the shinju theory, the truth of this matter, including the full extent of the LDP’s involvement with Mishima, will likely never be known.

    A bit of Mishima trivia

    I also happened across an interesting nugget of trivia in Stokes book. When Mishima was in his early thirties his mother was (incorrectly) diagnosed with terminal cancer. Fearing that she would die without having seen her son married, he arranged to meet a wife through omiai. Although Mishima eventually settled on the young daughter of a traditional painter, his first meeting was with one Shoda Michiko. A job at Kunaicho awaits anyone who recognized that name without having to look.

    Read Mishima’s famous short story “Patriotism” online.

    (Note: Above quote taken from pg. 269 of Henry Scott Stokes. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. Cooper Square Press, NY. 2000.)

    Mistyping Japanese names

    After reading this rather interesting New York Times (by way of the International Herald Tribune) article about how Yomiuri Shinbum publisher Tsuneo Watanabe has recently been reconsidering the impact of the right-wing political views that he has helped to spread through his paper, I decided to look for some Japanese language coverage of this issue using Google News Japan.

    As you may or may not know, Japanese names are more or less insane. That is, the method of writing them in Japanese. Despite their phonetic simplicity and easy spelling when transcribed in, say, the Roman alphabet, it feels to me little exaggeration to claim that becoming an expert in the reading and writing of Japanese names would take almost as much effort as learning to read and write the entire rest of the dictionary.

    Japanese names (both people and places) are written using the same kanji (Chinese characters) as other, ordinary words, but are often pronounced in ways that are entirely unrelated to their pronounciation in other words, with some parents even assigning names to their children in which the characters used to transcribe it and the pronounciation have absolutely no historical relationship to one another. Furthermore, even many common names have several, or even dozens, of different possible ways that they can be written.

    This can pose a severe problem when Googling a Japanese person’s name. Just because you know how to spell their name in English does not mean that you can type it correctly in Japanese. Sure, if you type sounds, the Windows IME will convert it to kanji, but with so many different ways of writing names, the odds are that it will have chosen incorrectly.

    In the case of Tsuneo Watanabe, I had never read about him before, and therefore didn’t know what kanji he uses to write his name. Now, the family name is easy. (In Japanese, as many other Asian languages, the family name is written first, so to avoid cross-linguistic confusion I won’t say “first” or “last” name.)

    Watanabe is one of the more common family names in Japan, and generally always written the same way, 渡辺. It CAN be written using other kanji, such as 渡部 or　渡邊 (although technically the latter one is just the old-fashioned or “traditional” version of the common character), but the standard 渡辺 is overwhelmingly the most common, and so I could easily assume that Tsuneo Watanabe writes his family name in this way.

    Now comes the tough part. When you type Tsuneo in Japanese text input mode in Windows, the software gives you all of the following choices:
    常雄　恒夫　恒雄　恒男　常夫　常男　庸夫　常生　恒郎 恒生　庸男　経雄　庸雄　経男　庸郎　経夫
    Yes, there are actually 16 of them, and there are even more possible combinations that aren’t pre-programmed into the software’s dictionary. Naturally, I tried the first option that popped up, which was 恒夫, and lo, there was a hit. Strangely, a single hit. For a name important enough to pop up in the New York Times, I would have expected a huge amount of coverage in the native language, so I had a look at the article itself. Ok, it definitely seems to be the guy… but why only one hit?

    Realizing what the problem was, I tried another search, this time And lo, there were 31 hits! Instead of searching for his entire name, I’d tried just 読売 　渡辺, or in alphabet, Watanabe + Yomiuri, the name of his newspaper. Why did I get 31 hits on the second try, yet only a single hit on the original search? Because both I and the newspaper representing that single hit made the same mistake! Both of us had simply chosen the first possible kanji offered by the Windows IME instead of the correct name. As it turns out, his name is actually
    渡辺恒雄.

    While the frustration of trying to deal with Japanese names is something that I just have to deal with (at least, if I intent to keep using and studying the language!) at least once in a while I get the satisfaction of seeing that even Japanese people can’t keep it straight.

    In case they correct their mistake, here it is, preservered, for the record.
    tsuneo watanabe.gif

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some articles to read.

    Yahoo Japan To Open Dedicated Political Info Service


    ZAKZAK informs me that it will soon be easier to follow my favorite politicians, like Taro Aso and Sumio Mabuchi (pictured above (left) with Terry Itoh):

    (Paraphrased)

    Easily Search Diet Member’s Activities… Yahoo! Opens Politics Site

    Yahoo! Japan will start “Yahoo! Everyone’s Politics,” a political information site where one can easily search politicians’ actions and proposals submitted to the Diet, from Feb. 22. It will also be possible to read comments written by Diet members and political parties.

    Users can search for politicians by name, party affiliation, and election district. In addition to bios and daily political activities penned by the Diet members themselves, they have also instituted a function to monitor members’ voting records.

    Yahoo! has been explaining the contents of the service to political parties and Diet members since around the summer of 2005. Some said that inputting all that data would be cumbersome, but there were many who responded positively to the service as an opportunity to directly connect with their constituents. As of now, approx. 200 of the 720 Diet members in both houses have written entries, and that number is expected to grow.

    The site will not contain ads from normal companies but will instead display ads related to the political parties and elections. The site can be accessed from the Yahoo! portal, and the company expects approximately 2 million hits per month. Yahoo! users are often in their 20s and 30s, and Yahoo! has commented that they would like this to promote understanding of politics and lead to an increase in voter turnout.

    ZAKZAK 2006/02/06

    Goro Miyazaki’s Journal: 1/20/06: I saw Mamoru Oshii’s Latest Movie

    I have been busy, but apparently Goro-san has been writing a LOT. So I am only going to go after the parts where he talks about the relationship between him and his father. Here we go:

    Yesterday I saw a pre-screening of Mamoru Oshii’s latest, “Biographical Vignettes of Dr. Tachigui” at the Ghibli screening room. But before I give my thoughts on that, I’ll tell you an anecdote.

    20 years ago, when I was still a high school student, I met Director Mamoru Oshii.
    The place was at my grandfather’s cottage in Shinshu (more of a mountain shack than a cottage).
    The time was the middle of summer, I remember.
    At the time, Oshii-san, in his mid-30s, was the very picture of a rosy-cheeked beautiful (?) youth, and his white running shirt made an impression on me.

    While we were at the cottage, Oshii-san and my father would argue for hours on end over their theories of animation.

    The previous year or so, Director Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” and Director Mamoru Oshii’s “Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer” were released.
    At the time, I preferred Urusei Yatsura 2, and learned later that my opinion had been communicated to Oshii-san.

    Anyway, back to what I was talking about.

    Maybe because he remembers that, Oshii-san apparently has a unilateral fondness for me, and really wanted me to see “Biographical Vignettes of Dr. Tachigui.”

    I wish all the success in the world for Oshii-san.

    So my thoughts, briefly:
    Once more, on the same theme, I’d like you to make an effort toward entertainment that puts service first.
    That is all.