Category: Econ & Business

Japanese measures in former colonies

Just about everyone reading this blog is mostly likely familiar with the traditional Japanese measure of floorspace known as the tsubo (written as 坪, equal to 3.305785 m2 in standard measures), often translated as something like “tatami mats,” and many readers will know that it is also used in Taiwan and Korea, where it is respectively pronounced ping and pyeong (평). I had always assumed that this unit, like many other archaic units of measure which one will encounter from time to time, such as the shaku (尺), was based on the classical Chinese imperial weights and measures, but in fact-at least according to the Wikipedia Japan article-the tsubo is a unit of measure indigenous to Japan, and its use in Taiwan and Korea is exclusively due to influence of the colonial period.

While I can confirm from my time in Taiwan, and in particular my week long period of apartment-hunting, that the ping is still the standard unit of housing area used in real estate advertisements and transactions, the Wikipedia article (Japanese and Chinese versions both) state that Taiwanese law has mandated a metric standard since occupation by the Republic of China government after the war.

Interestingly, although there seems to have been little interest in eliminating this colonial unit of area in relatively Japan-friendly Taiwan,  the government of South Korea is apparently still trying. Like Taiwan, the pyeong (keep in mind that all three terms, tsubo, ping, and pyeong are merely different pronunciations of the same term due to linguistic and historical peculiarities of the nature of words shared between the three languages) has remained in common use by the real estate market, despite the passage of a 1961 law proclaiming public use of the metric system. South Korea has reportedly passed a new law, which came into effect July 1 of this year, which will impose fines for the use of pyeong instead of square meters. I would be very curious to know if any readers have some more information on the history and present state of the use of this measure in Korea or other places, as well as confirmation that it has not, in fact, ever been used in China. Incidentally, I imagine that North Korea has had outstanding success in replacing Japanese measures with the metric system.

Nikkei’s Wiki image management (more Japanese wikiscanner)

Continuing my dirt-digging exercise in the last post, here are some edits that Nikkei, Japan’s leading business newspaper, has made about itself in the “Nihon Keizai Shimbun” article:

  • Deleted passage (2005): “The upper floors of the company headquarters are shared with (top business lobby) Nippon Keidanren headquarters, and there are critics who characterize its editorial stance as “the official gazette of Japan Inc.” I can’t tell if this is true from Google Maps (and I’ve never been there) but they are at least right freakin next to each other. Similar (and somewhat harsher) language has survived in the current article.
  • Deleted mention that the company plans to move its head quarters to Otemachi in 2011 (just the mention of Otemachi not the 2011 move). (2005) Mention of Otemachi now survives and the move is characterized as “part of redevelopment of the Otemachi area.”
  • Diluting responsibilty over its treatment of the three Japanese hostages in Iraq in April 2004 (edit made in April 2007): A passage which read “In its reporting, [Nikkei] posted the detailed addresses of the three hostages on the Web. While it deleted the information after reader complaints, the addresses were widely distributed and are belieted to have aided in the harassment, insults, and embarrassment endured by the victims’ families” was changed to include “as other companies did.”
  • An edit made over the same time period deleted a passage: “One reason the mass media does not report these several scandals (including an insider trading scandal and a faked photograph that I will mention later) despite their being open to the public owes to the dubious tradition unique to the mass media in which they protect each other by hiding each other’s scandals. Perhaps that is why no apologies are ever posted on Nikkei’s website. Though it mercilessly attacks companies that commit crimes or cause accidents, it actively hides competitors’ scandals as if in collusion with them. This perhaps reveals one extreme example of the Japanese media’s closed nature.” This is the sort of editorializing that may not belong in Wiki, but it is funny that someone within Nikkei felt the need to get rid of it. The “we were not alone” passage survived (after being deleted more than once, evidence of some back-and-forth) and the deletion of the anti-Nikkei rant has also survived to this day.
  • A passage on a 2003 faked photo scandal, in which a Nikkei reporter covering the release of Sony DVD recorder PSX photographed himself for a photo of a random “man buying a PSX” and passed it off as actual reporting (great photo here). The original passage read “criticism mounted by people claiming the incident was a faked stunt” since the reporter’s armband was visible, and continues “Nihon Keizai Shimbun admitted that the man was a Nikkei BP reporter and apologized.” The text in quotes was deleted and replaced with “Nihon Keizai Shimbun admitted that the man was a Nikkei BP reporter and apologized since he was negligent in his duties while reporting.” Interestingly, this shifts the blame from the company as a whole to the one misbehaving reporter.
  • Comments that writing for Nikkei’s back-page “My Resume” column is “considered the greatest honor for people who have been successful.” This passage was deleted and then re-added and remains.

    • That’s about it for interesting edits… there are also the usual mundane ones on actors, economy-related stuff, cars, etc. More to come!

    Wikiscanning Japan

    I seem to be coming late to the party, but the amazing Wikiscanner has started to take its toll on the Japanese-language Internet thanks to a nice Japanese version of the site:

    – Yomiuri reports that Wikiscanner has found that among other things the health labor and welfare ministry and the education ministry have edited articles on themselves and Diet member Nagatsuma (claiming he exploits his stance to make money on the national pension scandal). The rest of the article explains the concept of an IP address for anyone who is smart enough to make it into the government but dumb enough not to know that people can tell what you do online.

    – Kikko uses the emergence of this tool to make a rant and rave over the inaccuracies in her own entry, but makes the following commentary on the Yomiuri article:

    So to sum up, looking at this web news article, I was angry to see that the MIC edited the “electronic voting” article to make the government look good, that the education ministry deleted a passage about the scandal surrounding former Tax Commission Chairman Masaaki Honma, or that the health labor and welfare ministry wrote bad things about DPJ Diet member Akira Nagatsuma, but it made sense just because that’s what they would do. What puzzled me was why someone in the agriculture ministry made a massive amount of edits to the entry on Gundam. We can tell it was accessed during work hours because of the MAFF IP address, but it has zero to do with government administration and could only have come from a Gundam maniac. And this guy is using the people’s tax money to play around on the Internet! So maybe we should find out his name and write a Wikipedia entry saying “He is a ridiculous civil servant who accesses Wikipedia from MAFF computers during work hours and plays around with the Japanese people’s tax money.” (lol)

    – JCAST notes that NHK has been making lots and lots of edits to a wide range of subjects and whines that they are wasting too much time editing Wikipedia for “personal” use.

    So with all the buzz, I thought I would take a stab at seeing what sort of edits Japanese IPs have been making. Feel free to try at home!

    – Mainichi Shimbun – In the English Wikipedia, Mainichi has edited the post on “MOTTAINAI” a term it has been promoting (in the face of much MF skepticism). This only deepens my suspicions at the cynical Japanese media-government collusion attempting to turn this word into some kind of soft-power buzz word.

    – People at LDP headquarters are fans of rakugo and J-Pop singer Minako Honda (“Japan’s Madonna”), ego-Wiki, and delete a mention of the involvement with the LDP of someone in the Nagasaki local TV for reasons I can’t possibly understand.

    … Someone at Dentsu changed the height of an actress by one centimeter. That is the attention to detail that keeps these guys on top.

    … A second look shows almost 300 edits from Dentsu. A rundown:

    A line was added to the entry for Calbee (a potato chip company) on the new president/CEO Yasuo Nakata. Previous: “He is the first head of the company from outside the founding [Matsuo] family.” Now after that, “However, Nakata is well-known in the IT industry as a CIO. He also serves as an external director of Autobacs, a car part retailer listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.”

    They added this to the entry for Kirin Beverages: “Starting in Feb 2006, the company started a new Internet shopping business “markers” an experiment with Internet business including selling items other than beverages.” Oh, I wonder whose idea that was?

    Lots of minor adjustments to musicians’ discographies, etc.

    Multiple edits to the ‘list of fictional diseases’

    More possible ego-editing to the page for “media creator” and former Dentsu-man Masahiko Sato

    Special attention paid to the AIDMAS “Attention / Interest / Desire / Memory / Action / Share” theory of Internet marketing

    …and a bunch of edits to pages for people that I’ve never heard of…

    OK, we can do this TPMuckraker style. Search the site and tell us what you find! Things I want to look at at some point: Johnny’s, Yoshimoto Kogyo, Scientology, Soka Gakkai, other media institutions (Nikkei, Asahi, Sankei to name a few) and on and on… I am sure 2ch has it all in there somewhere.

    The Samurai and the Swami

    Today’s New York Times article on the growing economic relationship between Japan and India contains the following line:

    Consultants are trying, so far in vain, to coin the catchphrase, like “the Samurai and the Swami,” that will sum up the nascent strategic economic relationship between the countries.

    Do the MFT readers have any brilliant suggestions?

    Attempting to explain just what it is about Louis Vuitton and Japan

    One of my favorite blogs at the moment is Marginal Revolution, which is run by a couple of academic economists who basically try to squeeze their science into every facet of life (á la Freakonomics).

    A recent post is totally on point with what we talk about here at MFT: namely, Japan’s statistically insane obsession with luxury goods. What’s great about this post is not the post itself, but the wide variety of comments it generated from armchair analysts who all think they know why Japan loves expensive stuff so much.

    Some of my favorite theories:

    • “Being in a warring society since 12th centuries until before their Meiji restoration, the craftsmanship and other manufacturing skills were cultivated by warlords in order to empower their army.”
    • “It might be a substitute for not being able to purchase land.”
    • “The Japanese fascination with brand names is an East Asian cultural thing. Having cool things gives one more “face” in society so they like to have things they can show off.”

    I figure it might be that since people are living and moving around so closely together, they have more incentive to accessorize themselves since they’ll be coming into contact with so many people during the day. Of course, it could also be a happy mixture of all these theories with some sort of plus alpha on top. Any ideas?

    Electric cars in New York City, circa 1906

    Yesterday’s New York Times had an article on the short-lived wave of electricity powered automobiles that were popular in the city almost exactly one century ago.

    Starting in 1914, the Detroit Taxicab and Transfer Company built and operated a fleet of nearly 100 electric cabs. Customers would often wait for a smoother, cleaner, more tasteful electric cab, even when a gas-powered cab was already on station.

    At the turn of the 20th century, quiet, smooth, pollution-free electric cars were a common sight on the streets of major American cities. Women especially favored them over steam- and gasoline-powered cars.

    Last year I posted a 1906 article from the same newspaper’s archive on an auto show at Madison Square Garden, which discussed electric vehicles in use at the time.

    Breweries are still the leading users of motor trucks. The three-ton truck that is ordinarily used will carry fifty half-barrels. As an indication of its utility, it may be interesting to note that one of these will leave a big brewery around New York at 6 o’clock in the morning, make a trip to Coney Island, return at 2 o’clock, and finish a short city delivery before 6 in the evening. With horse-drawn trucks, four horses would be needed to make the trip to Coney Island, and the team would not get back until late at night, while the following day it would be necessary to give the horses absolute rest. Most of the big breweries have their own electric plants and thereby reduce the cost of recharging their electric trucks to about 2t or 30 cents, representing only the actual cost of the fuel. If recharged in an electric garabe, the cost is about $1.25. The Vehicle Equipment Company maintains a large electric wagon garage at Ninth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, where over 100 cars in daily use are kept.

    The electric wagon can run only 30 to 35 miles on a single charge, and this limited radius naturally restricts the use of the electric wagon for city purposes. With good roads and with its simpler construction, requiring less mechanical work than is needed to keep the gasoline trucks in good condition, the electric wagon has become firmly established as the ideal method for deliveries in large communities. There is little difficulty now in securing capable men to manage them. The manager of one of the large concerns stated that motormen of the surface and subway lines are applying for jobs to drive electric wagons in great numbers. Their familiarity with electric motors fits them admirably for the work, as they can make light repairs and prevent needless damage, elements that enter largely into the economy of the motor commercial vehicle.

    I asked then, “Did you know we had electric cars in 1906? Why are they still so scarce in 2006?” A place like New York City does in fact seem like an ideal environment for battery powered vehicles, and you actually see them in use quite a bit in parks or train stations, where speed is no factor, but would it in fact be effective to re-introduce electric vehicles for commercial purposes, much in the same way as described in the 1906 article, but with modern motor and battery technologies?

    More on fake Harry Potter

    Today’s New York Times has published a moderate sized article on the Chinese phenomenon.

    No one can say with any certainty what the full tally is, but there are easily a dozen unauthorized Harry Potter titles on the market here already, and that is counting only bound versions that are sold on street corners and can even be found in school libraries. Still more versions exist online.

    These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” a creation whose name in Chinese closely resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”

    Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.”

    Harry Potter and the Big Funnel? I’ve heard of that one somewhere before… 

    In related news, of the 100 or so blogs and other websites that linked to my fake Harry Potter post, this post at the blog of the comic book fansite Newsarama may be the only one to offer a substantial contribution. Now, I had posted a couple of pages from a nice, wholesome Harry Potter Japanese fan comic (dojinshi), but someone at Newsarama had apparently dug into their personal bookmarks collection and dug out links to online archives of-ahem-less than wholesome product. The sort of thing that chronicles the sort of activity that English boarding school was famous for before Hogwarts. Am I going to paste the links here? No, but anyone curious enough to click can take that extra step.

    NPR on fake Harry Potter sequel

    For the many thousands of readers who can’t get enough of fake Harry Potter, NPR’s Morning edition had a story on Chinese sequel-legging for their July 13 broadcast. And no, they don’t mention either of the two presented here.

    Also, don’t forget the truly awe-inspiring Harry Potter in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese Translation web site, which gives detailed comparisons of the Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese translations of the novels. Fascinating reading for hardcore fans of the series (particularly those with some knowledge of one or more of the languages treated), and truly essential reading for any translators familiar with the world of Harry Potter.

    The ultimate sequels aka Asia loves you,哈利波特

    To tie in with the world-wide media extravaganza that is the release of the final volume of the megaselling Harry Potter series, today I would like present scans from three lesser known sequels in my collection.

    First is the China exclusive 2002 release, Harry Potter and the Filler of Big, a title made only slightly less mysterious when one realizes that the Chinese title translates rather more accurately into Harry Potter and the Big Funnel, although you’ll need someone with better Chinese than mine to describe the plot of this gloriously audacious illegally published novel-length fanfiction.

    Continue reading The ultimate sequels aka Asia loves you,哈利波特