Category: History

Profile of Ryoichi Sasakawa in Irrawaddy

Some recommended light reading: Burma democracy movement news site The Irrawaddy has published a profile of Ryoichi Sasakawa, the enigmatic right-wing figure who went from war profiteering in Manchukwo to development state profiteering as the yacht racing (kyotei) mogul/ostentatious philanthropist.

Some excerpts:

A report prepared in June 1947 by US army intelligence described Sasakawa as “a man potentially dangerous to Japan’s political future…He has been squarely behind Japanese military policies of aggression and anti-foreignism for more than 20 years. He is a man of wealth and not too scrupulous about using it. He chafes for continued power. He is not above wearing any new cloak that opportunism may offer.”

Twenty years later, Sasakawa was the head of a multinational foundation, named after himself, which funded health and educational programs mainly in Asia. He claimed to be a man of peace, and one branch of his philanthropical empire was even named “The Sasakawa Peace Foundation.” When he died in 1995, his deepest regret was said to have been that he never got the Nobel Peace Prize.

From the very beginning, Burma was one of the countries where the Sasakawa Foundation and its sister organization, the Nippon Foundation, were especially active. Apart from being an associate of Kodama, Sasakawa was also close to Nobusuke Kishi, the Japanese prime minister from 1957 to 1960—and, in the late 1940s, also a prisoner in Sugamo. Kishi led the once influential Burma Lobby in Japan, and the Japan-Burma Association counted among its members 11 trading companies allowed to operate in various aid projects in Burma prior to 1988.

A native of Osaka, he was born in 1899 into a family of wealthy sake brewers. In the 1930s, he led an ultranationalist group called Kokusui Taishuto, or the “Patriotic People’s Mass Party,” which grew to 15,000 members. Each one of them wore a dark uniform fashioned after Benito Mussolini’s Italian Blackshirts. He also had his own airplanes, which transported supplies for the Japanese army. In 1939, Sasakawa used one of them to fly to Rome, where he met Mussolini. Years later, he expressed regret about not meeting another European leader at that time: “Hitler sent me a cable asking me to wait for him, but unfortunately I didn’t have time.”

The problem after the war was that the American occupiers in Japan badly needed the extreme right to counter the leftist movement, which was growing strong in the late 1940s. So, in 1948, Sasakawa, Kodama and Kishi were all released and allowed to rebuild their former organizations.
Continue reading Profile of Ryoichi Sasakawa in Irrawaddy

A bit more on KMT remnant in SE Asia

I was pretty surprised and fascinated by a BBC mention last week of KMT soldiers who had fled to Southeast Asia instead of Taiwan, and turned to banditry and drug trafficking instead of soldiery. In an excellent coincidence, the Taipei Times ran an article on Saturday’s issue on just this subject.

Descendants of KMT soldiers living in limbo

ON THE MARGINS: The offspring of former KMT soldiers who fled China are finding that while they are welcome to study in Taiwan, they may not be able to reside here
By Loa Iok-sin
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Nov 03, 2007, Page 2 “Stateless” descendants of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops stationed in northern Myanmar and Thailand yesterday pleaded with the government to naturalize them.

Tens of thousands of KMT troops retreated across the Chinese border and stationed themselves in northern Myanmar and Thailand following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Nationalist forces by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War.

As the push to retake China never took place, many of the soldiers and their families were stranded in the region.

Since these people entered Myanmar and Thailand illegally, they are not recognized by the two countries. Their descendants have thus been denied citizenship, although many of them were born and raised in these countries.

Some of these stateless people faced a new challenge after coming to Taiwan to attend college.

Chen Chai-yi (陳彩怡), from northern Myanmar, told her story during a press conference held at the legislature yesterday.

“I passed the college entrance exam held by Taiwan’s Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission [OCAC] and was accepted by a university in Taiwan in 2003,” Chen said.

However, since she had no citizenship from either country, Chen purchased a forged Burmese passport to travel with, she said.

It was only once Chen arrived in the country that she discovered she would be required to prove her status before receiving Taiwanese citizenship.

“I wasn’t aware of this and the OCAC didn’t tell me when I took the exam [in Myanmar],” Chen said.

“I cannot return to Myanmar because I will be imprisoned for life for holding a forged passport, but my stay in Taiwan will also become illegal once I graduate from college,” Chen said. “I’m basically stuck.”

Liu Hsiao-hua (劉小華), chief executive of the Thai-Myanmar Region Chinese Offspring Refugee Service Association, estimated that more than 1,000 students from the region are in a similar situation.

Lee Lin-feng (李臨鳳), an Immigration Bureau official, said that there are difficulties involved in granting these people citizenship.

“What has blocked these people from obtaining Taiwanese citizenship is that neither they nor the Ministry of National Defense have any proof that they are descendants of former soldiers,” Lee said. “Even when some had proof, they were unable to submit a certificate renouncing their original nationality.”

Lee said she would seek a solution at the next Ministry of the Interior meeting, “considering the special circumstances.”

I’m rather surprised that these former KMT soldiers and their descendants have remained stateless for so long. It is hardly expected that Burma or Thailand would have granted them citizenship. Although both countries do have communities of Chinese citizens, they would hardly have put escaping soldiers and criminals in the same category as immigrant merchants. The article does explain that “these people [do not] have any proof that they are descendants of former soldiers,” but I have yet to see any reason for why the KMT remnant in SE Asia never rejoined their main force on Taiwan, once it was clear that they were well established there, and the threat of invasion from the mainland began to recede.

The article mentions the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission [OCAC] (see their official English language website here,) which handles documentation and residency for overseas Chinese citizens (Overseas Compatriot.) While in a strict technical sense, Republic Of China citizenship theoretically extends to all of China, as the ROC is constitutionally the government of China, but as the ROC itself has shrunk to include what may someday be called merely the Republic Of Taiwan, ROC citizenship today more or less means Taiwanese citizenship, and in practice excludes any citizen of the People’s Republic of China.

While I do not have time at the moment to examine it in detail, the OCAC provides rules on Overseas Compatriot status, as well as rules for applying to study in Taiwan through the OCAC, using the process referred to in the above article.

Another mention of the KMT remnant turned criminal in SE Asia comes from a surprising source- the subject of the new Denzel Washington film American Gangster, the famous real-life New York based drug dealer Frank Lucas. The following text is from an interview article in New York Magazine:

Lucas soon located his main overseas connection, an English-speaking, Rolls-Royce-driving Chinese gentleman who went by the sobriquet 007. “I called him 007 because he was a fucking Chinese James Bond.” Double-oh Seven took Lucas upcountry, to the Golden Triangle, the heavily jungled, poppy-growing area where Thailand, Burma, and Laos come together.

“It wasn’t too bad, getting up there,” says Lucas. “We was in trucks, in boats. I might have been on every damn river in the Golden Triangle. When we got up there, you couldn’t believe it. They’ve got fields the size of Tucson, Arizona, with nothing but poppy seeds in them. There’s caves in the mountains so big you could set this building in them, which is where they do the processing . . . I’d sit there, watch these Chinese paramilitary guys come out of the mist on the green hills. When they saw me, they stopped dead. They’d never seen a black man before.”

Likely dealing with remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Kuomintang army, Lucas purchased 132 kilos that first trip. At $4,200 per unit, compared with the $50,000 that Mafia dealers charged Stateside competitors, it would turn out to be an unbelievable bonanza. But the journey was not without problems.

“Right off, guys were stepping on little green snakes, dying on the spot. Then guess what happened? Banditos! Those motherfuckers came right out of the trees. Trying to steal our shit. The guys I was with — 007’s guys — all of them was Bruce Lees. Those sonofabitches were good. They fought like hell.

“I was stuck under a log firing my piece. Guys were dropping. You see a lot of dead shit in there, man, like a month and a half of nightmares. I think I ate a damn dog. I was in bad shape, crazy with fever. Then people were talking about tigers. I figured, that does it. I’m gonna be ripped up by a tiger in this damn jungle. What a fucking epitaph . . . But we got back alive. Lost half my dope, but I was still alive.”

(Via the Fighting 44s blog, pointed out by my friend Jon Lung.)

Tangential end-note: searching for “military remnant” on Google produced an article on the remnant of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, following the end of Return of the Jedi.

More skeletons in the KMT closet

Just when I think I have a fairly good idea about what the Chinese Nationalist Party, aka Kuomintang (KMT) has been up to over the years, I read the following text in a BBC obituary of Burmese warlord, gangster, opium smuggler and “prince of death” Khun Su.

Born in 1933 to a Chinese father and a mother from Burma’s Shan ethnic group, Khun Su’s given name was Chan Chi-fu.

Growing up in the Burmese countryside, he had little education and came of age fighting Chinese nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers, who had been forced out of China by the Communists.

The KMT rapidly took over and expanded the opium trade in the region, but Chan Chi-fu and his gang gradually began to exert their influence during the 1960s.

Allied with the Burmese government, they are thought to have fought against both the KMT and the Shan nationalists in exchange for being allowed to continue trading opium.

All of us here know that the KMT as an organization, following their defeat by the CCP in the Chinese civil war, fled to Taiwan where they ruled a one-party police state for decades, and that many of them had been engaged in warlordism and banditry on the Chinese mainland before and during the civil war (this corruption was one factor in their defeat,) but I do not recall reading before about KMT members who fled to and engaged in banditry in SE Asia in large numbers. I do, however, find it a little amusing that Khun Su would, with his history of fighting the KMT, “play host to journalists and Western tourists, treating them to Taiwanese pop music.” After fighting KMT bandits in Burma, mightn’t be be a little bit sour towards Taiwan?

Anyway,  do any readers have any suggestions for sources to look at on similar KMT banditry/criminal activity in SE Asia, following their flight to Taiwan?

Unintended benefits

Joe’s post on the history of East/West flight routes led me to read the Wikipedia article on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down by the USSR for entering Soviet airspace without authorization. The article then linked to this US State Department history of the Global Positioning System (GPS), which you may remember was built by the United States military, which contained the following fascinating bit of info.

In 1983, Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air civilian airliner carrying 269 passengers that had mistakenly entered Soviet airspace.

Because crew access to better navigational tools might have prevented the disaster, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive guaranteeing that GPS signals would be available at no charge to the world when the system became operational. The commercial market has grown steadily ever since.

So in short, if KAL007 had not accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace (their registered flight plan took them within 17 miles of the boundary) the US government might never have opened up the GPS network to unrestricted civilian use, and might even have restricted its use to military/government use, or perhaps only to large corporate customers in the private sector, or used the little-known GPS encryption capabilities (which are built into the network, and only supposed to be invoked for military reasons.) While GPS probably would have made its way into commercial aircraft like KAL007, it is unlikely that the unfettered, unencrypted, subscription-free access that allows us to our automobile navigators and GPS-equipped cell phones and digital cameras would have been granted. I’m not saying that every one of us who enjoys consumer GPS should be thanking the Soviet military for their Sept 1, 1983 massacre of civilians, but this is a good example of how so much progress is based on unexpected and unplanned connections.

Recalling the “golden age” of air travel: when the quality of the booze was the only thing that made you forget how long the trip was taking

Since I’m between jobs this week I have a lot of time to catch up on some of my passions: Japan, history and airplanes. One of my recent wastes of time online (taking up some of the time I would have otherwise spent blogging) is FlyerTalk, a massive online message board system populated by people who are excessively interested in travel and flying. Many of the fogeys in the crowd constantly complain about how bad airline service has become in recent years, and how they pine for the “good old days” when the stewardesses would carve ice sculptures at their seats. Also, more people are now able to fly in private jets through private jet charter services provided by companies like Jettly.

JAL route map, 1968There is an awesome article on Japanese Wikipedia which talks about airline routings between Japan and Europe. Until 1991, it was basically impossible to do this directly, because the Soviet Union was in the way and they would not let planes fly over unless they were approved to fly into a Soviet airport. You can see the effect this had on routing in the 1968 JAL route map shown to the right (click to enlarge—courtesy of the awesome Airchive site—also note how they were using the dorky “Japanese government publication font” even back then).

Here’s a brief history of how things progressed:

  • 1952: BOAC (the predecessor of British Airways) inaugurates Japan-Europe service using de Havilland Comets, the very first jet airliners, now principally remembered for busting open at their poorly-designed windows. The routing is Tokyo – Manila – Bangkok – Rangoon – Calcutta – New Delhi – Karachi – Bahrain – Cairo – Rome (- London). Eight stops! It almost sounds like a pleasure cruise, except that it’s being conducted in a big aluminum pipe filled with mustard-yellow burlap seats.
  • 1957: SAS says “screw that” and begins service from Copenhagen to Tokyo via Anchorage. Several other airlines decide that Anchorage is a good stopping point—among them JAL, KLM, Alitalia and Lufthansa. Although it’s out of the way, it’s slightly more convenient than avoiding Russia to the south. Once travel restrictions are lifted in the early 1960s, the airport in Anchorage becomes a little hub of Japanese tourist activity.
  • 1961: Air France begins service in Boeing 707s (which are basically like today’s Boeing 757s except louder and less efficient) on Tokyo – Bangkok – Calcutta – Karachi – Kuwait – Cairo – Rome ( – Frankfurt – Paris). That brings it down to five stops, which I suppose is progress.
  • 1967: Japan and the Soviet Union negotiate to permit JAL to fly to Moscow, allowing connections to Europe through the Aeroflot network. Which would be cool, except that the service is actually operated by Aeroflot, using a dodgy Russian aircraft that looks like this, and as well as Japanese consumers avoid US airlines nowadays you’d better believe they wouldn’t touch a Russian one.
  • 1979: Air France manages to cut the southern route down to three stops: Tokyo – Beijing – Karachi – Athens (- Paris).
  • 1983: Finnair finally manages the first nonstop flight from Japan to what can almost be considered Western Europe: Helsinki. They accomplish this using DC-10 aircraft, by flying all the way across the pole, through the Bering Strait and back to Japan nonstop. Other airlines eventually figure there is no reason to continue stopping in Anchorage and follow suit. Also this year, KAL 007 was shot down, proving that the Soviets were serious about not letting airliners fly over Siberia.
  • 1991: The Soviet Union collapses. Airspace restrictions cease to be an issue. Schedule-sensitive executives rejoice.
  • 2007: The food sucks and the stewardesses are all pushing sixty, but I appreciate the fact that nobody wants to shoot me down. Besides Bin Laden. And maybe some ex-girlfriends.

Is it Burma or Myanmar?

Following on the theme of my previous post on place names and decolonization, the BBC gives the best explanation I’ve seen for the confusion over the two names by which this country is known internationally.

The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon.

The Adaptation of Expression Law also introduced English language names for other towns, some of which were not ethnically Burmese.

The change was recognised by the United Nations, and by countries such as France and Japan, but not by the United States and the UK.

A statement by the Foreign Office says: “Burma’s democracy movement prefers the form ‘Burma’ because they do not accept the legitimacy of the unelected military regime to change the official name of the country. Internationally, both names are recognised.”

It’s general practice at the BBC to refer to the country as Burma, and the BBC News website says this is because most of its audience is familiar with that name rather than Myanmar.

[…]

They have both been used within Burma for a long time, says anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman, who has written extensively about Burmese politics.

[…]

“There’s a formal term which is Myanmar and the informal, everyday term which is Burma. Myanmar is the literary form, which is ceremonial and official and reeks of government. [The name change] is a form of censorship.”

If Burmese people are writing for publication, they use ‘Myanmar’, but speaking they use ‘Burma’, he says.

This reflects the regime’s attempt to impose the notion that literary language is master, Mr Houtman says, but there is definitely a political background to it.

Richard Coates, a linguist at the University of Western England, says adopting the traditional, formal name is an attempt by the junta to break from the colonial past.

I’ve always been slightly puzzled that the democracy movement was in favor of maintaining the country’s colonial name, but considering that the name was changed at the behest of the Junta, one sees how it makes symbolic sense. I look forward to seeing whether the democrats currently protesting can win their battle and topple the Junta (naturally I hope that they do,) and I am interested in seeing whether they restore the official name of Burma, or continue the linguistic decolonization policy that had been started under the Junta, but giving it a popular aegis.

Taiwanese place names and colonial Japan

There was this interesting item in the “Taiwan Quick Take” section of the Taipei Times.

A plan to change the name of Sanmin Township (三民) in Kaohsiung County has hit an obstacle as residents remain divided over what to name it. A Bunun-majority township, Sanmin was called Mayatsun during Japanese colonial rule and then Maya Township (瑪雅) after World War II. It was later renamed Sanmin after Sun Yat-sen’s (孫逸仙) “Three principles of the people.” Officials and some locals want to change the township’s name back to Maya. Although the name change is welcomed by many residents, some local elders suggest using another name, arguing that the name “Maya” was an incorrect name given by the Japanese. Officials will visit Japan to research the name before making a final decision.

This is an interesting colonialism related phenomenon in Taiwan, and I’m not sure whether it exists in other colonies or not. The most famous example is indisputably the city of Kaohsiung(高雄 in kanji/hanzi or “Gaoxiong” in correct Pinyin.) The currently used Chinese characters for the city’s name were given to it during the Japanese colonial period, when they were meant to be pronounced as “Takao,” based on the Japanese kun-yomi, as if it were a Japanese place name and not a Chinese one. The same name, pronounced as Takao and written as 高雄, is also used in Japan. The twist here, however, is that the name given to the city was in fact an attempt to approximate the historical name of the city, originally based on the region’s name in the language of the aborigines (“Takau,” meaning “bamboo forest”) who lived there long before ethnic Chinese settlers ever arrived from Hokkien across the Taiwan Straight. The Chinese had used various characters to approximate the name “Takau” over the years, such as “打狗” or “打鼓.” Similarly, the Japanese name 高雄 was meant to approximate the native name, except it only does so when read in Japanese, and not in any dialect of Chinese. After the Japanese left the city’s name remained as they had made it-part of their cultural legacy on the island-except the characters are now read as Chinese (Gaoxiong in Mandarin,) with the having somewhat ironically having maintained its original pronunciation all the way throughout colonial rule, only to lose it during the process of decolonization.

Another moderately well known example is the district of Xi’men in Taipei. Now known for its plethora of fashion stores, fast food and tattoo parlors (often referenced as Taiwan’s closest parallel to Harajuku,) Ximen’s name derives from being near the former location of the city’s west gate, from the hanzi 西門, literally meaning “west gate.” In Chinese speech, Ximen is often referred to as “Ximen-ding,” with “ding” being the Mandarin pronunciation of the character ” 町.” Students of Japanese will instantly recognize this character as one frequently used in Japan as a label for streets or neighborhoods in Japan, pronounced as either “chou” or “machi” depending on the context. If one looks at a map of Taipei from the period when it was ruled by Japan, one sees that 町 was a standard designation for parts of the city, in proper Japanese fashion. Since decolonization these names have all officially been changed, but Ximen-ding (and possibly others) still lingers as a colloquialism long after vanishing from the map.

A more unusual example that I personally discovered was a small village in the east coast province of Hualian, (花蓮) by the name of Morisaka. Although Japanese architecture dating to the colonial period is fairly common in Taiwan, this village is interesting in that it was constructed entirely in that period, and entirely in the Japanese style. Architecturally, there is little to no trace of Chinese or native influence, since there was apparently no village there before the Japanese built one. It was given the ordinary, almost generic, Japanese name of Morisaka (森坂 or possible 森阪- I forget which version of the second character was used.) Although people do live in the village, it is interestingly preserved in its historical demeanor as a sort of historical museum of the period (including some actual museums.) Although I believe the original name of the village 森阪, pronounced as Shenban in Mandarin, it appeared to me from the various signs that it was renamed as 摩里沙卡, which is a transliteration of the Japanese name into Chinese, read as mo li sha ka. Perhaps since the village had no pre-Japanese name, in either a Chinese or aboriginal language, it was decided that the pronunciation of “Morisaka” was the “true” name, which should be maintained. This is however highly unusual. The standard practice with Chinese character names in different languages has historically been to maintain the original orthography, and simply pronounce it in the language of the reader whenever possible, and I can think of no other cases in which a Chinese character place name was changed to maintain the pronunciation of one sinic orthography language in another. Unfortunately I am unsure which name is ordinarily used by the local residents, leaving the exact story of the village’s name incomplete and perhaps incorrect.

So there you have it. I think four examples, one from the Taipei Times and three from my own knowledge, is enough to at least begin to hint that there may be enough going on to use the word phenomenon. Do any readers have further similar examples, either in Taiwan or elsewhere?

Ruins of Shinbashi [Photos]

When meeting Adam and I on my last trip to Tokyo before I came home, for some reason Aceface had suggested we meet at Shinbashi Station. Having never been to that district I went about two hours early and wandered around the backstreets, in which I came upon one of the combination demolition/construction sites that frequent the developing regions of a city. I prepared the photos and meant to post this several weeks ago, but got distracted and left it half done, until the current thread of discussion going on here inspired me to finish it. All 25 photos are after the jump.

Continue reading Ruins of Shinbashi [Photos]

Abe down, otaku up?

So, it turns out that Abe Shinzo had supporters the way the fictional band Flight of the Conchords had fans (or rather, “fan”), and yet after managing to survive longer than some expected, still gave up the ghost suddenly and with no clear immediate reason. While most people are probably concerned about such things as when the next lower house election will be called, what this means for Japanese constitutional revision or the future of overseas troop deployment, or whether the grandson of “The Bismarck of Japan” will be the next prime minister, others are speculating on it. That is to say, the prospect of famously geeky Aso Taro assuming the prime minster-ship has sent shares of manga and otaku related stocks soaring.

On Wednesday, shares of manga publisher Broccoli shot up 71 percent, while those of second-hand comic store chain Mandarake climbed 13 percent. Shares of We’ve, which produces a Japanese version of Sesame Street, rose 14 percent.

Although Olympic sharpshooter and manga aficionado Aso Taro would probably be a more entertaining premier than Abe was (although certainly no Koizumi), he would likely still be a disaster and a half. To remind everyone why, I would like to briefly revisit some things we’ve posted about the man in the past.

First of all, here are some items from what Joe described as his “colorful past.”

  • Aso’s father, Takakichi Aso, was a big businessman: he owned a large cement company, Aso Cement. He later entered the Diet and was buddies with Kakuei Tanaka, the Nixonian prime minister of Japan who spent half of his life amassing political capital in Niigata and the other half split between running the LDP from the shadows and fending off prosecution for corruption. (Tanaka’s daughter Makiko is the short-lived foreign minister who called Bush an asshole.)
  • Takakichi’s wife (Taro’s mother) was Shigeru Yoshida’s daughter—Yoshida being the postwar prime minister who set up Japan’s foreign and domestic policy for much of the Cold War era.
  • Yoshida’s wife’s father was Nobuaki Makino, a Meiji-era diplomat and politician; Makino’s father was the famous samurai Okubo Toshimichi.
  • Back to Taro Aso himself: he represented Japan in the shooting events at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, while still president of the cement company he inherited from his father (he gave it up to run for office in 1978, and now his brother runs the company).
  • He was appointed Minister of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications in 2003, and Koizumi apparently likes him, because he’s survived two subsequent cabinet reshuffles.

Then there were these statements:

  • “Japan is one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture, one race, none of which can be found in any other country.” (Direct quote)
  • Claimed Koreans wished to change their names to Japanese names during colonial rule (an attempt to justify the Aso Zaibatsu’s colonial-era actions). Also claimed Japan helped spread the use of Hangul writing.
  • When inaugurated as MIC Minister in 2003, made the bold prediction that office paperwork would disappear with the development of information technology and that everything would be done by magical new floppy disks in the future.
  • “Japan is treated like a nouveau-riche child because it has no military power but does have economic power. All the G8 countries are White, and Japan is the only Yellow Race country there. So we teamed up with the best fighter, America. This should be obvious!” (Originally posted here.)

He also made a proposal to “de-religicize” Yasukuni to avoid “all this fuss.”

“It’s about expressing our respect and gratitude for those who died for their country and praying for the peace of the souls of those who died…without all this fuss,” Aso told a news conference.

“The tens of thousands of soldiers who died crying ‘Long Life to the Emperor’ filled those words with deep emotion,” Aso said in a statement outlining his idea. “So I strongly pray that the emperor can visit Yasukuni.”

Since the plan made no mention of removing the Class A war criminals who are the cause of “all this fuss,” I fail to see how taking away the shrine’s tax exempt status or whatever would actually change anything. In another speech, Aso had this to say on the Yasukuni issue:

‘From the viewpoint of the spirits of the war dead, they hailed ‘Banzai’ for the emperor—none of them said ‘prime minister Banzai!’

But Aso isn’t all bad. On the plus side, his appointment as Foreign Minister, to replace himself, would apparently be Astroboy.

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.