Category: Japan

German expats in Thailand discuss Japan’s “charisma ones”

Machine-translated from the “Schoenes? Thailand” forum:

RATIO:

Which Bruno over Frodo says in such a way meets in some will coincidence also on me

Rear Schnacker, make for you not too much nen thick head, everyone must these “are I also like that?” Moment have, because there is ne quantity of Paralellen to have with the men the Asian friends, from Thailand to North Korea.

I had mean moment, when I am discovered a blog, in which a Japanese over its view on men write, who have a Japanese friend. Unfortunately I do not find the left any longer, at that time but I noted the most important points (with those some also to me to apply) more fuer to mean blog, did not gepostet her then however, because the whole topic somehow too negatively rueberkam:

1. The men came to Japan in a recent age and them come around this journey as part of the arising becoming to use.

2. They became acquainted with your wife in Japan and not in its homeland.

3. Most speaking very well Japanese, it prefer the society of Japanese, since they can impress these easily to be simply only thereby foreigners. They fall themselves into that learn the language.

4. Few of them had ever a western friend.

5 most of you has very negative stereotyped ones over western women.

6. however very positive opposite Japanese women, above all these is as feminine.

7. Many are arrogant and have large problems if their ideas and opinions are contradicted.

8. They may not other western foreigners and compare their language abilities and its cultural knowledge permanently with these over unterschwellig say them would be better.

Is to be become “gotten” always dumb and in generalizing Characteristika be recognized.

Interesting about also charisma one https://www.mutantfrog.com/2007/02/22/superman-meets-charisma-man/

A Comic over Canadian loose, which mutates in Japan to the Supercasanova.

Greeting:
Ben

Women set to overtake men in US workplace. What about Japan?

Amazing news from the New York Times:

With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation’s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.

The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling.

The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.
…
As of November, women held 49.1 percent of the nation’s jobs, according to nonfarm payroll data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By another measure, including farm workers and the self-employed, women constituted 47.1 percent of the work force.

With that in mind, I wondered what the figures were for Japan. As it turns out, they are released monthly by Japan’s statistics bureau. The figures (PDF) include farm workers and the self-employed.

As of December 2008, of Japan’s 63.31 million workers, 36.92 million, or 58.3%, are men, and 26.39 million, or 41.7% women. Not even close!

Architectural preservation and history in Taiwan updates

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed three stories in the Taipei Times on the topic of preserving notable or historical architecture in Taiwan.

  1. Taipei County looks to rebuild site of weird UFO houses – I had actually written that I wanted to stop by this area and see the UFO houses before my trip to Taiwan last summer, but just couldn’t find the time. Alas, they may be completely gone by the time I next visit Taiwan.
  2. Taipei to preserve historical Japanese-era buildings – I have previously discussed the many Japanese houses that can be found all over Taiwan in stages of repair ranging all the way from crumbling ruin to well preserved monument. Here is a gallery of photographs I took at one ruin in Taichung, and here and here are photographs of the one behind my apartment building in Taipei. Although Taipei is not proposing a general preservation rule for such historical buildings, which might be nice, they are designating an area near the intersection of Zhongxiao E Road and Jinshan S Road, which contains a cluster of 10 surviving houses built for Japanese civil servants – reportedly the largest single cluster in Taipei – as a special historical zone.
  3. Miaoli officials caught in a lie – Another piece of grim news. Apparently officials in the Miaoli County actually pretended to hold a meeting to discuss the historical preservation of the last three surviving kilns in what was a center of the pottery industry during the Japanese colonial period, but in fact never even convened the meeting. The claim that the kilns had “no historic or cultural value” sounds shaky at best, and it seems that they likely violated the Cultural Heritage Protection Act [文化資產保護法] to make way for an industrial development. Angry preservationists are filing lawsuits against the officials who cleared the kilns for distruction.

There were also three other stories of note related to historical topics I have discussed on this blog before.

  1. Chiang Kai-shek plaque to return to memorial hall – “Rectification of names” continues in Taiwan. I have discussed this phenomenon several times in the past, as committed by Chen Shui-bian’s DPP administration here and here, who was replacing China-centric names with Taiwan-centric ones, and then with the reveral of Chen’s Taiwanization moves by Ma Ying-Jiu’s KMT administration here and here. As of January 22, Democracy Hall nee Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is now once again Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. However, the new KMT administration has magnanimously decided to preserve the renaming of the area surrounding CKS Hall to “Liberty Square”.
  2. Descendents of ‘Orphan Army’ dream of home – I previously discussed the KMT/ROC army remnant of Southeast Asia here, noting in particular their fascinating historical association with the SE Asian drug trade, and the unlikely direct connection forged with 1970s Harlem druglord Frank Lucas, as portratyed in the film American Gangster starring Denzel Washington. As descendants of KMT soldiers, there are actually a fair number of “overseas Chinese” from Burma or Thailand who have gone to Taiwan to study using fake documentation, and although they are apparently not deported from Taiwan due to the tricky historical ROC links, they also find it difficult to obtain proper documentation that would allow them to travel back and forth. I imagine there is some sort of process by which they can apply for legal status, but it may very well require geneological or other documentation that is hard to come by. This is a story well worth checking into more.
  3. Study backs findings on Polynesian origins – Linguistic, genetic and archaeological research in the past has suggested that the entire Polynesian/Austronesian group of peoples, ranging from the Malays of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines to the Maori of New Zealand and the native Hawaiians, are all descended from seafaring explorers that set out from Taiwan thousands of years ago. Although only about 2-3% of Taiwan’s current population officially belongs to these “aborigine” tribes whose ancestors were also the ancestors of the Polynesians, a much, much larger percentage of “ethnic Chinese” Taiwanese are actually at least partially descended from aborigines who became culturally Sinicized generations ago. This is of particular pride to proponents of Taiwanese independence who use it as evidence that Taiwan is not inherently Chinese. It is actually a popular theory (if not fact) that much of the “Han” population of southern China is actually descended from natives who became culturally Sinicized in a similar way hundreds or thousands of years ago, and have a noticably distinct genetic history from the northern Han Chinese.
  4. Descendants of victims mark ‘Taiping’ tragedy – Not specifically related to anything I have written about before, but the story of how over 1000 immigrants from China to Taiwan died in a shipwreck near Shanghai in 1949 is new to me, and well worth knowing. I am a bit skeptical of how one can wring out a 20-episode drama from this story though. James Cameron’s Titanic was long enough for me.

Big retail winners in Japan’s downturn

Here is my list of some of the few companies that have found success during the recent economic downturn. Note their domestic orientation and low-priced offerings:

Disneyland – Multiple upward earnings revisions. Popular as alternative to international travel.

Nintendo – Record earnings. Gaming as substitute for an expensive social life. Their strategy to expand the pie of gamers through educational titles and the like has paid off enormously.

McDonald’s – Record earnings. 100 yen burgers for high school girls who want a place to chat and penny-pinching single salarymen who don’t cook for themselves

Fast Retailing – operators of cheap apparel seller Uniqlo, offering reasonably fashionable cheap clothes, plus a popular line of ultra-warm “Heat Tech” thermal underwear.

Nitori – cheap imported furniture, many convenient locations and no IKEA-style assembly requirements, no-pressure shopping experience (contrast with expensive, high-pressure Otsuka Kagu).

Tsutaya – is reporting surging new membership in their Internet rental service (similar to Netflix) is surging, while rentals-plus-online numbers have posted a sixth straight record year. People apparently spend their vacations watching the entire Sex and the City series instead of traveling to Hawaii.

Anecdotally, some of the supposedly high-end shops, such as the Caldee line of imported food stores, seem to be pretty popular. For one, the yen is strong, and for two, even relatively expensive items,  are still cheap compared to the overseas trip you’ve decided to skip this year.

Writing in INSIGHT NOW!, small-business M&A consultant Shin Satake identifies four lines of business that do well in economic downturns:

 1. Education services (people who have lost their jobs turn to retraining to make them more competitive)

2. Medical services (stress is a killer!)

3. Repair/maintenance (people decide to get stuff fixed rather than buy a replacement)

4. “Escapism” businesses – (the desire to escape everyday existence is a self-defense mechanism. Includes entertainment, etc.)

Stimulus or investment? Japan vs. USA

Ever since the start of our current financial disaster various economists and pundits have been comparing first the US banking problems with Japan’s, and then more recently the infrastructure-heavy stimulus program with Japan’s construction state. Today’s NYT has a substantial article that easily marks the most high profile comparison yet. I’m certainly no economist and I’m not even taking the time to look at numbers right now, but my quick take on the issue is that the comparison is being significantly overblown, but it is still a very worthwhile comparison to make, so that Japan’s various successes and mistakes can be absorbed as lessons. See the following summation of Japan’s massive pork spending:

Dr. Ihori of the University of Tokyo did a survey of public works in the 1990s, concluding that the spending created almost no additional economic growth. Instead of spreading beneficial ripple effects across the economy, he found that the spending actually led to declines in business investment by driving out private investors. He also said job creation was too narrowly focused in the construction industry in rural areas to give much benefit to the overall economy.

He agreed with other critics that the 1990s stimulus failed because too much of it went to roads and bridges, overbuilding this already heavily developed nation. Critics also said decisions on how to spend the money were made behind closed doors by bureaucrats, politicians and the construction industry, and often reflected political considerations more than economic. Dr. Ihori said the United States appeared to be striking a better balance by investing in new energy and information-technology infrastructure as well as replacing aging infrastructure.

Japan’s huge boom in public works spending was less a national stimulus program than a gigantic rural welfare program of pork-barrel projects designed to prop up the ailing LDP in its long decline. The money was largely directed not to the areas where it would benefit the largest number of people, but the areas where it would benefit the largest number of politicians. This was not done entirely out purely cynical political motives but also due to a genuine desire to arrest the decline of the rural regions themselves, in the face of continuing urbanization and a decline in Japan’s traditional and lionized (if anachronistic) agricultural lifestyle. Regardless of intent, a huge proportion (I won’t use words like “most” without looking at actual numerical research) of the spending was “stimulus” but not “investment”.

I am very, very wary of the general principal of “economic stimulus.” I am not opposed to government spending, or even large amounts of government spending, as long as it is being spent on something that is actually necessary or build further value in the future, i.e. services or investment. I think this attitude should be obvious from the mass transit funding letter I wrote and posted here a few days ago. In short, I worry that the discussions on spending currently ongoing in Washington may turn into a series of worthless boondoggle projects oriented at unpopulated rural areas, combined with random tax cuts and other expenditures poorly aimed at short-term (i.e. one election cycle) economic recovery, while continuing to ignore the trillions of dollars in outstanding repairs or upgrades as well as vital new investment that the country needs. I think it’s safe to say that politicians are going to spend this money. The question is, what will it buy us? Would we rather have a bunch of bridges to nowhere, vacant museums and amusement parks in virtually deserted rural towns, and paved-over mountain tops, or would we rather have a modern electrical grid, mass transit that at least meets late 20th century standards if not 21st century, a safe and reliable water system, bridges rated to not collapse, and maybe even an adequate system of public health care?

Dai-ichi survey says: Economic concern a factor in decisions on marriage, third children

Speaking of juicy bits, last week the Nikkei evening edition ran a feature in its “Living” (seikatsu) section, reviewing the results of some of the recent research coming out of Dai-ichi Life Research Institute.

During a “monitor” survey (which polls a pool of pre-registered respondents who match a desired profile) conducted in summer 2008, the institute noticed some starkly negative comments in the free answer sections, such as this unmarried, 30-year-old male: “My income is not sufficient to get married. At my current income, I could not even pay my children’s school expenses” or this married woman aged 33: “I want another child, but I am very uneasy in terms of the economy, such as rising prices.”

Noticing that they had never bothered to gather data on how many people think this way, in late September (in the panicky period just after the Lehman collapse) Dai-ichi polled a nationwide sample of 800 men and women aged between 25 and 39 on their attitudes.

The results indicated that an economic downturn had a bigger-than-expected effect on young people’s attitudes toward getting married and having children.

Two thirds of unmarried respondents felt that it will become economically more difficult to get married, and that figure grew among those who felt the economy will worsen over the next few years. More than 90% of married respondents felt that a weaker economy would make raising children more difficult. Most strikingly, married people with two children who feel uneasy about the economy overwhelmingly felt it would be harder to have a third child in a weak economy.

While the above study sounds like front-page material for Duh Magazine (sounded way more interesting when I read it on the train last week), it’s an interesting indication when you consider that Japan’s birth rate (measured using the total fertility rate) closely tracks the rate of economic growth, only the birth rate lags GDP growth by about two years. Also, there is a negative correlation between the unemployment rate and the birth rate.

As might be deduced from the above findings, the government’s ongoing measures to fight the declining birth rate (which focus heavily on daycare subsidies and work-life balance policies), while important, may not succeed without ensuring stable employment and a reasonably bright future.

Interestingly, the article closes out with a warning to the mainstream media – overly dramatizing stories on layoffs of vulnerable temp workers and wage cuts may be “heightening average people’s sense of alarm more than necessary” even though most people’s jobs and life plans are more or less intact.

Google Reader shared items meets the Adamukun blog!

Now my shared items are easier to view than ever — check them out as the top post on the new and improved Adamukun blog! I have also beefed up my sidebar.

As always I will keep my juiciest tidbits for the MFT audience (and occasionally Neojaponisme), but for right now I am having fun messing around with the Blogger settings and posting complete randomness.

While I am here, allow me to place the unqualified Adamu seal of approval on my new favorite band, Mates of State. I’ve been annoying my colleagues by humming this same tune for the past week or so:

Also, just curious: anyone else going to see Death Cab next weekend?

New Joyo Kanji

The Kanji subcommittee of the national language study committee of the culture commission has announced an addition of 191 kanji to the list, which brings it to a new total of 2131. Looking at the full list of the now officially common kanji, I am actually struck at how common so many of them are. In fact, I went through the list and did a quick count, and I saw at least 125 for which I knew at least 1proper usage in Japanese (i.e. reading plus definition or place name), and a couple more I decided not to count because I only know them in Chinese. If I know this many of the 191, with still well under a decade of study of Japanese as a foreign language, I think it’s a safe bet that pretty much any native-speaker high school student knows almost all of them, plus a LOT more. If nothing else, I think we can safely put to bed the myth that “you only need to know about 2000 kanji to read Japanese fluently” because there are only about 2000 on the list of kanji that high school students are officially required to know. The joyo list really is a joke, and while I’m sure in reality you don’t need to know nearly as many characters to be fluent in reading Japanese as you do in Chinese, the numbers are probably not as far apart as is commonly believed.

Interestingly, 5 were also removed from the list, and the one example they give, 銑, I have no recollection of every seeing before, although I’m going to guess it is some sort of farming implement.

Thanks to Curzon for mailing me the article.

A hypothesis regarding Japanese universities

The Japanese university model of education is in reality more like a European model in which most of the work is focused on seminars and final projects, and where most lectures and other courses are borderline optional. However, due to post-WW2 reforms the Japanese university system is institutionally based on the American model, and therefore has a superficial structure of grades, credits, homework, etc. that is often but weakly related to the more important areas. This disconnect makes Japanese universities (which do have serious problems) look even worse than they really are, and in fact contributes to their degradation.

As a hypothesis I haven’t thought about this too hard or looked for any evidence but would like to see some discussion. Thoughts?

Yakuza visibility

One of the distinctive characteristics of Japan’s yakuza, as compared with similar mafia type organizations in other countries around the world, is their sometimes incomprehensible blatantness. Where the American Mafia used to officially deny its own existence, Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest Yakuza “family”, has a sign outside their headquarters and a PR officer.

The other weekend Joe and I were in Osaka and happened to pass through the lobby of the Rihga Royal Hotel in Naka no Shima coming out of the subway and noticed that there were signs out advertising meeting places for two parties with rather unusual names:  昭成会 and 朝日会. 昭成会 (Shou-sei-kai) is obviously a reference to 昭和 (Showa) and　平成　(Heisei), the former and current Emperor/historical period of Japan, and 朝日会 (Asahi) just has a nationalistic ring but could mean almost anything. A quick mobile phone Google confirmed that 昭成会 is a known Yakuza group and Yamaguchi-gumi affiliate based in Ishikawa Prefecture. Asahi-kai is far less obvious. A few minutes of poking around just now showed a medical group and an Asahi newspaper distributor, but no obvious gangs of that name.

So basically, one confirmed Yakuza conference at the Righa Royal Hoten on January 24.