Somehow I missed this release last week – Dentsu has Japan’s 2008 ad spend figures. The takeaway:
Thanks to media professor Hiromi Ibukuro and his awesome research data blog on IZA.
I had been vaguely aware that gays are more open in Taiwan than in Japan (more active gay pride festival, spotting a very cleary labeled gay bookstore near Taiwan University), but hadn’t consciously realized quite how different things are before reading this article from yesterday’s Taipei Times.
Gay rights activists yesterday announced that they would form a voting bloc to support gay-friendly candidates in the upcoming legislative by-election in Taipei City’s Da-an District (大安).
“We’ve had six gay pride parades in Taipei in the past six years and more than 18,000 people took part in last year’s event — that’s where the voters are,” chief coordinator of last year’s gay pride parade, Lee Ming-chao (李明照), told a news conference.
“In the process of mobilizing the gay and lesbian community in Taipei, we estimated that around 10 percent of voters in Da-an District are gay — including myself. We can surely become a deciding minority if we stand together.”
He predicted that the turnout for the by-election would be lower than the 60.47 percent for last year’s legislative election.
This whole concept seems to me utterly inconceivable in Japan. While there is not much in the way of active discrimination against gays in Japan (like there is in most Muslim countries and some Christian ones, even including much of the US until recently) I get the impression that homosexuality and related issues are still generally more taboo here than anywhere else in all of East and Southeast Asia. Yes, there is a transgender politician in Tokyo, but Kamikawa Aya is said to be the only openly LGBT politician in the entire country of over 120 million people. Compared with Taipei’s apparently increasingly popular gay pride parade, Tokyo’s has been cancelled for this year due to lack of interest/resources.
Turning Japanese
Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics is the go-to guy for understanding Japan’s lost decade. From prepared testimony for a Joint Economic Committee hearing tomorrow…
What follows is thankfully not Adam Posen reading the words “turning Japanese” into the Congressional record, but I swear if I see that phrase again I might just rip myself in half, Rumpelstiltzken-style.
Now, here at Mutant Frog we like to follow cliches in the media, my own favorites being the overused “kabuki” and the often-used but always amusing “slammed!” But “turning Japanese” is just so cringe-worthy that I haven’t been able to bring myself to mention it.
I am not sure why I hate this phrase so much, but I suspect it’s got a lot to do with the grating awfulness of the original song. I mean, imagine if every time Spain is mentioned on CNN they started playing “Hey, Macarena!” That’s how this makes me feel.
So what can be done to end this painful abuse of the English language? I was thinking it might make a difference if someone came out with a new definitive song about Japan, this time without the cartoonish 80s new wave voices and stereotypically “Asian” intro melody. Please let me know your ideas so we can finally take care of this important issue.
(Bonus: See Marxy’s take on the song at the bottom of the link)
Per a Kyodo wire report in Japanese, the new “zairyu card” proposal (detailed here and here) coincides with an MLIT proposal for an updated resident registration (juminhyo) system, which will include foreigners for the first time.
This is perhaps the best part of the entire change. For years now, foreigners have been booked in a separate alien registration system, which creates all sorts of hassles: their Japanese spouses officially appear to be single, and the foreigner can’t verify their identity using the same means as locals (which confuses inexperienced clerks all the time). Visitors in Portugal who plan to stay in the country longer, or even permanently, may consider applying for a portugal golden visa.
So now the picture is a bit clearer. When a foreigner moves, they will update their juminhyo at city hall just like a Japanese person would, and this update will be forwarded to Immigration for recording in the zairyu card system. It still isn’t clear how extensions and changes in immigration status will work (the same in reverse?), but this seems like a promising line of developments so far.
Yes, says the man in the bowtie:
Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) — A U.K. businessman is seeking to raise $50 million to invest in North Korea, reviving a 2005 plan after the U.S. government removed the communist regime from its list of countries that support terrorism.
ChosunFund Pte. Ltd. will join with North Korean partners for mining and energy projects, Colin McAskill, founder of the Singapore-incorporated fund, said in an interview.
…
“The country holds huge natural resources but is capital starved and lacks the technology and management skills with which to develop them,” McAskill said.McAskill, 69, said he has been consulting on potential North Korean projects since 1987. While the country attracts one-off investment deals such as a recent contract licensing Orascom Telecom Holding SAE to provide wireless telephone services, it has struggled to raise money from global financial markets since defaulting on overseas debt in the 1970s.
London-based emerging markets money manager Fabien Pictet & Partners Ltd. was considering a fund that would invest in South Korean companies that do business with the North. The idea is “on hold for the time being,” Jonathan Neill, managing director, said in an e-mail.
I understand that the terror designation was a technical barrier for to much economic aid in addition to banning most financial institutions from doing business with NK. And I know saying investing in North Korea is a bad idea is like shooting fish in a barrel.
But the US political decision to remove NK from the list doesn’t strike me as any real vote of confidence in the country, since North Korea appears to remain the dictionary definition of a state-run criminal enterprise, even if it hasn’t strictly engaged in “terrorism” the 80s. Nor is this is any real sign that the situation in North Korea is at all stable. The ailing health of Kim Jong Il also plays a decisively destabilizing role. We could easily see a succession battle worthy of imperial Rome when he finally dies.
Still, you have to give the man credit for sticking with the idea for more than 20 years. There is always the chance that NK will stabilize somehow, so getting in on the ground floor would then be seen as a smart move. There could also be a rationale for investing in SK companies who take on NK projects with the backing of the South Korean government, or with some other guarantee to offset losses.
Walking from Nogizaka Station to Tokyo Midtown this morning, I joined thousands of commuters who were forced to step over what appeared and smelled to be a smear of human feces on the Roppongi sidewalk. Was it anti-capitalist terrorism, or just the work of a partier who couldn’t contain himself?
Now that some of my anger has subsided, I can’t help but see this as an aptly pungent metaphor for modern Roppongi. While conveniently located in the center of Tokyo, for a long time the Roppongi area was not considered a business district but overwhelmingly the notorious nightlife center of Tokyo. But the construction of business centers such as Roppongi Hills and Tokyo Midtown over the past few years has re-branded the area as office-friendly. Yet as long as the dozens of clubs continue to infest the Roppongi Crossing area, workers such as myself will be forced to commute each morning using the same streets taken by the drunks and gangsters to go home the previous night. I have had more than one run-in with drunks returning from a night out, but needless to say today’s experience trumped them all.
Debito has gotten hold of the actual proposal to overhaul Japan’s alien registration system (as blogged in this space last week). If you read Japanese, go straight to his post and read the primary sources.
Some of the details which are now clear:
My recent post about the eikaiwa industry by the numbers has made the rounds of a couple ESL job forums, and it seems to have a few people worried. My intention wasn’t to scare people off of English teaching entirely – the demand for learning English is high in this country, and while there is something of an oversupply of teachers amid slumping sales, Japan possesses some serious advantages, such as high living standards and the rule of law, that make it a better choice than some other destinations. So if some of them are still reading this blog, I just want to remind them that English teaching isn’t dead in Japan. The issue is just that the business is headed for a rough patch, not that every teacher will have to put up with crappy wages and dismal work conditions, though that may be true for many.
The private-sector eikaiwa industry appears to be hurting badly, ever since various events in 2006 led to the ignominious business suspension, flailing attempt to save through shady financing deals, and eventual collapse of former industry giant NOVA (so carefully documented by the Japan Economy News blog) shattered the image of a once booming industry and, with the disappearance of the well-known NOVA rabbit mascot, symbolized the sudden end of long-running profit machine and source of easy employment for thousands of young Westerners interested in life in a new country. The rest of the “big four” schools also faced serious difficulty, most notably LADO which is no longer with us.
Today I want to pass on some things I learned after learning about the worsening management-worker relations at Berlitz Japan:
Benesse – happily cleaning up after NOVA?
Benesse, a long-time provider of education services, chiefly juku, jumped feet first into Japan’s English conversation market when it acquired veteran language teaching company Berlitz International in 2001. The company caught my eye when some of its unionized teachers in Japan were sued on grounds that they striked illegally. Without commenting on the merits of the dispute itself, I would like to react to one passage of the Japan Times article (while I am generally pro-union, I simply don’t know enough about the case to have any opinion one way or the other. Feel free to discuss in the comments though!):
The financial health of Benesse Corp., Berlitz Japan’s parent company, also influenced the timing of the strike. In their annual report for the financial year ending March 31, 2008, Benesse recorded their highest-ever earnings. Operating income grew 11.4 percent and Berlitz International Inc. achieved its best result since being bought by Benesse. Operating income for Benesse’s language company division rose 36 percent from the year before to ¥6.35 billion, in part due to higher revenues and profits at Berlitz International, which benefited from “an increase in the number of lessons taken worldwide, particularly in Japan and Germany,” according to the report.
Curious about exactly how Berlitz is boosting its “number of lessons,” I decided to take a closer look at their latest annual report for FY2007 (PDF) in the hope that they would explain exactly how they could enjoy such growth as the industry as a whole is caught in a horrific vortex. It is also interesting to see Berlitz on the rise, considering that it had long lost market share to the other big chains. I came up a little disappointed, as annual reports are not the place to broadcast your super-secret business strategy to the world. But one passage did at least seem to hint that they were up to something:
[As for the business environment of] our language business area, while there are concerns over the global economic slowdown, the demand for language learning remains robust. However, in Japan the collapse of a major language school has led to increased selectivity of language schools among customers. (Page 11)
Considering that they are giving record numbers of lessons in Japan, one can assume that while they won’t come out and say it, this explicit mention of a flight to quality means they must be enjoying some benefit from former NOVA students in need of tutelage. Plus, they have maintained one of the world’s strongest language teaching brands, and they don’t seem to have had the same customer service problems as NOVA, whose six-month business suspension for unfair refund policies spelled doom for the company.
Other wisdom from Benesse
In addition, it is interesting to note that the management decided to explicitly state an intention to use between 20 and 30 billion yen for acquisitions over the medium to long term, including in the language business (Page 18). Could they be looking to scoop up some underperforming rival to pick up more market share?
In the business risk section of the report, they remind investors that while they are prepared for the conventional consensus on Japan’s shrinking population (their main business is juku, so fewer kids = bad), their business will be screwed if the population ages even faster than expected.
They are also worried that the government’s measures to combat declining educational standards as measured by the international PISA tests. The measures as listed by Benesse (to be implemented between 2009 and 2013) fall under the banner of “life skills” and include more classroom time throughout the curriculum, mandatory English instruction at elementary schools, as well as “training to develop skills in using knowledge and not merely acquiring basic knowledge.” They worry that this “increased diversification of demand” could negatively impact their business if it progresses at a more sudden pace than expected. In other words, juku have traditionally filled the gap left by the deficiencies in classroom instruction, so if the schools actually get their act together then Benesse (and to a lesser extent Berlitz) could be in trouble.
OK, I did the first one here over the weekend. (As a riff on this real poster.)
Curzon posted it here (currently on page 2 at time of posting) to this Japanese funny pics board, where it sits between some racist anti-Korean pics (NOT posted by Curzon) and uhh this.
Next, Ben’s friend BigJohn passed along this variation on the idea.
And finally, regular poster Jade OC tried his own variant on the cake theme, which I think came out very well. This cake is no lie.
Come on people. Aso’s approval rating is working on a new record low and the LDP is on the slow train to dumpsville. The least you can do is help out with a new campaign poster. Send it in at an attachment or post a link and it’ll be added to the collection.
Seeing Adam’s reference to the highly disputed pieces of worthless, barren rock known as Takeshima/Dokdo in his post just now reminded me of this, which I had been meaning to post. A Korean classmate of mine at Kyoto University picked up this wet hand tissue from what she described as a very normal restaurant in Korea. It reads:
Republic Of Korea wet tissue
Dokdo is our land.
To translate into Japanese, which as usual maps closely to the original Korean better than English:
大～韓民国 御絞り
獨島 は我が土
Dokdo is of course the Korean name for Takeshima, which in European languages used to be called the Liancourt Islets, and is now called whichever of the two stupid names will make your conversation partner happy.
