Current Events – Page 59 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Signs of improvement?

As our Alex Kerr inspired discussion continues I have noticed two recent stories in which public policy makers are actually working to address some of the very issues which he focuses on.
First, from The Japan Times: (Try Bugmenot to view the article.)

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government started a project Monday to cut down 1.8 million cedar trees in the mountainous Tama region west of Tokyo to help people with cedar pollen allergies.

One in every four residents in the metropolitan area is believed to suffer from cedar pollen allergies in spring, when the trees release vast amounts of pollen into the air.

The project, aimed at reducing pollen produced by a 1,200-hectare area in the mountains by 20 percent over 10 years, involves replacing ordinary cedar trees with broadleaf trees and a new kind of cedar that releases only a tenth of the pollen of the conventional cedar.

Timber from the felled trees will be used to make desks and lockers for schools and to help build private housing, the metropolitan government said.

“(The cedar trees) have caused vast damage across the country, but the central government hasn’t done anything for us. The metropolitan government will take the first step,” said Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who attended the ceremony.

Next, the AP passes on reports from Yomiuri and Mainichi that Kyoto is banning certain billboards and neon signs, as well as increasing regulation over building heights.

TOKYO: Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto plans to ban billboards on top of buildings and blinking neon signs to improve the city’s landscape, news reports said Saturday.

Kyoto, dotted with old temples, shrines and other historical sites, is known for its beauty and is a popular tourist destination.

But just like many other big cities in Japan, Kyoto’s streets are not free of eyesores such as gaudy billboards and glaring neon signs. Critics often blame Japan’s lax regulations.

Kyoto plans to ban all rooftop billboards as well as neon signs that flicker, Japan’s largest daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported Saturday.

The city plans to revise its regulations on outdoor advertisements by March and rooftop billboards and blinking signboards are expected to be removed completely in six years, the paper said.

The city is also considering introducing stricter regulations on the height of buildings in areas near historic sites, Yomiuri said.

Notice the photograph of Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, who has appeared in public with Kerr, personally cutting down a cedar true. Kerr has of course been extremely active in promoting Machiya preservation and historic district legislation in Kyoto. Should he get some credit for his activism, or were these policy changes inevitable?

A Moment in the Life of Ms. Toshiko Abe: Chinese food with her constituents

Toshiko Abe 中華料理屋ちゅー (1)_640.jpg
Nagi-cho, Okayama Prefecture: LDP Lower House Member Toshiko Abe (LDP, Okayama 3rd District, pictured second from the right in a smart orange jacket) bumps into supporters at a Chinese restaurant during a trip to her home district.

Life in Nagi (pop: 6,564), birthplace of NARUTO author Masashi Kishimoto, looks so… relaxed. The biggest news story affecting Nagi right now is the cold weather they’ve been having, as far as Google News is concerned.

Check out Abe’s blog to witness her remarkable post-lunch transformation into a Kabuki actor.

Adamu scoops the Japanese mainstream media

ZAKZAK cites a Mainichi investigation that estimates that the LDP could earn up to 250 million yen in extra public funds allotted to political parties if they act by the end of the year to readmit some of the LDP members who were ousted for voting against the bills to privatize Japan Post. Since the tallies for how much each party gets in this funding scheme are calculated based on the number of Diet seats the party holds at midnight on January 1, the shuffling of party affiliations to maximize the subsidies is a practice that has been going on for years, and was especially fierce during the political turmoil of the 90s when new parties were popping up and fading out constantly.

This year, however, the LDP opened itself up to extra criticism after kicking out the postal rebels, a group of connected, effective politicians whose only crime was to violate party discipline and stick up for their sleazy bloated constituencies. Letting the ones who are really really sorry back in would prove that the move was just another Dentsu-inspired publicity stunt and leaves the less experienced new lower house members who the LDP ran against the rebels with their rear ends exposed. Leaving the rebels hanging means the party not only loses money but also a good deal of political talent that could end up working actively against them. Making it all worse is a divided LDP that can’t decide one way or the other – Secretary General Hidenao Nakagawa met with the rebels’ leader Takeo Hiranuma to help seal the deal, while the new Diet members and their supporters such as ex-LDP sec gen Tsutomu Takebe fight to guard the positions of the “Koizumi children.”

It’s nice that the major news organizations are focusing on a more cynical angle that may motivate the LDP. Too bad I already covered this more than two weeks ago! Remember this post?

(2) As you may know, the deadline for Diet members to register for government subsidies for political parties is the last day of December. As you can see from the fact that the timing for people to join and leave parties has almost always been at the end of the year, it would not be surprising if this recent scandal, too, centers around the money. That’s because if the postal rebels and unaffiliated members were already members of the LDP, then the party’s subsidy, in other words the funding for its activities, would probably substantially decrease. Meanwhile, if the rebels manage to rejoin the party by the end of the year, their party subsidies coming to the LDP will increase. (tr: here he seems to be implying that the postal putsch was a scam to earn more party subsidies)

The only Japanese-language news source that even came close to my level of intestinal fortitude was the Sanyo Shimbun, a Chugoku regional paper that brought up the funding issue in a Nov 7 editorial, noting that not only will the LDP lose money by not bringing them back in by the end of the year, but the rebels themselves would lose possible monetary impetus to go back and could even form a new party themselves. Sankei may have picked up on it last week with some sweet graphics, but I still beat them both. And that’s all that matters.

Looks like these so-called “reporters” should have been listening to DPJ Upper House Dietman Tetsuro Fukuyama (or reading Mutant Frog, as it were). I owe this man a beer.

Japan’s Internet homeless – living the dream?

The Asahi has a report about the growing phenomenon of people living in Internet cafes:

…[F]or a growing number of young people, the coffee-shop-cum-entertainment-centers are not just a home away from home but home itself.

Most are freeters–job-hopping part-timers–who hit hard times and have no permanent place to live. They have found a haven in the cafes, which offer showers and private cubicles at a bargain price.

On a recent evening, a 30-year-old man from Osaka entered one such place in the city’s Umeda entertainment district. He signed up for the late-night rate, which allows a five-hour stay for 1,500 yen starting at 10 p.m. The man slipped into one of the private booths, carrying a backpack.

He quickly showered, brushed his teeth and then burrowed under a blanket that comes with the room. He stretched out in a reclining seat as best he could and tried to catnap.

Asahi gives some background to the problem later in the article:

Internet cafes that offer multiple services including overnight stays began cropping up around 1999. According to the industry organization that represents them, 1,320 such cafes had registered for business around the nation as of the end of September.

“The rates are better than saunas and capsule hotels,” says Hirohiko Kato, 52, who owns a cybercafe chain with 55 outlets nationwide. “And in addition to that, cafes offer special perks such as bottomless soft drinks. Multiple-service cafes have become especially popular in major city areas.”

A cafe manager at a large-scale cybercafe with 150 seats in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, says: “We serve about 140 overnight customers a night on average. About 10 percent are regulars we see come in carrying large bags.”

They act like this is a new problem. There have been reports of people being “caught” living in Internet cafes for a least a year now. The cafes all differ in what they offer and what they’ll tolerate, but most run 24 hours a day and many offer showers and toiletries, supposedly to cater to businessmen who missed the last train for the night.
Continue reading Japan’s Internet homeless – living the dream?

Thallium poisoning in the news again

The fine tradition of poisoning continues in Russia, as Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB spy, is reportedly suffering from thallium poisoning.

What is thallium?

“It is tasteless, colourless, odourless. It takes about a gram – you know, a large pinch of salt like in your food – to kill you”, he said.

Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who also lives in Britain, said thallium was a “special” poison, that “you couldn’t just get over the counter”.

“You could say it is only available to secret services,” he said.

While thallium is not as easy to get as rat poison, it is most emphatically not only avaliable to secret services. In fact, even a child can get it if they try hard enough. Long time readers of this blog will remember the case of the teenage girl who poisoned her own mother with thallium. As the girl wrote in her creepy, creepy blog:

“It’s a bright, sunny day today, and I administered a delivery of acetic thallium,” the girl wrote in August. “The man in the pharmacy didn’t realise he had sold me such a powerful drug.”

Shintaro Ishihara’s “luxury tours”

Tokyo Governor Ishihara is in trouble these days for a recent report released by the Japan Communist Party’s Tokyo chapter that reveals the extravagant details of Ishihara’s 19 official trips abroad. According to the Asahi’s report on the incident, the excessive use of public funds for these trips violates Tokyo’s spending rules, and they far outpace the spending of governors of neighboring prefectures. Here are some details of the trips in a bullet list so you don’t have to wade through the article:

During a trip to the Galapagos Islands in 2001, a trip supposedly necessary to study “eco-tourism,” the governor rented motorboats and spent 4 days “cruising” around the islands off Ecuador famous for their unique fauna. The JCP notes that Tokyo’s Environment Bureau had already compiled a report on ecotourism, calling into question the governor’s justification in spending a total of 14.4 million yen on the trip (figure includes costs for translator/assistants).

In 2006 trip to the US, Ishihara visited Grand Canyon and Redwood national parks, supposedly to observe America’s park ranger system. However, during the trip he spent another 4 days sightseeing and hobnobbed with local MOFA officials and Japanese business leaders. And anyway, Tokyo already has a similar park ranger system.

Most expensive, at a total of 35 million yen, was the governor’s May 2006 trip to the UK. His visit was intended to observe London’s strategies to win the chance to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. However, he only spent about an hour and a half on his stated mission – a meeting with local Olympic officials and a 30-minute helicopter ride. After signing a cooperation agreement with the city of London, he took an oddly unnecessary-seeming trip to the Isle of Man, to watch a motorcycle race of all things. The justification for the trip was that one village in Tokyo is considering holding a similar race, but that project is still in the initial planning stages.

But before that, Ishihara was in New York and Washington in November 2005 to view the New York marathon and give a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (you can listen to the speech here). The contents of the speech (which I was this close to seeing live myself) consisted mostly of China-bashing (he famously declared that the US “could not win” a war against China), a practice that the Communists in Japan claim is not within the Tokyo governor’s job description.

Somehow the governor has claimed to be completely oblivious to the spending rules, according to Asahi: “It’s not a governor’s job to decide (how travel expenses are used),” he said. “I do not know much about the rules, but if there has been some deviation, I think it must be corrected.” What’s interesting is that he’s not being accused of misappropriating funds exactly, just overspending. The typical travel scandals involve situations like bureaucrats taking a few hundred thousand yen to go to Russia, but instead spending that time in Taiwan getting their groove on. Or more often bureaucrats will claim non-existent expenses (hotel rooms, taxi fare) so they can pocket the cash. But now with the growth of public scrutiny (and institution of a public information disclosure system similar to FOIA in the US), the Japanese opposition has come to a point where they now can complain that public trips are simply unjustified rather than grossly fraudulent.

Now, it’s no secret that the executives of major cities tend to travel a lot. The numerous inter-city exchange initiatives, conferences, official study tours of foreign policy programs etc offer tempting travel opportunities for internationally-minded mayors. Outgoing Washington, DC, mayor Anthony Williams was also famous for his many trips abroad, though no scandal ever arose over them that I’m aware of.

I’m a little surprised at how little English-language media attention the story has received given the man’s media darling status. The Western media have used Ishihara as an easy poster boy for Japan’s right wing given his tendency to make insane foot-in-mouth statements and other bluntness, but where are they now?

Murals of Wat Phra Kaew

Sure, the shiny gold buildings, freaky demon statues, and annoying Korean tourists at Wat Phra Kaew, the royal temple of Bangkok, were plenty fun, but what really did it for me were the fantastic murals that cover the entire inner wall. What exactly is going on, or what saga it is based on, I have no idea, but I do know that I want Peter Jackson to make a movie version of it, starting tomorrow.

Update: From the Wikipedia article in The Ramayana.

Thailand’s popular national epic Ramakien is derived from the Hindu epic. In Ramakien, Sita is the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari (T’os’akanth (=Dasakand) and Mont’o). Vibhisana (P’ip’ek), the astrologer brother of Ravana, predicts calamity from the horoscope of Sita. So Ravana has her thrown into the waters, who, later, is picked by Janaka (Janok). While the main story is identical to that of the Ramayana, many other aspects were transposed into a Thai context, such as the clothes, weapons, topography, and elements of nature, which are described as being Thai in style. It has an expanded role for Hanuman and he is portrayed as a lascivious character. Ramakien can be seen in an elaborate illustration at the Wat Phra Kaew temple in Bangkok.

You can read an English translation of the Ramakien online here.

These images cannot be appreciated in such a small space, so please click on them for a larger file.

What Adamu thinks: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

Being the preeminent experts that we at the Mutant Frog Travelogue are, some Japanese university student has decided to use us as a primary resource for a major research project (or more likely, the subject of one of the countless “survey the foreigner” projects they give in university English classes). Here’s what the questioner wanted to know:

Dear Mr. Mutant frog.
Hello! I’m a [Japanese] University student. I get your e-
mail address at MUTANT　FROG　TORAVELOGUE. [This university]
is Japanese university. Our English class was to sending e-mail which
has some questions about things which have interest.

Questions.

・ What do you think Prime Minister Shinzo Abe?

・ How will Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe be different
from the ex-Prime Minister Koizumi?

・ Do you think Japan become better? And I want to listen to your
opinion.

Thank you.
From [a] university in Japan.

Continue reading What Adamu thinks: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

Real facts about Shinzo Abe: His favorite foods

Rather than blog about more substantive issues (like the massive fraud perpetrated by the Koizumi and Abe administrations with their faked “town meetings” in which the government paid people 5000 yen apiece to ask the right questions), I’ll use this time during a break from translation to look at the latest “live talk” from PM Shinzo Abe, intended as his modern-day version of FDR’s fireside chats.

Abridged and edited from a video interview (mp4) with Japan’s prime minister on the occasion of the upcoming “Food Education Day” that occurs on the 19th of every month:

Q: What is your favorite food?

Abe: Well, it hasn’t changed since I was a child. I still like Korean BBQ, ramen, ice cream, and watermelon!

Q: Do you eat breakfast every day?

Abe: Well, I was asked at the Diet this soon after I became prime minister. Sometimes I eat light, just tree kale juice, carrots, and apple juice, but since becoming prime minister, I have been making sure to eat rice, miso soup with clams, and fermented soy beans with lots of leeks.

Continue reading Real facts about Shinzo Abe: His favorite foods

Inventor of Cool Biz Rewarded with WSJ Picture

This, like my recent translation of the Soka Gakkai-Japan Times article, is from July, but I thought Wall Street Journal’s portrait of the mayor of Yokohama and inventor of Cool Biz made him look especially dignified. You can read the WSJ’s interview with him here. An excerpt:

WSJ: What was your first job and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it?

Mr. Nakada: My first real paid job was as a staffer for the Japan New Party , but I experienced different jobs while I was at the Matsushita Institute. I first worked for three months at a suit factory in the countryside. Then I worked in the seafood section of a supermarket in Singapore for three months. I spent the longest time in waste management, collecting garbage and working at a factory that sorts and prepares garbage for recycling. I learned different things from each job. At the suit factory, I learned what small-to-medium-size businesses are about — their organizational structure and way of thinking. Working in garbage management, I learned about people’s irresponsibility: Sellers only care about selling products and consumers only care about using them. No one cares about what happens to waste. I learned that different players act out of their own interests.