Politics – Page 47 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

But, I like sashimi!

“I even like sashimi” Taiwan’s KMT party secretary denies being “anti-Japan” to media

“Reports that the KMT walks lockstep with the mainland (China) in their anti-Japan campaign do not reflect my real feelings. I even love sashimi!” On the 10th Ma Ying Jiu (mayor of Taipei), chairman of the KMT[Chinese Nationalist Party], Taiwan’s largest opposition party, assembled Japanese reporters resident in Taipei and issued a denial of the viewpoint that he was himself a believer in anti-Japan ideology.

There are indications that the KMT has been intensifying their anti-Japan tendencies, such as stressing their own role in the Sino/Japanese war. “We criticize even the white terror (of KMT despotic rule) and (China’s) Tainanmen incident from the same basis of human rights and constutituional government. There’s no reason to make an issue out of only Japan,” Chairman Ma Ying Jiu said.

However, “I do not approve of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s Yasukuni Shrine visits,” he said, not forgetting that stab in the neck. Ma Ying Jiu is currently considered the favorite to win in Taiwan’s next presidential election.

Doesn’t the “but, I like sashimi defense” have the same ring to it as, “but I have so many black friends” or “but Jews are so funny”? I’m amazed that this is the best that Ma could come up with.

Now your entire meal is embargoed

We’ve all been hearing so much about how the mad cow disease related beef embargoe is going to damage Japan/US relations so badly that we might as well be going back to the day before Little Boy fell out of the Enola Gay, but according to this article in The Mainichi, there’s actually been another large-scale food embargo going on for some time.

Japan will allow foreign potatoes into the country for the first time, accepting a U.S. proposal to brush or wash off all dirt before shipping, send them in sealed containers, and limit their use to processed potato chip snacks, an official said Wednesday.

Japan decided to accept the proposal after 17 months of deliberations, which included sending a team of experts to the United States from July to August 2005, said Masashi Kaneda of the Plant Protection Quarantine Division at the Agriculture Ministry.

Until now, Japan banned imports of foreign potatoes to keep out potato wart fungus and a potato eelworm, the ministry said.

Potato wart fungus has been eradicated in the United States since 1992, while potato eelworm has been limited to areas in New York state, the ministry said.

If potatoes had been banned until now, why is beef attracting so damn much attention?

China angry over Japan’s arms trade

Younghusband pointed out this brief news article related to my earlier post.

BEIJING — A Chinese newspaper and the Japanese Embassy in Beijing are in dispute over coverage of Japan’s firearms exports. The dispute was triggered by an illustrated, full-page Jan 17 article in Elite Reference, a newspaper under the China Youth Daily, that Japan exported $65 million worth of arms in 2003, becoming one of the world’s top eight arms exporters.

The article, titled “Examining the Reality of Japan’s Military Spending,” said that in 2001 Japan exported $55.7 million worth of bombs, hand grenades and other arms, mostly to the United States. Embassy spokesman Keiji Ide visited the newspaper’s offices in Beijing on Jan 19 to meet the reporter, Qiu Yongzheng, question his sources and challenge some parts of the article.

Ok, I know that Japan exports handguns under the claim that they are sports equipment and not actual “arms,” but bombs and hand grenades? Is there any truth to this whatsoever? Keep in mind that the report comes from Chinese state media, not widely knows as the most reliable source.

Yahoo Japan To Open Dedicated Political Info Service

ZAKZAK informs me that it will soon be easier to follow my favorite politicians, like Taro Aso and Sumio Mabuchi (pictured above (left) with Terry Itoh):

(Paraphrased)

Easily Search Diet Member’s Activities… Yahoo! Opens Politics Site

Yahoo! Japan will start “Yahoo! Everyone’s Politics,” a political information site where one can easily search politicians’ actions and proposals submitted to the Diet, from Feb. 22. It will also be possible to read comments written by Diet members and political parties.

Users can search for politicians by name, party affiliation, and election district. In addition to bios and daily political activities penned by the Diet members themselves, they have also instituted a function to monitor members’ voting records.

Yahoo! has been explaining the contents of the service to political parties and Diet members since around the summer of 2005. Some said that inputting all that data would be cumbersome, but there were many who responded positively to the service as an opportunity to directly connect with their constituents. As of now, approx. 200 of the 720 Diet members in both houses have written entries, and that number is expected to grow.

The site will not contain ads from normal companies but will instead display ads related to the political parties and elections. The site can be accessed from the Yahoo! portal, and the company expects approximately 2 million hits per month. Yahoo! users are often in their 20s and 30s, and Yahoo! has commented that they would like this to promote understanding of politics and lead to an increase in voter turnout.

ZAKZAK 2006/02/06

Did Iran and Japan make the same mistake?

Or to phrase it as another SAT analogy: Israel is to Iran as Norway is to Japan.

I just wrote a post last week, largely about Japan’s illegal whaling, in which I pointed out the absurdity of Japan having voluntarily signed an anti-whaling treaty they had no intention of following and opened up themselves to international criticism, while Norway, who simply never signed the treaty, is perfectly content carrying out their own whaling activities.

For the other half of the analogy, look at this quote from the other day’s NYT:

The resolution was passed after the United States agreed late Friday to a clause indirectly criticizing Israel’s secret nuclear weapons status. Initially Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had rejected any compromise, arguing that Iran would use the clause for propaganda purposes to criticize Israel, which unlike Iran is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and suffers no consequences as a nuclear power, diplomats in Vienna and American officials said.

Of course the real reason that Israel can get away with having nuclear weapons and Iran can’t is not because of the treaty, but because the USA and Europe are willing to tolerate Israel’s possession of such weapons, but it does raise the question of why Iran bothered to sign the treaty in the first place. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples of countries that signed up for treaties that they then turned around and violated without a second thought, but I found this parallel particularly apt, despite the vast difference in scale of importance.

Maybe people would still be protesting Japan’s whaling activities even if they hadn’t entered into the treaty, and Iran would definitely still be under diplomatic pressure to curtail their nuclear research, but why in both cases did they only make it easier for their opponents by breaking rules that they never had to agree to be bound by in the first place?

Japanese vs US Blogs

High praise from Curzon at Coming Anarchy:

Educational and entertaining in one healthy dose, [Mutant Frog Travelogue is] probably the best East Asian blog around.

Thanks, I think we’re pretty great too! But that made me wonder — what do other East Asian blogs look like? What about, just for example, the highest ranked Japanese blogs on Technorati?

(Note about Technorati from their About section: “Technorati displays what’s important in the blogosphere — which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence, and the speed at which these conversations are taking place.” Hence, these rankings are a measure of what people with blogs are linking to, not the number of page views, influence, revenue, or any other factor (as far as I can tell))

For starters, let’s see what’s out there. Here’s a quick rundown of the top ten blogs in Japan and the US/English-speaking world (for comparison):

Japanese blogs:

1. がんばれ、生協の白石さん！ “Fight on, Shiraishi of the Co-op!”

This is the blog of a Mr. Shiraishi, “very very average” employee of the Co-op (student cooperative/school store) at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. Shiraishi gained fame for being the writer of responses to comment cards that students would write to him. The comment cards are a well-known phenomenon at Japanese universities as the answer are often posted outside the Co-ops on a bulletin board. He differs from other such Co-op employees in that he actually answers the stupid joke comments that he gets rather than giving them a quiet death in the round file. For some reason this has become majorly popular in Japan, probably because college students throughout the country have wondered just what kind of weirdos answer their comments.

Jenkins Update

I still need to read his Confessions memoir, but I suspect it’s pretty juicy. Here’s a quick update on what he’s been up to:

Jenkins: DPRK targeted Soga

Shigefumi Takasuka Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Charles Jenkins, a U.S. Army deserter to North Korea and husband of Hitomi Soga, a repatriated Japanese abductee, said Thursday that North Korean agents targeted Soga and waited a month to get a chance to kidnap her.

…

He said he was planning to apply for Japanese citizenship in July.

“I am planning [to become a Japanese],” he said. “What happened is I must wait for one year since the day I got my Japanese identification card. That’ll be July, I think.”

He also said he had been asked by a local tourist association in Sado to work as a tour guide during the summer.

“I think I’ll do that,” Jenkins said.

Asked if his book “Kokuhaku” (To Tell the Truth) would be published in countries other than Japan, Jenkins said he hoped so. “Maybe in the Korean language,” he said. “But it’s not definite yet. I’ll wait and see.”
(Feb. 3, 2006)

Come on, print an English edition! We all know it was originally written in English anyway. Are you afraid of unkind reviews in the New York Times, Jenkins? You can’t spend your whole life running away, you know.

Takebe’s Grandchildren Think Horie is His Brother… OOPS!

At a speech in Saitama City, the embattled LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe, who is being blamed for his outpouring of support for ex-Livedoor president Takafumi Horie during the September 2005 Lower House election, let people know that he had to tell his grandchildren that he is in fact NOT Horie’s brother, despite saying so at a speech at the time.

Aso Backs off of Tactless Emperor-Visit-Yasukuni Speech PLUS

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Aso Qualifies Remark Calling For Emperor To Visit Yasukuni

TOKYO (Kyodo)–Foreign Minister Taro Aso clarified Tuesday that his call over the weekend for the emperor to visit the war-related Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo was not meant for the emperor to go there ”in the current situation.”

”I made the remark from the standpoint of the spirits of the war dead enshrined (at Yasukuni) because they died for the emperor. I never said that (I wanted) the emperor to make the shrine visit in the current situation,” Aso told a news conference.

Aso said Saturday in a speech in Nagoya that ”From the viewpoint of the spirits of the war dead, they hailed ‘Banzai’ for the emperor — none of them said long live the prime minister. A visit by the emperor would be the best.”

Nothing witty to say about this guy, but I have discovered a wonderful site dedicated to the man. This site is as fascinating as it is jam-packed with information. Some quick highlights:

– He reads 30 comic books per week. 30! (Was once caught reading Rosen Maiden in the VIP room at Haneda Airport, and had comics shipped to him when he was in America)

– In addition to comics, he reads a ton of normal books and is an intelligent man with lots of stories to tell (Yet another counterexample to the facile notion that problematic politicians are simply fools)

– Visits Yasukuni Shrine every year despite being a Christian (Christians are, of course, forbidden to worship other gods as one of their most basic tenets)

– Is apparently aware of the existence of 2-channel as a “problem forum site on the Internet”

– Was voted best dresser in the political world in 1977

– Speaks English, having studied at Stanford and London University after graduating from Gakushuin, which before the abolition of the peerage in 1947 was an exclusive finishing school for the Japanese nobility

– Lived in Sierra Leone for 2 years developing diamond mines but left after a civil war erupted

– Once said, “I think the best country is one in which rich Jews feel like living.”

Continue reading Aso Backs off of Tactless Emperor-Visit-Yasukuni Speech PLUS

More on the Aso Speech

There was a very interesting part of Aso’s speech calling for the emperor to visit Yasukuni that didn’t make it into English reporting so far:

“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!” (Source: NTV News 24, paraphrased from memory)

The statement repeats a theme emphasized in Aso’s most recent essay on his official website:

If you analyze the current situation, unrelated to the anti-American feelings of left-leaning Japanese and the mass media, isn’t it Japan who has no choice but to take a basic national policy attitude of relying on America? Even children know the everyday wisdom that if there’s a dangerous person in the seat next to you, protection, if you can’t provide it yourself, become friends with the best fighter. This is a little too simplistic, but please consider this one “differing opinion.”　

Unfortunately, the video has already been taken down. If anyone can find me the full text of his speech I would really appreciate it!