Politics – Page 50 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

ROC Armed Forces English Manual

Earlier today I bought two neat old booklets from an old man on the sidewalk just outside Taiwan National History Museum.

Both books are from the same series, published by the Republic of China Military Foreign Language school in 1965.

As you can see from the table of contents, the range of material is a little different from the typical English textbook.

As you may expect from a language textbook published by the military of a fascist government, there is a certain amount of propaganda. For example, a sample sentence for the phrase”come from” is:

The refugees all come from the mainland.

Most the “humorous stories” are also demonstrations of the evils of Communism.

Budapest schoolteacher “What is the cause of the increase of population here in our capital city?”
Pupil: “The population increases because the people from the country flock to town.” Teacher: “Now think carefully, children. What could be done to prevent the influx of the country population?”

Pupil: We could set up collective farms here, too”

And a history lesson:

The arrival of Soviet “technicians” in Cuba brought forth this story from that Communist-dominated island:

A Cuban pupil in a local school was asked by his teacher: “Pepito, who was Napoleon?” “That’s easy,” the boy replied. “He was a technician who left Francee to help Italy, Egypt and lots of countries.”

What you might not expect is that the quality of the English is often very poor. Bold marks the phrase they are trying to explain.

At the same time he will do it if you pay him some money.

The very day at his marriage.

We have lived together for that time on. [The other example correctly says “from that time on.”)

It is better for a woman to marry a man who loves her not a man she loves.

When you’re very lucky, you can even find propaganda and poor English in the same text sample.

Why is the statement that the Principle of Nationality is equivalent to the doctrine of the state is applicable in China but not in the West?

Answer: The statement that the Principle of Nationality is equivalent to the doctrine of the state is applicable in China but not in the West? For the reason that China, since the Ch’in and Han dynasties, has been developing a single state out of a single race, while foreign countries have developed many states from one race and have included many nationalities within one state.

Congress v. Constitution, chapter 942

[11:09] Wade: I love it when Congress acts unconstitutionally [11:09] Joe: ?

In a 49-42 vote, senators added the provision by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to a sweeping defense policy bill. Under the provision, Guantanamo Bay detainees would be allowed to appeal their status as an “enemy combatant” one time, to the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. But they would not be able to file petitions known as writs of habeas corpus, which are used to fight unlawful detentions, in that or any other U.S. court.

“For 200 years, ladies and gentlemen, in the law of armed conflict, no nation has given an enemy combatant, a terrorist, an al-Qaida member the ability to go into every federal court in this United States and sue the people that are fighting the war for us,” Graham told his colleagues. (AP report)

[11:11] Joe: hmmm

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2)

[11:11] Joe: well, this is a "case of invasion," I guess [11:12] Joe: not an invasion of us, but still . . . [11:13] Wade: If Asahi Metal could be heard by the courts, I think the habeas motions for "unlawful enemy combatants" are definitely worthy of the federal courts

Now, the Supreme Court already said that enemy combatants can file habeas motions, and only Clarence Thomas dissented from the notion that enemy combatants get due process protection. Even with that fact aside, Graham’s quote makes no sense whatsoever. Its lack of logic is matched only by its lack of factual basis.

Though I’m no fan of terrorists, lawyers in the Senate should know better than this. You don’t mess with the Constitution, especially when the Supreme Court has just told you not to. Want to get rid of habeas corpus? Vote on a constitutional amendment. Call it the “Deprivation of Rights Amendment.” That’ll go over real well.

The latest from Pat Robertson

The school board in Dover, Pennsylvania decided to adopt intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. Earlier this week, all eight of its members were voted out of office. Pat Robertson responded that God might not save them from disaster as a result. Draw your own conclusion.

Fun fact: Robertson has a law degree from Yale. More fun fact, courtesy of rotten.com:

In a March 1986 speech to Yale University Law School, Robertson admitted one possible reason why he failed the New York Bar Exam (and thus, never practiced law): “When I was at law school, I studied constitutional law for a whole year. I read a thick book of cases on constitutional law. I did all kinds of research. But I confess to you, I never read the Constitution. I graduated without anybody asking me about that.”

Again, draw your own conclusion. I’d say this goes further to support the notion that the American religious right is powered by evangelicals, but thought through by Catholics.

Random awesomeness – video sites, Japanese quiz

First up is Net Cinema, a project sort of similar to the English-language ifilm. Features original shows starring B-grade actors such as former porn star Ai Iijima (NSFW), my favorite nutty rightwinger with googly eyes Terry Itoh (pictured above, left), and second-tier okama (gay) comedian KABA-chan. I haven’t got into any of the shows yet, but given some free time I’m willing to give it a chance out of pure longing for some semblance of Japanese TV. (Hmm, after watching a bit of Iijima-chan bitch about her stocks I am getting skeptical…)

Then there is Japanese Govt Internet TV. This site brings you various government propaganda featuring Koizumi, Abe, and all your other favorites in “high” definition streaming video! It worked great after I downloaded Windows Media Player 10. Koizumi had a swank Ramadan party with all his Muslim ambassador friends.

I’ve mentioned KOKKAI TV (Diet TV — great taste, less filling than regular TV! Watch here: Lower House, Upper House) before, but now it’s new and improved, allowing you to see higher definition video and archived footage. Want to see that magical moment when the postal privatization bills were passed? Just click on October 14, 2005!

Finally we have a fun little Japanese quiz at ALC. I got the first one wrong, and so should you! Updated daily.

That’s what’s wasting my time these days. Enjoy!

Is Alberto Fujimori Japanese?

Following on Joe’s Alberto Fujimori post, I have some different issues that I would like to examine. Why is Alberto Fujimori being protected by the Japanese government? What legal rights does he have in Peru or Japan? What is his citizenship under the law of both countries? I think the best way to examine this is with a timeline of his life, and references to the appropriate law.

This is going to be a long one, so click below for the entire thing.
Continue reading Is Alberto Fujimori Japanese?

Chilling in Tokyo vs. political martyrdom

Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s first president of Japanese ancestry, was managing to get some peace in Tokyo, where he’s a citizen and outside the scope of extradition treaties. But for some reason, he decided to fly back to South America. He says he wants to run for president again in 2006: the national legislature passed a law barring him from running until 2011, but he claims the law is unconstitutional. (You’d think it would be, assuming Peru has some sort of equal protection…)

Well, whatever his motive, here’s what happened: once he got to Chile, the authorities showed up at his hotel room and arrested him. He’s been denied bail and Peru wants him extradited; his supporters in Peru say that he has “a plan” and won’t be extradited. Whatever happens, he’s going to be in Chile for about four weeks, as that’s how long the criminal procedures in Peru are supposed to take. Chile has authority to hold him for up to two months before he is sent to Peru.

Peru has charged Fujimori with a number of nasty crimes, including supporting the FARC forces in Colombia, “disappearing” a few scores of students, and pushing a policy of forced sterilization for population control. The more plausible charges include millions of dollars’ worth of corruption and way too much zeal in going after terrorist groups, including the Shining Path guerillas and the MRTA forces that took over the Japanese embassy in Lima in 1997.

Make no mistake, though: Fujimori is not a demon in his home country. Peru is sharply divided over him. His supporters see him as a hero for liberalizing Peru’s economy and shutting down terrorist groups that made life difficult in the eighties. His opponents, including President Toledo, see him as a tyrant who stole from the people, handing back just enough to keep his popularity up. While he isn’t doing too well in the polls for president right now, he’s doing all right for someone who’s been campaigning illegally in absentia.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of trial he ends up getting. Will it be a giant political show? Which charges will be brought, and which will be substantiated? Will he ever become president? Will he rot in a prison cell? Or will he spend his final days hawking Fuji Cola?

Please, people, get the Alito debate right

The SEPTA strike finally ended early this morning. In a way, losing mass transit was beneficial: with a 90-minute commute on foot, I had some forced spare time to listen to podcasts on my way to and from campus, including Face The Nation and Meet The Press. The episodes two weekends ago, coming in the wake of the Scooter Libby indictment, were most amusing.

But this weekend, it was all about Alito. And I had to hear Democrats on both shows go on about how “he wanted to strip-search a 10-year-old.” The case was Doe v. Groody, 361 F.3d 232 (3d Cir. 2004), text available here. Now, I know these senators must know better—they went to law school, for feck’s sake. So let’s get this straight.

The searches took place as part of a drug bust. The suspected dealer is referred to as “John Doe.”
When the police applied for a search warrant, they asked several times to be able to “search all occupants of the residence and their belongings to prevent the removal, concealment, or destruction of any evidence requested in this warrant.” In fact, it says “all occupants” several times, as if to scream “DON’T LET ANYONE GET AWAY!”
When they got the warrant, the box marked “premises and/or persons to be searched” said “John Doe” and gave some of his personal information. This information filled up the entire box on the form.
The police conducting the raid knew there were going to be women in the house, and didn’t want the suspected dealer to hide the goods on the women, so they got a female meter maid to go in with them.
The meter maid took the wife and daughter of the suspect into the bathroom and had them strip down to show they didn’t have anything hidden in their clothes.
After this happened, the victims sued the police officers individually under Section 1983. The police officers argued that they should get qualified immunity because they didn’t violate “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
The district court rejected this argument and decided the officers should be liable. They appealed. Alito was one of the three-judge panel who got the appeal.
Two of the judges voted to affirm the district court’s decision, since the warrant only said “John Doe.” Alito dissented on the grounds that the officers clearly intended to get a warrant to search everyone, and had a decent reason to believe they were given the right to do so.

Now, criticizing Alito on this last issue is one thing, but he certainly isn’t in favor of strip-searching children left and right. All he wanted was to keep police officers from being sued when they were doing something they thought they were authorized to do. If you want to go after perverts in the government, go after Scooter.

Shinzo Abe, barbarian-defeating shogun?

Now that we’ve completely trashed Foreign Minister Taro Aso’s political qualifications, it’s time to look at Shinzo Abe, the new Chief Cabinet Secretary and Minister of State for Taking Over After Koizumi, shown here in all-out “I’m gonna be a world leader someday!” mode.

Like Koizumi, Abe is a popular guy. Also like Koizumi, he enjoys ruffling feathers, whether it’s advocating a tougher defense policy or visiting Yasukuni Shrine. He is often described as “hawkish,” although I think that word is a bit loaded. He’s certainly confrontational, though: his fame comes from negotiations with North Korea over the abductee issue, in which he refused to take much crap.

Like Aso, he has a political pedigree, although it doesn’t go too far back. Abe’s father Shintaro Abe was Secretary-General of the LDP and served in the Nakasone cabinet back in the mid-80’s. His maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was Prime Minister in the late 1950’s and younger brother of Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Kishi and Sato were both rags-to-riches stories, so Abe’s political lineage ends there.

He started out at Kobe Steel after college, then worked his way into the bureaucracy and became his father’s secretary during the elder Abe’s tenure as Secretary-General. After his father died in 1991, he ran for the empty seat representing Yamaguchi Prefecture, won it, and slipped from the administration into the government.

The Chief Cabinet Secretary position, a combination of press secretary and chief of staff, gives Abe an excellent platform to become even more well-known to the people (many CCSes have gone on to become prime ministers, most recently the late Keizo Obuchi). But he shouldn’t need too much help: he’s already way ahead of the field in opinion polls. Abe has been getting some blogger support too: Lord Curzon is a longtime fan, for one.

Koizumi is using his great political capital to give the country a choice between a hard-ass and a wack-ass. This Yomiuri writer says it Japanese-style:

Koizumi, by including possible successors in the Cabinet, intends to let them compete with each other to come up with ideas and efforts for reform, a decision that suggests the prime minister is grooming an heir to inherit a shogunate named “reform.” … Koizumi, in his reshuffle, made it quite clear he wants this shogunate of reform to be inherited by Abe.

The choice is pretty obvious; hopefully the obvious choice will be made, so Japan doesn’t end up with a prime minister who’s obsessed with “floppies.”

CAVEAT: It could be one of those dark horses, too, like finance minister Sadakazu Tanigaki. But Abe is who just about everyone seems to want.

Taro Aso: the future of Japan?

Prime Minister Koizumi’s new cabinet is in place this week, and one of the apparent front-runners to succeed him is this interesting fellow, Taro Aso, now Minister of Foreign Affairs.

We’ve already talked about some of his more asinine comments: that burakumin shouldn’t be in government, that Japan is one race, that Korea was better off under colonial rule, that floppy disks are the future, and all that.

But there’s more to Aso-san than just knee-jerk right-wingery. Let’s look at 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.

Now, he’s certainly qualified to be prime minister given the generally low standards that have been accepted historically: take a look at Koizumi’s predecessor, Yoshiro Mori, who greeted Bill Clinton by saying “Who are you?” and went on to screw up the Buddhist rites at Keizo Obuchi’s funeral later that day. Part of me wants Aso to become prime minister because there’s an excellent chance he’ll produce all sorts of hilarious Mori-esque gaffes that will make great blog material.

On the other hand, I love Japan too much to subject its people to this man’s leadership. His gaffes are not silly and laughable like Mori’s, but dark and pitiful, likely to kill what few good relations Japan enjoys with the rest of East Asia. Hopefully the LDP will not be foolish enough to elevate him to the top post; maybe he’s just a foil to make Shinzo Abe look better. We can only hope.

Japan’s intestinal fortitude

Some of you may have heard the claim that Japanese intestines are longer, or in some other way, different from those of other people. This is of course just one part of the entire school of Nihonjinron (日本人論), or discussions on the uniqueness of the Japanese race/culture/nation/language. Unlike most of the nihongjinron pseudo-science (like Japanese use the opposite side of their brain to process language, etc.) this one sounds at least vaguely plausible. After all, there are all sorts of morpholigical differences between races; hair, skin, facial features, height, and so on. Could it be true?

Continue reading Japan’s intestinal fortitude