Ranting – Page 10 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Police: Ibaraki Prefecture 33% honest

The Yomiuri reports that Ibaraki Prefecture police announced 2008 figures on reported incidents of lost and found items. The results for cash? 600 million yen reported lost, 200 million yen reported found.

Maybe some of the lost money could have been found later by the original owner who neglected to update the police. It could also have been somehow destroyed or neglected without human contact (and sometimes it takes a while to return a wallet). And on the other side, people surely could lie about losing cash in hope of an easy payday. But obviously the lion’s share must have been pocketed by the finders.

A typical praise one hears from visiting Americans about Japanese society conters on the people’s reflexive, almost unthinking sense of honesty, as if the nation were the world’s largest and most disciplined Boy Scout troop. A typical anecdote goes something like “I dropped a one yen coin only to have it returned to me immediately by a kindly but unnecessarily concerned bystander,” often including a lament that this could never happen back home.

But in the case of Ibaraki Prefecture (located in the northern Kanto region and increasingly serving as a commuter base for Tokyo), the record gives a more complicated image of reality.

Ibaraki residents are outperformed by a more than 2:1 margin by the results of wallettest.com, a “social experiment” in which 100 people are observed finding “lost” wallets that were planted for them in Belleville, Illinois, a mid-sized American city. The test showed that 74% of people returned the wallet unharmed, while only 26% kept the money or the entire wallet. While it might not be fair to make a direct comparison since there is no guarantee that all or even most of the Ibaraki money was found in similar circumstances (the wallets in the Test only contained around $2 plus a fake $50 gift certificate), it does make me wonder whether common stereotypes of Japanese good citizenship are really grounded in reality, or whether foreign visitors are just more likely to a) lose things; and b) receive special treatment when they do, owing to the Japanese perception of them as guests in their country (not that that’s a bad thing – the typical tendency is for foreign tourists to be victimized rather than helped).

Also noted in the report:

Wallets were the most commonly lost item, followed by mobile phones. Cash was the most commonly found item.
People are concerned about retrieving some lost items more than others: Compared to almost 16,000 umbrellas reported found, only 49 bothered to report them missing.
In addition to cash, items reported found included a chameleon, a goat, and 33 chickens (the chameleon and goat were either returned or given to new owners, but the chickens had to be put down).

Ibaraki police started putting lost and found information on their website starting in December 2007. And Facebook has made the police potentially irrelevant in this regard as people can easily find and contact just about anyone with an account, as long as their wallets contain ID. Still, this doesn’t solve the problem of greedy or lazy people from deciding “finders keepers.”

Two-man union on strike at Kyoto University

According to the As ahi, Kyoto University has issued a final warning demanding the dispersion of two men who have been camping out on the university main campus for a month. The pair formed their own union, called Union Extasy in English, to demand that their employment contracts be extended past their five year maximum. Thirty supporters, presumably members of the regular Kyoto University workers’ unions who have taken a position supporting improved conditions for campus part-timers, stood with them in solidarity.

The crowd scene could be a sign that the moment when the university forcibly removes the two from campus could end up becoming a publicized confrontation, similar to the one seen at the Shinagawa Keihin Hotel earlier this year, when police forced the staff of the bankrupt hotel from keeping the business open against the wishes of the owners. The event was apparently crowded with both protesters and journalists, making for an enormous spectacle, itself something of a replay of the “temporary employee village” set up in Hibiya Park over the new year holiday.

The two men, both in their late 30s, were doing data entry work for the agricultural faculty for monthly wages of around 120,000 yen, according to an earlier report. I find it just amazing that they were both able to live on that much (20,000 yen/month apartments, probably a very meager diet).

A JANJAN citizen reporter who interviewed the strikers notes that of Kyoto University’s 5,400-strong staff, 2,600 are part-timers, 85% of them female.

The employment rules for university part-timers are on paper intended to promote full-time, indefinite employment. Universities are basically required to prioritize permanent hires and can only hire contract employees on a provisional basis. However, in typical lukewarm fashion, when the Kyoto U and other national universities were officially branches of the education ministry, Kyoto University signed non-permanent employees to 364-day contracts, theoretically terminated employment on March 31, “re-hired” the same people the next day for another term, and repeated this process for years. Exploiting this loophole had the added benefit that none of the “new employees” needed to be given raises from the previous year.

But when the national universities were corporatized in 2004, the rules changed. The ministry decided to close this loophole and instead, for employees hired on or after fiscal 2005, limited contract employment to a maximum five years, after which universities were barred from hiring the same person as a contract worker. In other words, the schools must now choose to either take them on as a full-time employee (and provide all the job security and regular pay raises that entails) or hire someone else on a contract basis. Kyoto University apparently decided to go with the cheaper option at the time, and now five years later they have this protest on their hands along with all the creative artwork that’s come with it:

The decision for these older men to protest may have been in part due to their stated desire to raise the wage levels for this type of work. The assumption for years has been that this so-called “part-time” work is the province of housewives in need of extra cash, so the fact that they are men and not basically dependents of their spouses breaks with this stereotype. And of course, this also implies the question, what difference does it make whether men or women are expected to fill the position?

The university Director involved in the labor negotiations has argued that non-permanent employees have no “operational responsibility” — in other words, they are not expected to become Company Men and accept forced transfers or other duties that would come with permanent status. But in an era of decreased job opportunities to the point that men are competing for jobs that were traditionally seen as women’s work, these old divisions seem pretty irrelevant.

Despite the clearly brazen and confrontational tactics taken by the union, asking to change this arbitrary rule seems pretty reasonable. Saga University has apparently already done so. They apparently are not asking to be taken on as full timers, just for a raise and the chance to stay on.

As often happens when observing events in Japan, I get the feeling that viewed from the outside this issue seems simple – just allow indefinite part-time employment, and leave the decision of who to promote to full-time status up to the university managers. I can understand the university’s reluctance to take on indefinite staff – in these uncertain economic times and an era of declining population, I wouldn’t want to promise someone a job for the next 30 years either. But there is strong resistance in Japan to a system of at-will employment, and the US model that I am used to is certainly not an obvious path to prosperity.

In addition, the various parties have widely divergent agendas. I would imagine the politics of a university employees union must be quite intense indeed, and they along with the bureaucrats have a vested interest in maintaining the seishain system of stable employment and regular pay increases, at the expense of everyone else. In addition, other actors such as the Japan Communist Party have a somewhat extreme vision of maintaining employment, as seen in their platform of forcing companies to use their “internal reserves” to maintain employment.

(Photos courtesy JANJAN)

Video of the “kubikiri” fish head exhibit:

Did Japanese watch their baseball team beating Korea on mobile “websites”?

UPDATE: Could have been “a special WBC page set up on the Asahi shimbun’s web site”. Thanks to commenter ST

In an otherwise vividly descriptive article on Japan’s World Baseball Classic victory, it seems like the Wall Street Journal reporters may have made a slight error (emphasis mine):

Even workers who couldn’t watch the game live on television kept an eye on the contest. In Tokyo, three Japanese businessmen who were waiting for the subway huddled together staring at a mobile phone screen, tracking every pitch from a Web site.

I am pretty sure they must have been watching “1seg,” a mobile TV signal that’s become fairly common in Japan over the past three years or so. Scenes of strangers watching mobile TV together have become somewhat common in Japan, a sort of modern-day version of businessmen stopping to watch the sample TVs at the Sakuraya in front of Shimbashi Station. During pivotal sports games (Asia Cup soccer, Red Sox in the World Series, etc.), people seem willing to share their mobile TVs with onlookers. Maybe they don’t have much choice unless they want to be a jerk and turn it off, but all the same it’s a new and somewhat rare expression of community with strangers in this city.

(DISCLAIMER: This is not an essentialist statement about Japanese culture! I found Washington DC to be full of similarly detached and unfriendly strangers, as perhaps it should be to a certain extent).

A hard bargain

In a 2ch thread reacting to news of a high-end speed-dating bar catering to older “marriage hunting” women and men (this year’s manufactured social phenomenon), commenters have excoriated a 39-year-old single female flight attendant (an apparent lookalike of former Takarazuka Revue actress Yuki Amami) for her quote, “I am no longer in a position to be choosy. My conditions are that [my future husband] does not smoke, can communicate, and makes at least 10 million yen per year.”

Such high standards reminded me of a recent episode of NPR’s This American Life, in which the hosts discussed just how limited dating options can be once you start getting choosy. I suggest you give it a listen, but suffice to say the prospects for Boston-area chemistry grad students were whittled down to the dozens, if I recall correctly.

So what about this woman’s scenario? Does she stand a chance? Let’s try whittling down the population of Tokyo until we find out how many men would pass muster:

Population of Tokyo: 12.79 million people (also see Stat Bureau)
Number male: 6.354 million (49.6%)
In Amami’s age bracket (25-49): 2.536 million (more generous than 2ch would allow for – see below)
College grads: 1,038,492 (assuming college grads are more likely to have communication skills than non-grads. The number was reached by estimating from the facts that 45.5% of high school students moved on to four-year universities in 2006, of which around 90% eventually get their degree (OECD Fact Sheet PDF))
Salary of at least 10 million yen: 103,849 (10%: Though 7.5% of men in the private sector earned at least 10 million yen per year as of 2006 nationwide, I will be generous and say 10% given the age and education group’s above-average earnings and the probably higher wages of the Tokyo area) (PDF page 18)
Single: 51,924 (about half?)
Non-smokers: 31,414 (39.5% of Japanese men smoke)
Attractive to her: 6,282 (1 in 5? This assumes that even if she can’t be choosy, she will still remain superficial enough to avoid lazy eyes, missing teeth, limps, moth ball smell, etc.).

Then what if you divide by between 3 and 5 for other possible dealbreakers, such as religion, politics, sense of humor, blood type, and all that? Not exactly raining men! And this exercise doesn’t even address the issue of her age, which was the biggest bone of contention among the 2-channel posters (specifically, many found the entire premise farcical – a woman entering middle age is delusional enough to think well-off men would consider her marriage material, to the point that 10 million a year becomes the bare minimum, and she thinks they will show up at a speed-dating bar in Roppongi).

While this is a rough guess and the general bias toward richer and more educated people in Tokyo would no doubt push the number somewhat higher (and she is lucky to be in Tokyo and not comparatively tiny Boston), it is still kind of sobering to see how closely this woman’s search for love (or at least stability) in Tokyo resembles the quest to find the missing Dragonballs.

How much should I worry?

The NYT headline pretty much says it all: Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times.

Of course, the economy has already run off a cliff and is currently plummeting and times are hard for everyone, but should prospective academics like myself and, I presume, many of our readers, be particularly worried? The article has, as is the form, a number of anecdotes from individal PhD holders who have had trouble finding jobs, but while these may be representative they are of course not necessarily so. The statistics and generalized data are the important part. And they don’t look particulary good.

For example:

A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Association’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

Or perhaps:

In the past 30 years, public and private money dedicated to the humanities has also significantly declined. The budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities is roughly a third of what it was at the high point of 1979, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Humanities Indicators data, though stimulus money may raise that figure.

Only 13 percent, or about $16 million, makes its way into scholarly projects. And unlike the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health, the humanities endowment does not give awards to postdoctoral students.

Although there are some small positive signs in the article. According to one “Margaret Peacock, 35, who spent eight years on her dissertation in Soviet history at the University of Texas”, “Americanists seem to be having a much tougher time now than those specializing in other historical areas.” As is the case in other fields, supply and demand is still the rule in academics, and perhaps it is true that American historians are the most plentiful, as it is naturally by far the easiest field of history to pursue while studying in America.

Now, while I can certainly sit and think about dimming future career prospects and conjure up a state of apoplectic nervosia I’m not actually particularly concerned. While I mainly study and research things of particular interest to me, I believe that I am lucky to have stumbled into areas that will continue to be of particular interest in the future. Although there is aways the possibility that, say, Taiwan will be absorbed by the People’s Republic at some point in the future-an event which, upon consideration, I am not sure would actually increase or decrease demand for a course on Taiwanese history-and Japan’s economy may very well wither over the next decade to the point where it falls into the second rank of world economy’s (a far from foregone conclusion, naturally) , I certainly expect that my general areas of interest, which I suppose could be summed up as late 19th century-20th century modernization, colonization and education in East and parts of Southeast Asia, will be at least as relevant as today.

Where I stand: I will be starting a 2 year MA at Kyoto University in April. Graduate in March 2011. I will have sent out PhD applications in November 2010 to several PhD history programs in the US and will therefore hopefully be moving into one of those in September 2011. Hopefully the school of my choice will also be providing a good living stipend and perhaps a decently subsidized apartment, but considering the financial situation at present this is perhaps the most insecure part. Over the course of the PhD studies, I would hopefully be spending at least one year doing research in Japan, one year studying Chinese in Taiwan, one year doing research in Taiwan, and perhaps a few months doing shorter stints of varying lengths in other Asian countries. Assuming relatively prompt completion of my dissertation (none of the 8 or 9 year marathons referred to in the article), I would hopefully be getting a PhD around 2017 which is rather shockingly far away.

Having done all of this, would I then be able to get a real university job, not a mere adjunct teacher but also with a research budget and so on? Perhaps, perhaps not-I really have little idea. But would I be able to get some other sort of decent job? I certainly think so. Assuming that working as a professor in a university setting is not the only option I allow myself, I actually think that even considering this sort of academic background it would probably be far easier to find a decent job in other sectors. Naturally government would be the easiest, particularly the State Department, but there is also the UN, NGOs, assorted think tanks and other non-academic research institutes, and probably even some sort of corporate options. There may even still be a news media by then, although now I tread into the realm of the fantastic.

Lemon-flavored socialism hitting Japan?

In Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan author Nassim Taleb notes, “A theory that does not present a set of conditions under which it would be considered wrong would be termed charlatanism.”

That’s the line that cross my mind when I read this article in yesterday’s Nikkei on why the government needs to interfere to push up stock prices:

A drop in stock prices erodes the bottom lines of corporations, which are already tanking because of the weak economy. Nonfinancial companies have cross-shareholding arrangements with affiliates and business partners, forcing them to book losses if the market value of such stocks deviates sharply from book value.

Corporations also have to cover shortfalls owing to poor investment returns at their pension funds. Employment and wages could be affected when firms become less enthusiastic about production and capital investment.

Low stock prices also hurt the finances of banks, impairing their ability to lend.

According to Nomura Securities Co. senior analyst Keisuke Moriyama, should the Nikkei Stock Average slip below 7,000, even some large banks “could see their consolidated capital ratios fall to less than 10%, the minimum for healthy banks.” Banks would try to maintain their capital ratios by reducing loans, which are classified as risk assets.

A stock market downturn also dampens personal consumption. Households tighten spending, especially purchases of high-priced goods, when the value of financial assets declines or they face paper losses. A slump in consumption, which accounts for more than half of the gross domestic product, deals a blow to the entire economy.

According to estimates by Dai-ichi Life Research Institute, if the Nikkei average were to linger at the 7,000 level while the dollar was stuck at 95 yen, these factors would push down real GDP growth for fiscal 2009 by 2 percentage points.

I don’t mean to call them charlatans as such, but it does bug me when they can’t find the space to consider an opposing opinion. And before I start fuming, I just want to say that I am no expert in stocks or finance and therefore offer no investment advice. Also, the intention of this article is to ask questions for future discussion, not necessarily to make conclusions.

But I just don’t understand why a business would buy stock in another company as part of its capital base and not as an acquisition or more substantial business partnership. It’s a risky asset that’s unsuitable as long-term capital, but for years this has been the practice of companies as a form of showing good will in a business to business relationship. Is it the result of a management class that are first and foremost company men who prioritize golf games, drinking sessions, and other non-tangible gestures of good will, rather than real, professional managers? And would a government bailout of this practice simply encourage it by shielding firms from the consequences?

Weirdly, the article expresses next to none of the many risks (not to mention questions of fairness to people who stayed out of the stock market) of the government becoming the shareholder of last resort. Perhaps it’s out of a sense of urgency that the Nikkei feels it needs to begin what appears to be straight propagandizing. Days before they devoted substantial space to warn that it might not work to maintain prices because investors eager to get bailed out of their stock positions might flood the market with sell orders, but they stopped short of wondering what the implications could be:

But such direct market intervention carries risk. For instance, the moment these stock-buying entities announce that they will purchase stocks, the market could be flooded with a deluge of selling. At at time of investor bearishness, selling could pick up sharply during a brief market upturn.

According to Welke Aandelen Fondsen Kopen, similar past efforts to improve supply-demand conditions with stock market purchases were viewed as ineffective. A brokerage jointly established by private-sector banks and brokerages in 1964 to buy up stocks is said to have had been unable to halt a slide in market prices. “Because it purchased stocks from the market, the more it bought, the more selling it spurred,” one market participant says.

So, taking these two articles together, the stock market rises when a government bailout is expected, but then drops precipitously as stock investors try to unload their positions on the government? I am reminded of the phrase 虫が良すぎる (i.e. the investors have an unfair advantage).

Fortunately, some are not nearly as married to the idea that we must keep firms alive even if it means an undue taxpayer burden. Paul Krugman argued against creating “lemon socialism” last month:

I’m talking, instead, about the [Obama] administration’s plans for a banking system rescue — plans that are shaping up as a classic exercise in “lemon socialism”: taxpayers bear the cost if things go wrong, but stockholders and executives get the benefits if things go right.

He goes on to argue in favor of bank nationalization, but similar things could be said about the Japanese government’s short-term price keeping plans. Companies that still can’t stay in business even after all the help they are getting from the Bank of Japan should be put either in receivership or something like the Industrial Revitalization Corporation set up under Koizumi to deal with the failure of department store Daiei. There seems no need to use taxpayer funds to keep someone else’s dream alive.

Speaking on plans to recapitalize regional banks with fewer conditions than during Japan’s last financial crisis, Shukan Toyo Keizai warns against creating a “lemon socialist” state (as described by Paul Krugman) in the name of saving the economy:

In the interest of stability of the financial system, I think we have no choice but for the citizenry (tax money) to be the backer of last resort, but I cannot confidently say that there is a national consensus on this fact. Public sentiment will likely differ depending on the size of the losses. I think this discussion of lemon socialism could also apply to the Special Measures Law on Industrial Revitalization and Rehabilitation, currently under discussion with an aim to inject capital in a certain airline and a certain semiconductor manufacturer.

Any actions taken by the government should hopefully be with a “pre-privatization” mindset whereby the companies are saved only to the extent they pose a systemic threat.

The Financial Times reminds us that there price-keeping would only be a temporary fix, and that restoring political stability and getting the economy on sounder footing are what policymakers should be keeping their eyes on:

One proposed response is to start “price-keeping operations” – spending 25,000bn yen of public money to prop up the stock market. This is an old staple for Japanese policymakers, and a smaller plan has already been put forward by the government but – predictably – is being held up in the Diet. Either version would be expensive and the breathing space it would buy for banks would only be temporary.

The Japanese should, instead, focus on rebalancing their economy. In addition to a real fiscal stimulus to jolt its citizens to spend, the government needs to stop Japanese companies retaining unproductive cash. If Japan needs to recapitalise its banks, it should do so directly – not by supporting the stock market. The virtues of these policies, however, remain academic when the Aso administration is so weak. It is time for an election. There is little point to paralysed governments.

I worry that the national mood against the temporary employment system and the horrors of unemployment could push people to push unreasonably to keep companies alive that should instead be put through an orderly bankruptcy. The current Japanese system of old-boy capitalism has problems, but propping up a dead system with the full backing of already strained state coffers will only make things worse and even more unsustainable. Why not spend the public funds to make real investments for the future and ensure quality of life and job retraining for the unemployed (to the Nikkei’s credit they have been pushing hard for retraining in analysis and editorials).

Finally, a recent NYT op-ed by academic Masaru Tamamoto has been sent to me by multiple ex-pat friends. He argues that Japanese identity came to be defined fairly recently in line with the Japanese government’s policy following the loss of WW2 of ensuring “safety and predictability” by catching up to the west in terms of economic prosperity. Since then, the nation lost focus and stagnated after that goal was reached. He closes as follows:

In fact, Japan’s passiveness today is in large measure a calculated and reasonable reaction to its behavior during the Second World War. But today, this emphasis on safety and security is long past its sell-by date.

We have run out of outside models to imitate. We must start from scratch, embracing an idea of progress that is based on innovation, ambition and dynamism. Doing so will take risk — and extraordinary leadership. But the alternative is to continue stumbling down a path of decline.

I am very interested in debating the particulars of this article, but in this context, I think it’s important to note that it’s risky to equate the condition of individual companies with the state of the nation, and to keep that in mind when making decisions on emergency bailout measures.

How to kill the “turning Japanese” cliche?

Krugman!

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)

Roppongi is Tokyo’s toilet bowl

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.

The horrors of local government

For a while I was taking comfort in the notion that if I ever lost my job, I could naturalize and become a local politician like Anthony Bianchi or Jon Heese. At least it would be a more interesting experience than the salaryman grind, right?

Well, watching this clip of city council petitioners in Santa Cruz, California has really made me question that idea.

Pinyin in Taiwan

The Taipei Times printed an interview the other day with Yu Bor-chuan of the Taiwan Pinyin League, and head of the team that designed Tongyong Pinyin. He is of course a heavy promoter of Tongyong Pinyin, saying that it is better suited to Taiwan than the internationally accepted but PRC originated Hanyu Pinyin. He has some interesting background on the history of various kinds of phonetic writing in Taiwan, and of course makes his argument for avoiding Hanyu Pinyin.

That the MOE did not cite the source of the Hanyu Pinyin charts constituted an act of plagiarism as the phonetic system was approved by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and ratified by its National People’s Congress in 1958.

This is just a weird statement. He seems to be arguing that any discussion of Hanyu Pinyin MUST be centered on politics and not linguistics, which to me is an utterly absurd position.

As for the false information I mentioned, the MOE said Taiwan’s street and place names are spelled using Hanyu Pinyin on maps and atlases published by most countries and international organizations. This is not true, since the international community generally goes by the guideline of naming a person or a place after its original name.

There are hardly any countries or international organizations that use Hanyu Pinyin to spell places in Taiwan except maps published by China.

This, however, is correct. Of course, with romanization in Taiwan being so unstable, foreigners often have no idea which system they should be using.

TT: The main reason given by the government to adopt Hanyu Pinyin was to bring Taiwan in line with international standards.

Yu: If that was the real reason behind the policy shift, the government should have replaced the traditional characters used exclusively in Taiwan with simplified characters, because more than 95 percent of the [Chinese-speaking] population worldwide uses simplified characters.

He’s really mixing apples and oranges here. While it is kind of true that making all language policy decisions on the basis of international standards would lead to the adoption of simplified Chinese, Yu is being very disingenuous about the logic as it applies here. While traditional written Chinese is used in Taiwan as the national and official language and the medium of instruction for all Taiwanese, Pinyin in any form is used ONLY for the benefit of foreigners. Most Taiwanese simply do not learn Pinyin, whether Tongyong, Hanyu, or Wade-Giles. The argument that a supplemental writing system which is used only to accomodate foreigners should follow international standards should in no way mean that the primary writing system, used for the primary Taiwanese national language by its citizens, should also be changed.

Adopting Tongyong Pinyin will not pose difficulties for foreigners.

For foreigners who do not understand Mandarin, whether a road sign is spelled in Hanyu Pinyin or Tongyong Pinyin makes no difference, not to mention that Tongyong is more friendly to English speakers than Hanyu in terms of pronunciation.

The primary differences between the two systems are that Tongyong uses “s,” “c” and “jh,” which corresponds more to English spelling, instead of “x,” “q” and “zh” as used in Hanyu Pinyin, which English speakers without Mandarin skills do not usually know how to pronounce. There wouldn’t be a problem as long as street signs an maps were spelled consistently everywhere.

This is largely true. Consistency is the most important thing such a writing system, but why is consistency between the spelling of identical place names or syllables in Taiwan and the rest of the Chinese-speaking world a bad thing?

The Hanyu Pinyin system is not entirely suitable for Taiwan given the fact that not every Chinese character is pronounced in Taiwan as it is in China.

Maybe something is lost in translation here, but this sentence simply makes no sense. While some characters do have a different common pronunciation in Beijing-accented Mandarin or Taiwan-accented Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin uses exactly 0 sounds that do not exist in Hanyu Pinyin. I have a Chinese dictionary from Taiwan in which it notes-in Hanyu Pinyin-both pronounciatins where they differ.

Immediately after Hanyu Pinyin was adopted by the government in September, the MOE promulgated guidelines for using Hanyu Pinyin to Romanize Hakka, replacing the application of Tongyong Pinyin for teaching Hakka.

As Tongyong has been used for the Romanization of Hakka, even some KMT lawmakers were against the new guidelines. They said that it would make learning Hakka more difficult because Hanyu Pinyin did not accommodate sounds in the language.

This is getting into a more complicated area, but it is easily avoided. Hanyu Pinyin is a romanization system for Mandarin. Hakka, while a related language, is not Mandarin, and should have its own romanization system designed for it with no consideration for the romanization system used for other languages. While I am generally supportive of the move to use Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin despite it being partly based on a political agenda, extending Hanyu Pinyin to other Chinese languages (or dialects, as they are known by Chinese nationalists) is a purely political choice that makes no sense from a linguistic, educational, or practical perspective.

The most serious problem is how our names are to be Romanized.

Although the Hanyu Pinyin guidelines allow individuals to decide the spelling of their name, it suggested using the format of surname first, followed by given name without a hyphen between the syllables … If my name were that way, my initials would be [Y.] B. instead of [Y.] B.C. in Tongyong Pinyin … How can the government ignore the fact that Taiwanese people have used a hyphen in their given name … for about 20 to 30 years?

No one has the right to arbitrarily decide what other people’s names should be. By the same token, Taiwan has every right to decide its proper names.

We should not give up autonomy over this as it is a representation of our sovereignty.

No real arguments here. People should be free to write personal names as they wish, but that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a recommended orthography. One thing that isn’t addressed even here is while for most Taiwanese (aside from ethnic aborigines) primarily write their name in the same Chinese characters, their primary language may be Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hoklo), or Hakka. Shouldn’t they be able to choose to romanize their name for international use in the system of their primary spoken tongue, and not based only on Mandarin?

Japan, where two different Romanization systems have been used since 1954, could serve as an example.

In 1954, Japan’s Cabinet announced a program including the Hepburn and the nippon-shiki [“Japan-style”] systems, under which the Hepburn Romanization system devised by an American is employed in overseas Japanese-language teaching materials, while the nippon-shiki system is used to transliterate local names and for domestic education.

Japan’s experience proves that the adoption of two Romanization systems does not hurt a country’s competitiveness. In addition, [there is] compatibility between the Tongyong and Hanyu Pinyin systems.

This is sort of true, but the nippon-shiki (actually the modernized version is Kunrei-shiki) serves almost no function. It is largely the same as the far more common Hepburn standard, much in the same way that Tongyong and Hanyu are largely the same, but has several minor differences which serve only to confuse. Even in Japan pretty much nobody actually uses anything but Hepburn romanization, and when he says “Japan’s experience proves that the adoption of two Romanization systems does not hurt a country’s competitiveness.” he should really be saying “Japan’s experience proves that the adoption of two Romanization systems is inconvenient, and everybody not legally required to use the less popular system will gravitate over time to the more popular one.”