Ranting
Headline:
Flat Beer Sales Bring Drinks Online At Key Asahi Brewery
Sorry again please??
This is for a story about how one Asahi brewery has had convert its output to soft drinks and “chu-hi” (sort of like wine coolers) due to a slump in beer sales. At first I thought they were selling “flat beer” but then realized that the whole headline was kind of funky.
Japan’s economic gap not growing as fast as the Gini coefficient would have us believe? According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a recently released economic white paper details some key developments that could be skewing the data. From the Nikkei:
To prove the point [that the data are flawed], the white paper cited a nationwide consumption survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs showing that most of the growth in the income gap since 1989 stemmed from the fact that households composed of the elderly increased as a percentage of all households. The white paper cited a decline in the average number of members in Japanese households as another reason for the apparent widening of the income gap.
The big problem that could have “adverse effects” on the Japanese economy, the report says, is the now 3.6 million youngsters shooting themselves in the foot by insisting on living a free-wheeling lifestyle in a system that punishes them both socially and financially for it. In other words, if your average Japanese person doesn’t lock in a permanent position in that critical age window of 22 until around 30 (when the typical age discrimination kicks in), he or she has little chance of making as much lifetime income as someone who followed the rules. Of course, there’s nothing controversial about people making less money because they don’t have full-time jobs. The problem is that “full time” jobs (seiki koyo) in Japan are permanent (no firing/quitting as a general rule), so when times get rough, companies have filled up vacant posts with “part time” or contract positions that pay fewer benefits, lower wages, and don’t have the same amount of security in exchange for working the same hours and often performing the same job as full time employees. In terms of effects, the report estimates that once this “Freeter” generation (named after a Janglish word for part-timer) hits middle age in 2015, this phenomenon will result in a 4.9 trillion yen (or 0.9%) loss in GDP.
While part-time work might work for women (who face social pressure against pursuing a career and who may want to work fewer hours while raising children) and old people, young workers who enter companies as part time employees find themselves trapped because while regulations were changed in the 1990s to allow for non-seiki employees, there was no concurrent reform of the seiki system – age discrimination included. If the youngsters continue working part time until they hit the age ceiling, then they are screwed.
Adamu’s Politically Untenable Solution? remove restrictions on firing full time workers (or simply introduce an “at will” employment system), eliminate age discrimination, and otherwise create a truly flexible labor market. GOJ/Shinzo Abe‘s politically sexy solution? Treat part time workers the same as full time workers, raise the maximum hiring age, and encourage more mid-career hiring.
The Net Neutrality debate rages on, and I’m sure every reader is enough aware of the basics so that I need not summarize. My friend Younghusband over at the Cominganarchy blog made a brief post earlier in support of Net Neutrality. I began to write my own thoughts as a comment there but then thought, why not post it here instead?
Without Net Neutrality the hopes for future innovation, future disruptive technologies in the future are dim.
The fundamental misunderstanding about Net Neutrality is the nature of what some of the network providers really want to do when it’s gone. Net freedom advocates have been trying to paint a picture of a world in which the network providers are allowed to charge content providers for higher quality service to that network’s customers and to then throttle down the speed and reliabilty of servers that have not paid up. Unfortunately, there is a general misconception that this is how it already works, because content providers must pay for their bandwidth.
Let me be clear- this is NOT how it works now. Yes, when you connect a server to the Internet you pay for the size of the connection you get, for the amount of data that you send. But this payment is only on the server end, and while it may be expensive if you send alot of data, it is also a single payment (leaving out regional mirrors or media distribution services like Akamai or whatever).
What network providers would like to be able to do is force servers to pay not only at their end, but also to each individual ISP, for premium access to that ISP’s customers. This would mean that, say, Youtube would have to pay not just for the fair cost of their presumably massive network connection, but also pay each and every single ISP, AT&T, Comcast, AOL, SBC, Earthlink if they wanted all Americans to be able to access their service.
Now imagine how much worse it gets in an international environment. Youtube is an American company, primarily aimed at Americans, and yet it has become very popular in Japan despite not even having a Japanese language interface. If a so called “tiered internet” were standard, then Youtube would have had to pay KDDI, NTT and YahooBB to guarantee access to the Japanese market before they could have become popular. But their popularity here was unexpected and unmarketed, spread by word of mouth. This sort of serendipitous success that has made the Internet what it is today would be no more.
There would be no more underground successes like, in reverse chronological order, Youtube, Myspace, iTunes, Friendster, Google, Napster, Yahoo. Everything would have to have its target market planned out in advance. For a startup without the budget to pay for access to every local ISP in the world, they would have to identify in advance their projected customer base through marketing surveys, demographic analysis, and the other insults and discrimination towards consumers that we as a society have become used to over the decades. It would be the death of grassroots popularity and a return to the centralized marketing driven media hegemony of the past, and it would be an awful tragedy.
I speak English and Japanese, but not French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian or any other Western language. So when you hear me talk about the “Western media” I am basically talking about sources from English-speaking world or occasionally English language services of “Western” publications. Just wanted you to know that.
Question: What are Japanese reporters doing using cassette tapes to record news conferences?? They could take a cue from Lord Curzon!
BOJ Chief Toshihiko Fukui has raised Japan’s interest rates to 0.25%, ending a nearly 6-year period free or less than free money in Japan.
If you’ve spent any extended time in Japan then you have surely had an encounter with an Oyaji (or “ossan” depending on the circumstances). Chances are he looked something like this. You may have suspected that he at one time or another frequented one of Japan’s legalized prostitution hubs, but unlike Mr. Fukui here you had no proof that he liked his shabu shabu with no underwear. Nonetheless, the bad English, stinky breath, irrational claims of Japanese superiority, and general ickiness no doubt put you off.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you King of Oyaji. Behold, and fear for Japan’s future!
Consider these two phenomena:
1) Athletes endorsing products that supposedly help their performance; and
2) Exploitive marketing of second language learning products that offer a specific pattern of drills as a purported secret to learning the language.
By themselves, they are typical, if somewhat sleazy parts of everyday consumer life. But put them together and you get this nugget of infotainment from the ethically-challenged Daily Yomiuri:
Bobby Valentine learns the joy of Japanese
Yoko Mizui Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
“The most exciting thing that ever happened to me was not winning the Asian Championship and the Japan Championship last year. Nor was it winning the Major League. It was not even winning koryusen this year,” said Chiba Lotte Marines baseball team manager Bobby Valentine. “The most exciting thing was that at the age of 50 plus, I could discover Step Up Nihongo and learn the language.”
Valentine talked about how he learned the Japanese language and utilizes it in managing his team at a seminar to introduce a new e-learning system, “eSUN,” in Tokyo on June 26.
Step Up Nihongo (SUN) is a set of textbooks for non-Japanese to study the Japanese language, written by Shigekatsu Yamauchi, who also writes the monthly column “Japanese in Depth” for the Language Connection page of The Daily Yomiuri.
That’s right, just when you think Chiba Marines manager Bobby Valentine is going to give us some insight into ups and downs of his attempts to learn the language of his adopted home (which he incidentally lives away from in the off-season), BAM you get a sales pitch. There is nothing indicating that this article is an advertisement meant to promote a specific product. And adding insult to injury, there’s next to no info about how good Valentine’s Japanese actually is or how he really learned it. I guess it’s up to us to try eSUN and find out, right?
In the interest of fairness, there are dozens of press releases put out and promotional events held every single day in Japan announcing the arrival of some great new product. Every one of them claims to be newsworthy, making it up to the reporter/editor’s judgment to know what is really worth printing. If we give the Yomiuri the benefit of the doubt, “Bobby Valentine endorses Japanese study method” could be newsworthy in and of itself. He’s yet another success story of a foreigner in Japan, so people want to hear just about any tidbit of information that’s available. I mean, color me ignorant, but I didn’t even know Valentine was seriously studying Japanese, although I’m not about to start believing it now (Question: is his Japanese any good? According to this Nov 2005 interview it’s “a major problem”). Unfortunately, the article is not exactly written to emphasize the newsworthy aspects of the event. Again and again the writer emphasizes the benefits of eSUN.
Keep in mind that in the Japanese media, product placement passed off as news (i.e.: with no mark denoting that you’re looking at an ad rather than actual news) is rampant (for example, Nikkei has an entire Saturday supplement for just such a purpose). Marxy has some good coverage of that phenomenon on his blog.
I would say this article fits snugly into that tradition of unannounced advertising. Especially since after about 10 minutes of the most cursory research, I was able to unearth a good bit of info to that makes it unlikely that Valentine is merely a volunteer supporter of this learning technique.
First let’s consider: are we really expected to believe that the discovery of this product was the most exciting moment ever in the life of the Bobby Valentine, the only foreign manager (except for Sadaharu Oh I guess but he doesn’t count) in Japanese baseball to ever win the Pacific League and Japan Series championships and, coincidentally, the inventor of the “wrap” sandwich?
If it is, he’s been quiet about it up to now – he only mentions the product once on his official blog (which in turn is a marketing gimmick for a different site) in the form of a brief non-sequitur in a February 2006 post explaining how the blog works:
It is very interesting to note that David, who is bilingual in English and Japanese, learned his Japanese from the same teacher I am currently learning mine! Our teacher is Shige Yamauchi-sensei of ICI, a foreign language school in Tokyo. Using Step Up Nihongo (SUN), which is a wonderful teaching tool for those that want to learn Japanese, students can not only learn it by book and tape form but also interactive internet lessons as well.
But that brief endorsement was enough to warrant ICI, creator of the Step Up method and the company featured in the article in question, to include a full-on graphic logo (linked to the above blog post) on their website to let potential students know that Valentine endorses their methods:
And I’m sure he does – but I have a tough time believing he’s doing this simply as an uncompensated advocate. The article claims that Valentine was hooked on eSUN after someone handed it to him on a plane. Sure, and James Bond drives a BMW to impress chicks. Valentine is a businessman. Look at the way he’s doing his blog: some secretary is recording his thoughts while he’s on the road, and then transcribing them onto a blog that links directly to a major Valentine investment. Pretty shrewd!
And from the get-go, the seminar that constitutes the “where” of the article was held by a company run by a Yomiuri contributor. Considering that the very existence of his column is a convenient way to drum up business, sneaking in a cheap promotion of a celebrity endorsement of his product doesn’t make for much of an intellectual stretch. And being a part of the Yomiuri establishment must make it easy to cut in line ahead of other, less-connected Japanese learning methods.
So we’ve got a) An article that is clearly pushing a specific product but does not identify itself as an ad; b) a subject who in all likelihood is a paid (but unannounced) spokesman for the product; and c) The company offering said product has personal and financial connections to Yomiuri. In my own amateur opinion, such an article violates the “newspaper ethics” that the Yomiuri supposedly subscribes to as a member of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association (NSK). Here’s the relevant excerpt of the NSK’s Journalistic Canon, Newspaper Advertising Printing Standards (for some reason these standards are left out of the English version of the NSK website):
[Newspapers] shall not print advertisements that correspond to the following:
[omitted]
3. Falsehoods or items for which there is a danger of misinterpretation.
“Items for which there is a danger of misinterpretation” refers to the following:
(1) [Advertisements] that use formatting and expressions that look ambiguously like editorial matter, making the fact that it is an advertisement unclear.
[rest omitted]
So as long as the journalistic canon applies to online articles (at least it seems to in the US) the DY might consider sticking the word “advertisement” above articles that serve little purpose than to sell us something. Until either that happens or I get definitive proof that Bobby Valentine has no endorsement deal with Step Up Nihongo, I will continue to be properly offended.
(Thanks to FG for pointing this article out to me)
The diaries of the Columbine killers are at last online for the world to see. Here‘s a link to the PDF, and here’s the Smoking Gun site. While I of course condemn what Eric and Dylan did, as someone who also harbored misplaced resentment of the “popular kids” as a high school student I can’t help but feel a certain empathy toward them. Had I not found some positive encouragement and an outlet for my energy (studying Japanese of course) I could have ended up doing something similarly stupid. I think Matt Stone in Bowling for Columbine put it best when he said that if only someone could have told them that all the bullshit from high school ends almost from the day of graduation they might not have gone through with it.
My favorite part so far is the “Hell Dog” on page 79. He has two extra arms in addition to his four legs: one’s a chaingun, the other a rocket launcher. Sweet! Maybe we’ll see that monster in Doom 4.
If you’re like me 5 years ago, or like a good number of the folks at Crisscross, you are a young American, you’re learning Japanese, you’re enrolled in a liberal arts-focused university program, and you probably want to use your Japanese language skills in your future career. That’s great, and I commend your aspirations. But I am here to tell you that if you’re seriously looking to use Japanese in your career, good reading comprehension is absolutely crucial.
Most Japanophiles who make it to Japan for an extended stay are far less likely to pay attention to developing reading comprehension in Japanese as they are to speaking pidgin-slang Japanese with their gaijin-groupie friends (see tip #23 at the link), hooking up with the locals, and in general taking the path of least resistance. That is understandable, but there are numerous benefits of boning up your reading skills even while you are in Japan. Kate McArthur, a columnist for Japan job site daijob.com, summarizes them well: expanded menu choices in restaurants, ability to find coupons and other deals, using Japanese websites, and reading the ubiquitous subtitles on Japanese TV (Like her, I hold the irrational belief that “the written language is so intriguing with all the various looks and meanings that I can’t understand how it could possibly not be interesting to someone”).
Even among those who are interested in learning to (and in some cases already claim they can) read Japanese – the types who intentionally stay out of the gaijin bubble – many do not measure up when it comes to reading ability. This phenomenon I attribute to the gaijin complex, by which foreigners interested in Japan isolate themselves from others of their kind. They’ll stick with their girlfriends, host families, or whoever and seek out the so-called real Japan – the “Other” if you will. Without objective scrutiny or friendly competition (and with the entire population of Japan praising them for supposedly excellent Japanese abilities), these people start to think their Japanese is much much better than it actually is.
But the fact of the matter is, good reading skills are almost always an essential element if you want to make yourself useful in a quality Japan-related job, and most employers are not going to tolerate someone who cannot deliver no matter how entrenched his/her gaijin complex is. If you are otherwise lacking in specialized skills, companies that hire “Japan-friendly” university graduates usually put them to uses that stray significantly from what the employee would like to do – following developments on Capitol Hill or a specific industry, editing the English of superiors, coordinating between Japanese and foreign staff, website development, and so on. Not quite what you had in mind, right?
So now that you see why reading skills are important, the next question is how good do they have to be? For Americans, the general standard should be the ability to read any given written work in Japanese and precisely tell someone what it means in plain language (English or Japanese).
This should be obvious, but did you ever hear anyone tell you that in Japanese class? Perhaps because most students are only in the classes for the credit requirements and don’t have much serious interest in studying, Japanese as a second language classes at universities tend to hold their students to unacceptably low standards. On top of that, the most exalted goal for JSL learners who are somewhat serious is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 1 (“ikkyu” in Japanese). As someone who paid the $50 and passed ikkyu in 2003, I can tell you from experience that while passing the ikkyu was a very helpful goal during my earlier studies, it was in no way the end of the journey.
The JLPT, sponsored by the Japanese government-affiliated Japan Foundation, tests listening, vocabulary, kanji, and reading abilities on 4 levels, 4 being the easiest and 1 the hardest. Level 1 requires knowledge of around 2,000 kanji and a corresponding vocab/listening/reading ability. It’s certainly not easy to pass the JLPT Level 1, but in fact Level 1 Japanese abilities often do not translate into the common-sense reading abilities mentioned above.
So if you’re not quite there yet, keep at it! The Internet provides an inexhaustible wealth of study materials at your fingertips free of charge. Read asahi.com, kikko’s blog, 2-channel, Bloomberg Japan, slashdot Japan, public-domain novels, or whatever floats your boat! The vast majority of material never gets translated into English, so if you have a blog you might consider summarizing or translating the more interesting bits into English for posterity and practice. And if you’re reading something and don’t understand a concept or the topic at hand, look it up on the ALC dictionary or read up on it at wikipedia Japan! Even if you don’t end up landing the job you want, it’s a wonderfully unfiltered way to learn about Japanese culture and society.
I’m busy packing now, but I just wanted to direct you to this recent rant from Nikkan Gendai (a sensational tabloid that uber-commentator Naoki Inose has described as a good read on the ride home when you just want to say fuck you to the powers that be). According to the writer’s unscientific observations, more than half of Japanese men are now sitting down to pee.
Question to you: is this true? I’m not sure exactly how this guy was investigating men’s rooms, but find out!
At this one place where I worked (scanning Japanese medical journal articles for the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD) what pissed me off in the men’s room was noticing people purposely not flush the urinals, as if they were afraid of the germs contained in the flusher. There were days when I’d notice that none of the urinals were flushed. Granted, these are NIH contractors, so they know a lot we don’t. But that doesn’t give them some pass to “let it mellow” just because they think their immune systems can’t handle it! And anyway, isn’t leaving stagnant urine around a health risk of its own?
