Japan-US Relations – Page 6 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Abe staging a comeback from Washington?

Checking the Brookings Institution’s site on other business, I came across info for this event happening on Friday in downtown DC:

AN ADDRESS BY THE HON. SHINZO ABE, FORMER PRIME MINISTER OF JAPAN

A New Era Requires New Political Will
Event Summary

On April 17, the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at Brookings will host former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan for an address on key issues facing Japan, the United States and the world. Prime Minister Abe will discuss Japan’s role in addressing regional and global security concerns as well as the global economic crisis and climate change. He will also explore possible policy approaches to these and other issues for the Japanese and U.S. governments, as both countries and the international community face an era defined by urgent challenges and new leadership.

I’m sure that it does take “political will” to tackle difficult issues, just not Abe’s uniquely ham-fisted brand of it.

If this is indeed the start of some kind of political comeback, one can only hope that if the LDP stays in power after the next election, Aso will appoint Abe to multiple cabinet portfolios (I envision a right-wing hawk trifecta: foreign minister/NK abductee policy minister/Northern Territories minister).

Since I love to criticize without having any actual responsibility to run things, I will be sure to catch the audio of this when it comes out.

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Check the Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.

Shocker: Japanese people prefer “Japanese food”

The Nielsen research company has conducted a global survey on dining out preferences (Japanese PDF). The Nikkei presents the results from Japan. When asked what type of food they prefer when dining out, Japanese respondents said:

Japanese (48%)
Italian (20%)
Chinese (12%)
French (7%)

Globally, Japanese food was the fifth most preferred food. Surprisingly, the 46% of Japanese people who eat out more than three times per week is only marginally above the 44% global average.

Japanese people have a comparatively high level of what I would term “gastronomic nationalism” – that is, their preference for their own food far exceeds the global rate of 27%.

Anyone who has spent any time in this country will not be surprised to see Japanese food topping the results. Inside Japan, Japanese food is simply everywhere. The children are raised on government-supplied lunches and mother’s obento box lunches, on TV there is an endless parade of B-list celebrities fawning over the latest restaurant, and on the street the vast majority of eateries are nominally Japanese. On top of that, Japanese food is objectively scrumptious and awesome, a fact not lost on people.

But what exactly is Japanese food? The survey was apparently taken based on the respondents’ own definitions of what “Japanese food” means, but this is not always so clear-cut. Under such conditions, food that might otherwise be considered foreign must have been included under the “Japanese” rubric. “Japanese food” spans a very wide variety – from obviously Japanese foods like sushi, pickled radishes, and soba buckwheat noodles to more complicated foods that blur the lines between “pure” Japanese food and fusion dishes that have developed over the years. Other foods that may have foreign origins might not be perceived as foreign by some of the consumers (yakiniku aka Korean barbecue comes to mind as I have heard some tell me it is Japanese).

For example, it’s hard to tell whether ramen would be considered Chinese or Japanese (though the recipe is distinctly Japanese, many ramen shops advertise themselves as chuuka (Chinese) and also sell gyoza, which are more or less Japanized versions of Chinese dumplings), or for that matter whether Japanese-style curry can be called Indian (it was apparently adapted from Britain, which itself adapted it from the Indian dish). And then there is the plethora of dishes that are considered youshoku (Western/occidental food) in Japan but would be hard to find on a table anywhere in the actual West. These include omuraisu (ketchup rice wrapped in an omelette) and hambaagu (a bunless hamburger often seasoned and stuffed with onions, served with a variety of toppings such as grated daikon radish (oroshi) and ponzu, a kind of citrus/soy/vinegar sauce).

Conversely, much so-called Italian food has been considerably Japanized as well (think mentaiko spaghetti), but I doubt many respondents who go into their local Capricciosa to order noodles drowned in spicy fish eggs and mayonnaise would consider themselves to be eating at a “Japanese food” establishment. Confusing things further, many “retro Showa era” restaurants serve a “Neapolitan” spaghetti-and-ketchup dishes, but in a very Japanese izakaya atmosphere. And then there are the “rice burgers” served at Mos Burger, the new soy sauce-enhanced fried chicken at KFC, and Okinawa-style taco rice (this unlike the other two would be likely termed “Japanese”). I could go on, but it’s getting close to dinner time.

So all that said, the data could be kind of biased in Japan’s case (and the same probably goes for other countries) since Japan has co-opted so much of the Western menu into its own native cuisine. As far as I am concerned, the world is all the richer for it.

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Check the Adamukun blog for Adamu’s shared articles and recommended links.

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.”

Congressional Research Service on Japanese political turmoil, circa September 2008

I have been very excited to discover the website Open CRS, an unofficial repository of Congressional Research Service reports. Normally, the reports are only available to Congress members and their aides, but a surprising number of them do see the light of day. This site could serve as a helpful source until Joe Lieberman’s initiative to open up the CRS becomes law.

For a taste of what the CRS has to offer, here is a report (PDF) on the state of Japanese politics around the time when former PM Fukuda stepped down:

Factors Behind Japan’s Political Paralysis

A number of factors impeded Fukuda’s ability to govern and will challenge
whomever the LDP chooses as his successor.
Parliamentary Gridlock. In July 2007, the DPJ won a majority in nationwide
elections for the Upper House of the Diet. As a result, for the first time in Japanese
history, Japan’s two parliamentary chambers are controlled by different parties. Shortly
after the DPJ’s victory, then-prime minister Shinzo Abe resigned, leading the LDP to
select Fukuda as premier. Concerned by Ozawa’s threats to veto major legislation,
Fukuda attempted to form a “Grand Coalition” with the DPJ. After the talks broke down,
the DPJ adopted an aggressive policy of using its control of the Upper House to block or
delay several of the Fukuda government’s legislative initiatives.
The LDP’s Increased Dependence on Coalition Partners. For more than
a decade, the LDP generally has not been able to secure independent majorities in both
Diet chambers, forcing it to rely upon coalitions with smaller parties. Since 1999, the
LDP has formed a governing coalition with the New Komeito party, a pacifist-leaning
party with strong ties to the Buddhist Soka Gakkai religious group. Komeito’s clout in
the coalition has increased over time, for at least two reasons. First, the LDP is reliant
upon Komeito to obtain the 2/3 majority in the Lower House to override the DPJ-led
vetoes in the Upper House. Second, LDP candidates in many electoral districts have
become reliant upon support from Soka Gakkai followers.4 Although traditionally the
LDP has dominated the coalition, during the summer of 2008, New Komeito became
more assertive, for instance by resisting Fukuda’s push to renew the authorization to
provide fuel to coalition forces in Afghanistan (see later section for details).
The LDP’s Weakened Decision-Making Structure. Former Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi significantly weakened the LDP’s old, opaque system, in which the
leaders of the party’s internal factions made major budgetary, policy, and personnel
decisions (including deciding who would serve as prime minister). This system, although
widely criticized as lacking transparency, helped the LDP to overcome significant internal
divisions over policy. While he was breaking the faction-based system, Koizumi used his
personal popularity and aggressiveness to enforce party discipline. However, his
successors, Abe and Fukuda, often were unable to duplicate this feat. As a result,
decision-making became increasingly difficult on contentious matters, such as the battles between the LDP’s economic reformers and those favoring a return to the status quo of
channeling government funds toward key interest groups.5
The DPJ’s Discipline. The DPJ was formed in 1998 as a merger of four smaller
parties and was later joined by a fifth grouping. The amalgamated nature of the DPJ has
led to considerable internal contradictions, primarily between the party’s
hawkish/conservative and passivist/liberal wings. In particular, the issues of deploying
Japanese troops abroad and revising the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Japanese
constitution have generated considerable internal debate in the DPJ. As a result, for much
of its history, the DPJ has a reputation of not being able to formulate coherent alternative
policies to the LDP. Additionally, battles between various party leaders have weakened
the party. Since winning the Upper House, however, the party has appeared much more
unified, at least on the strategy of using its veto power to try to force the LDP to hold
early elections. This discipline is remarkable considering that, privately and publicly,
many DPJ members chafe at Ozawa’s top-down leadership style. If the DPJ does worse
than expected in the next election, it is likely that he will be forced to step down.

Who has more “construction workers”?

In my previous post, an investment analyst suggested the following:

Japan should focus more on creating jobs in the construction industry, to which 10 pct of its workforce belongs, he said.

To which my gut reaction was, MORE construction workers? Come on. As with the general worry that massive stimulus could create crippling levels of dependency on government largesse, a large permanent construction workforce could prove an end in itself, spurring fruitless construction projects like so many Towers of Babel.

So today I want to take a look at just what Japan’s workforce looks like and whether this guy has a point. Japan’s level of construction employment currently comes in at around 8.75%, having steadily declined since 2002:

Construction workers make up just 5% of the US non-farm civilian labor force. But then again, if you add prisoners and soldiers into the mix, you find the breakdown is 5.1% of the core workforce does construction, around 1.6% is in prison and another 1.03% is in the armed forces.

At that point the level of workers taken in by the “employment creation industries” (a term of my own creation) adds up to 7.8%. Given the comparatively miniscule incarceration and military service rates for Japan and the chronically higher unemployment rate in the US, the picture doesn’t end up looking so different from Japan.

I still don’t know whether Japan really needs more construction workers, but at least I know that there’s a somewhat equivalent population of workers in the US that makes Japan a less of an outlier.

It’s all about the Benjamin

There are times when I want to just quit my job, lock myself in an Internet-connected bomb shelter, and spend all my waking hours reading updates from the troubled mind of Benjamin Fulford:

The exposure of Satan worshippers accelerates as the Federal Reserve Board heads for collapse.

The confessions of child sacrifice and cannibalism by a Satan worshipper on prime time US television is a sure sign Satan worship is coming to an end:

This confession confirms other sporadic confessions and a few rare historical court cases describing human sacrifice among Satan worshippers pretending to be Jews or Christians. As the Federal Reserve Board heads for collapse many more of the Satan worshippers who are often found amongst the super rich are sure to be exposed.

An aristocratic Satan worshipper contacted me to say that “Satan has gone to heaven,” and ask “what are we to do now?” My answer is they should abandon the Western concept of an eternal clash between Good and Evil and replace with the Asian concept of Yin and Yang or harmonious opposites. They can then also start worshipping life instead of fooling themselves about some sort of war between Satan and God.

We are likely to see many more horrendous confessions over the coming months and years. In order to have a fresh start for the planet I think we need to forgive those who confess.

This guy David Icke, a promoter of the idea that “reptile people” are in secret control of the world order, called Benjamin Fulford a “disinformation artist” because Fulford says he needs proof before he’ll believe the Illuminati are actually reptilian Here Icke feverishly denying that money really exists:

More Benjamin…

About the Bush-China connection

The Skull and Bones drug dealing syndicate was a major player in the opium trade so they have been dealing with Chinese mobsters for over 150 years. However, while the two sides did business, they were also enemies who did not fully trust each other. The Bush family were heavily involved with China and the Chinese mob. They were also blackmailing top Chinese power brokers over illegal slush funds they had. Papa Bush’s brother Jonathan Bush lived in Beijing and had high level contacts. However, the Bush, China connection has since been severed because the Chinese figured out it was the Bush faction that was trying to depopulate China with Sars and Bird Flu etc. The Chinese were planning all-out warfare against the US because the US elite were planning to kill 80% of the world’s population. That plan has been stopped and there are now negotiations on to build a win-win permanent world peace.

On the DPJ Ozawa scandal:

Japan’s prosecutors ordered by US to trump up charges against opposition leader Ozawa’s secretary

The US criminal regime ordered the current Japanese puppet/slave colonial government to trump up charges against the secretary of opposition Democratic Party of Japan’s leader Ichiro Ozawa, according to senior sources in the Japanese secret government. The reason was that Ozawa said “the only US forces we need here are the 7^th fleet.”

As the US secret government comes to an end it is using every dirty trick in its book both in Japan and the US in a desperate but doomed effort to stay in power. No matter what they do they will not be able to con the Japanese people like they did during the last lower house election that was held on September 11 4 years ago. For one thing they no longer have any money so they will not be able to bribe the TV stations to run their propaganda. Furthermore, if members of the current slave regime continue to betray their people with dirty tricks like this they will surely end up in jail.

The Japanese Democratic Party promises to renegotiate the US/Japan security treaty once they come into power. If the US carries out any more dirty tricks it will hurt them in the negotiations. The Japanese opposition would like to retain a US presence as a counter-balance to China but they might change their mind if the US continues to abuse this country.

Oh hell yeah

I don’t know who had the insane idea to make a Japanese live-action version of Spiderman, but I’m just glad that it exists. And glad that Marvel has, for some reason, decided to stream episodes for free on their web site. There’s also a very odd Spiderman manga I’ve read a bit of, which may or may not be based on the plot of this show.

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)

Observations from jogging at the Imperial Palace

Today Mrs. Adamu and I went jogging around the Imperial Palace moat, an activity that is apparently all the rage these days. Mrs. Adamu is training for a half marathon, but I do one slow lap myself just to burn some calories. It is easy to see why the palace area has become a popular place to exercise – it is an unimpeded, smoothly paved path, the view is gorgeous, and it’s easily accessible from Otemachi or other surrounding stations. The downside, of course, is that the jogging traffic has begun to resemble a busy freeway, forcing slowpokes like me to constantly watch my back so as to not get in the way of the more serious athletes. Normal tourists visiting the grounds are also quite visibly inconvenienced by bespandexed Tokyoites rushing by.

But all in all it’s a great experience. Today was particularly eventful:

Happy Takeshima Day! The holiday set up by the Shimane Prefectural government in 2005 to remind their fellow citizens that the disputed rocks belong to Japan, not Korea. This is apparently a big deal to right wing groups (see Roy’s earlier post on this), so to commemorate, one decided to use its megaphones outside the Social Democratic Party headquarters to loudly berate them with accusations of treason for close ties to North Korea. BTW, these guys might think their country has a valid claim to the Takeshima rocks, but stamp expert/blogger Yosuke Naito shows us some fairly convincing Korean stamps that say otherwise.
Workers were emptying the shuttered Palace Hotel of furniture and other items. The hotel was set up in 1961, just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, on the site of what was once part of the Imperial Household Ministry and then a GHQ-run hotel “for the exclusive use of buying agents from abroad.” While it must have looked quite modern in 1961, more than 40 years later the design resembles a Holiday Inn and noticeably clashes with the more refined palace across the street. The current building will be torn down, with a renewed Palace Hotel will set to open on the site in 2012.　We started jogging the imperial grounds in mid-January, just weeks before the Palace Hotel shut down. We thankfully at least got to take a peek at the lobby before it was relegated to the history books. The inside looked much grander than the exterior, with obsequious front desk staff, expensive-looking lounges, and old-school carpeting and wood-panel walls. By far the neatest item in the lobby, however, was a wood-carved clock, shaped like a world map with digital displays showing the time in major cities. It was considered cutting-edge at the time it was unveiled at the time of the hotel’s opening. The thing just oozes 1960s modernity – I could picture this on the wall of an enormous workroom full of office ladies working on typewriters (click for full size. Thanks Yomiuri!):

Amazingly, no one knows who designed or manufactured the clock despite its iconic status, but one thing is for certain – it will live on. Though originally set to be destroyed after the hotel closed, at the last minute a German patent office decided to take it (for no charge except shipping costs) out of the management’s nostalgia for frequent stays at the hotel during business trips to Tokyo.

Best J-E financial glossary ever, available for free by the FSA thanks to the magic of XBRL

Thanks to some technological advances in the area of financial reporting, I am happy to pass along this very handy Japanese<>English financial glossary (3MB, Excel format). This treasure trove contains an extensive bilingual list of the terms used in Japanese financial statements, spanning all sectors and including terminology for investment business and mutual funds.

The file is a list of terms to used in XBRL. Ever heard of it? If you don’t work in investment or the finance department of a corporation, don’t feel bad if you haven’t. It’s a markup language, similar to XML or HTML, customized for the production of financial statements. (watch this awesome Japanese-language Flash animation to learn more).

The point is to standardize all aspects of producing the statements. Completely standardized and easily processed statements have all sorts of advantages, from highly efficient analysis to potentially spotting massive frauds. And the advantages extend beyond mere numbers because the the format standardizes terminology across languages. I have no clue how they came up with the translations (the FSA site mentions something about the terms being “extracted from past materials”), but from what I have reviewed they are all pretty solid.

Nextgov.com reports (perhaps with some slight overhyping of XBRL’s advantages by the SEC and others) that the system is set to be introduced to 500 of the largest US companies starting in April:

Adding XBRL tags to financial disclosures makes them searchable and much easier to compare. What used to be available only to financial professionals now will be easily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Investors, and regulators, in theory, will be able to analyze data faster and more easily, and possibly finding anomalies in corporate financial statements and investments.

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The new rule, while not necessarily helping SEC and investors uncover problems that led to the collapse of the financial industry or discover investment fraud such as that allegedly perpetuated by Bernard Madoff, will improve financial analysis. To do so, XBRL would have to be applied to filings on all types of securities, including asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations.

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The move will bring the United States into alignment with worldwide practices, said Diane Mueller, a member of the XBRL international steering committee and vice president of XBRL development at software vendor JustSystems.

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Currently, financial disclosure records that public companies and mutual funds file are large, unwieldy documents often thousands of pages long. Only large financial institutions have been able to devote the time and staff necessary to parse through the documents and glean the most pertinent information and figures for analysis.

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The adoption of XBRL, however, is likely to significantly change the way companies are analyzed. The addition of data tags will allow software to instantly comb through reports and identify the most critical information and figures. XBRL “makes for much easier and timely comparisons between companies,” Moyer said. “Today it’s extraordinarily difficult for investors to compare between balance sheets of two banks. They have different reporting styles, etc. [XBRL] starts to conform balance sheets and give you more comparability.”

Another advantage of XBRL for the commission is regulators will know instantly if a company’s filing is missing any key information because the software will automatically identify what data is missing when corporations electronically file documents and then notify the company and SEC. Previously, regulators had to manually check files to find missing information, Mueller said.

Speaking of worldwide practice, Japan’s Financial Services Agency, the financial regulator, was a step ahead, becoming one of the first major financial centers to mandate XBRL filing starting in April last year. Thanks in part to the Japanese authorities’ desire to be a leader in this area, they have provided an official FSA “XBRL taxonomy,” current as of March 2008, which is the file linked above.

While this isn’t exactly news, it’s the first time I actually bothered to look. I had heard that the transition to XBRL could completely eliminate the need to translate financial statements manually, but wasn’t quite sure what it meant until now. Dig in, and mourn the coming loss of one source of translation work!