Category: Japan

Sending Papers

Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010
Nudes land photographer in trouble
Kyodo News

Police plan to send papers to prosecutors shortly on photographer Kishin Shinoyama on suspicion of public indecency for shooting photos of nude models in public spaces for a book, sources said Saturday.

The police are consulting with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office on sending papers on the 69-year-old photographer and two female models, the sources said.

“Send papers to prosecutors” is a crude (but accurate) English translation of 書類送検 or shorui souken, a word frequently seen in Japanese news stories with no statutory basis or definition. What does it mean, and at what stage is Shinoyama in the criminal prosecution procedure?

“Sending papers” describes a situation where police officers have not arrested someone, or initially arrested them and released them, and then send the relevent evidence that identifies the suspect with the criminal offense. The word “sending papers” is not actually used by the police or prosecutors and does not appear in any criminal procedure legislation, but is a correct explanation of what happens — Article 246 of the Criminal Procedure Law obliges the police to promptly send all papers and evidence regarding the suspect and the incident (and information regarding confessions). Prosecutors can, and do, designate that some minor crimes be up to the discretion of the police to process independently or to decide at their discretion whether or not to send papers.

The background to Shinoyama’s case is that the photographer shot nude photographs of his two adult models in Tokyo in twelve public places, including a church and the Aoyama Graveyard, between August 16th and October 15th, 2008. The police received several complaints during this time and investigated one incident on September 7th, but Shinoyama responded by submitting a document to the police stating that his models were wearing swimming suits. When the photographs were published in his latest collection “NO NUDE” in September 2009, police felt compelled to proceed with a formal investigation.

Shinoyama’s public statements on this began with a defiant tone (“In my fifty years as a photographer…!”), but he has since taken a much more concilatory tone (“I’m sorry. I meant to consider my surroundings, but I was not careful enough”). That’s because in Japan’s apology-based criminal justice system, he still has time to avoid prosecution. Once the prosecutors receive the papers, they make the decision of whether or not to prosecute the case, under Article 247 of the same law, and have the option of deciding to not prosecute, under Article 248. At this point, the police are still “consulting” with prosecutors as to how and what to send them so as to be in compliance with their legal obligation. And the biggest issue with Shinoyama is a combination of the fact that he took public pictures of the nudes, that numerous people called 110 to complain, and Shinoyama’s denial of this fact at the time. If he apologizes enough, this appropriatly aged photographer could still avoid the most serious sanctions — or as one article in the Mainichi concludes, “it appears the goal of sending papers here is to put the brakes on similar acts.”

Self-proclaimed veteran translator: modern fansubbing a mess

From the “almost two years old but news to me” department:

Via the comments section at Neojaponisme, we have this series of videos decrying modern anime fansubbers as cliquey, Japanese language-worshiping elitists who offer “Japanese lessons” instead of actual translations. Their refusal to create plain, easily digested subtitles and refusal to translate culturally specific Japanese (instead offering copious on-screen liner notes) scares away potential new fans and is generally useless, he argues.

Watch here:

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

On a basic level, he is absolutely right that for a general audience, translations should be very clear and nearly invisible. It’s what I strive for in my job and on this blog, for sure. But from my (admittedly limited) experience with fansubbed anime, it’s clear enough that fansubbers are not in it for the benefit of a general audience. In the era of Wikipedia, BitTorrent, and Youtube where esoteric cultural knowledge is rapidly becoming obsolete, being an elite fansubber is one of the few sure-fire ways left to secure King Geek status. Maybe having an insular subculture makes it harder for good anime titles to break through into the mainstream (as has been fansubbing’s most often-cited benefit), but isn’t that kind of the whole point?

Why are Japan’s beaches so disgusting?

The environment at Enoshima Beach really is a bizarre contradiction for a nation that prides itself on cleanliness and orderly behaviour. I was always led to believe that the Japanese truly respect their natural environment. Or perhaps Enoshima Beach is simply a pressure valve for Tokyoites in summer . . . where they can strip off not just their clothes but also any respect they have for their surroundings.

—Matthew Abrahams writing for the Sydney Morning Herald about six months out of season. This is a problem discussed in Japan as well (see this TV report republished on Japan Probe).

There is a ton of amazingly beautiful and (more or less) unpolluted coastline in this country, but it tends to be of the boulder- or concrete-encrusted variety that is pretty useless for beach recreation, like this scene just a stone’s throw from Enoshima.

IMG_0506

I’ll throw out a few explanations of my own for Shonan’s problems.

  1. The few “good” beaches around Tokyo have to accommodate a huge beach-going population — the Tokyo metropolitan area has a population about one and a half times that of the entire Australian continent. Even if most people were meticulously clean, a tiny percentage of bad apples would be enough to spoil the beach for everyone.
  2. Beach visitors in Tokyo generally live very far from the beach (at least half an hour by train) and probably have a more tenuous personal connection to it than your average Australian coast-dweller.
  3. Shonan attracts the lowest common denominator of Japanese beach-goers, as the more well-off prefer to drop a few hundred (or thousand) bucks and visit Guam, Hawaii, Southeast Asia or the Gold Coast. Thus Shonan gets a bigger share of working-class yokels than the urbane Tokyo that many foreigners experience.
  4. As James notes in the Japan Probe piece linked above, Japan has no qualms about drinking in public, and booze consumption inhibits any pre-existing qualms about leaving trash on the ground.
  5. For some reason I can’t figure out, public trash cans are very rare here; if you want to throw something away while walking down the street, you basically have to find a convenience store. Same story at the beach, except there are no convenience stores.

The Google zeitgeist on Japanese marriage

There are some interesting posts floating around the blogs about what Google’s “auto-suggest” feature auto-suggests regarding love and marriage, summarized in this post which indicates that women overwhelmingly want to be loved, while men overwhelmingly want to get kinky.

I just read these today, but the near-future Mrs. Jones was telling me this weekend about a similar phenomenon she had heard of with the Japanese auto-suggest feature, so I decided to try it myself.

Here are the top suggestions for “wife” (妻):

  1. wife hysteria
  2. wife birthday gift ranking
  3. wife birthday gift
  4. wife shochu
  5. what to call wife
  6. wife gift
  7. wife honorifics
  8. wife depressed
  9. wife gift ranking
  10. wife not registered (i.e., the Japanese equivalent of common law marriage)

And here are the top suggestions for “husband” (夫):

  1. hate husband (most hits by a long shot)
  2. average husband allowance
  3. husband violent language
  4. dead husband procedures
  5. what to call husband
  6. husband depressed
  7. husband unemployed
  8. husband allowance
  9. husband space
  10. dead husband pension

Giving all permanent residents the right to vote = terrible idea

The DPJ has agreed to submit a bill that would grant foreign permanent residents of Japan (let’s call them PRs) the right to vote and run in local elections. Getting voting rights without having to give up Korean citizenship has long been a goal of zainichi Korean activist groups. But this proposal would apply both to “special” permanent residents that include the population of “zainichi” Koreans and Chinese from Taiwan who remained in the country after WW2, and to any foreigner granted permanent residency.

The bill has stirred up a firestorm of criticism, most loudly from the right wing. However, in support of the bill are some powerful forces, first and foremost DPJ Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa, whose job it is to ensure a lasting majority for his party. According to at least one critic, the decision to offer suffrage to all PRs may be  an attempt to secure a more permanent voting base because the zainichi population has been falling precipitously as the original group dies off and their decendants naturalize.

Personally, although I could potentially benefit from this bill if I one day am granted permanent residency, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Except for unique circumstances, only the citizens of a country should be allowed to vote.

Right-wing anger

The right wing and their allies in the opposition LDP have mobilized against this bill. Right-leaning Sankei Shimbun has run features pointing out the “big problems” with the bill. Financial services minister and conservative People’s New Party President Shizuka Kamei is against the proposal, noting he would refuse to sign a cabinet decision on the matter. In a statement, he worried that some areas with large foreign populations would see an upheaval of political power. He also suggested the compromise measure of loosening the requirements to naturalize, without being specific.

Protests have been common, and generally have taken a highly xenophobic tone. The crux of the argument is that there is no good reason to give PRs the vote and that almost no nations unilaterally grant foreign citizens the right to vote (some EU countries allow it for other EU citizens, along with some other exceptions made for special groups (PDF)). Some of the criticism veers into the paranoid, however. In addition to the long, long list of furious red herring arguments documented by Debito, here is a video of one activist calmly explaining that this is an attempt by China to take over Japan by populating the country with foreign voters.

Almost non-existent support

It’s obvious enough that these protesters are making ridiculous arguments and have cranked the outrage way out of proportion. But what is the case for giving PRs the vote?

In addition to expected support from zainichi Korean groups, we have some uncharacteristically half-baked support from Debito, the well-known human rights agitator: “Debito.org is in support, given how difficult it can be to get PR in Japan, not to mention how arbitrary the naturalization procedures are.” But just because it’s tough to get the status, that doesn’t mean one should get the right to vote and be elected. I am not accusing foreigners in Japan of being spies or degenerates, but a basic tenet of a country and the Japanese constitution is that it is to be governed by its citizens. That requirement helps assure those who will be involved in politics are committed citizens of the country. Permanent residents are already protected under the law and do not need to renew their visa to stay in the country. I think if they want more than that they should be ready to give up their original passport and become citizens.

In an article in Japan Focus, professor Chris Burgess praises the zainichi suffrage movement as “multiculturalism in practice” but makes no mention of the expanded proposal.

I can understand giving the special permanent residents the vote because they are for all practical purposes citizens of the country. The current DPJ proposal would essentially exclude those who did not explicitly take South Korean citizenship (朝鮮籍維持者), if I understand correctly. But I would not even have a problem with these people getting the vote as it was an tragedy of history that put them in the country in the first place. If Japan would permit dual citizenship that would be one thing, but absent that letting them vote one way to let them participate in society.

But really, what constituency of non-zainichi PRs is actually asking for the right to vote? The only one who really stands to gain is the DPJ itself which would earn itself an expanded and loyal voter base. That’s an irresponsible way to decide election policy in this country, and as much as it pains me to side with rabid right-wingers who may wish me ill will, they are right on this issue. There are more important issues in my opinion (allowing dual citizenship, establishing an immigration policy) that should be given more priority.

(Thanks to Mulboyne for the video link)

Admiring Shoichi Nakagawa

I happened to be listening to a speech by Shoichi Nakagawa from August 2005, addressing the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ), just after Koizumi dissolved the cabinet and just before the LDP went on to win a crushing victory against the LDP rebels and the DPJ. The background to this is that, I recently started listening to the speechs of the big names from that tumultuous year, such as Watanuki and Kamei (who went on to start the Kokumin Shinto, with Kamei now being a powerful force in the new government), Okada and Kan (as they floundered trying to find a theme on which to run their campaigns, little did anyone guess they would be leading powerful figures in a new government in a few years), Koizumi and his former cabinet minister Hiranuma (perhaps the key battle between two politicians that year, as they were locked in mortal combat); and Abe (who at the time was the favored heir to the Koizumi throne, yet we all know that didn’t last).

Nakagawa was at the bottom of my list of people to listen to, because he wasn’t particularly important that year, and his career thereafter fizzled and failed. Less than a year ago, he resigned after appearing drunk at a speech in Italy — particularly reckless as it was as he signed an agreement with the IMF to lend them $100 billion in the largest single loan ever in history. He went on to lose reelection in 2009 in what was previously deemed a very safe seat, and dying under peculiar circumstances several weeks later. Many people in Nagatacho and in political circles that I associate appeared devastated, thinking it was a big loss, but I never understood the attraction of the man — my only memories of him from the past few years were of him looking exhausted and bleary. I thought he was another entitled hereditary politician, overrated and unimpressive — and it had been clear to all Nagatacho watchers for years that the man had a serious alcohol problem.

Yet listening to his speech from the campaign of 2005, I had a real change of heart. Nakagawa spoke clearly and concisely, showing the best side of a politician speech and a policy wonk. He loosened up the foreign press audience with a little English, an apology (how Japanese) and a joke (how American), then launched into politics and policy, speaking clearly and carefully on very complicated topics. Having just listened to the speeches of a handful of other politicians from that year, he definitely came across as the best, far more concise, intelligent and persuasive than all the other big names noted above. (Koizumi is, of course, always brilliant — but his collected speeches from that election campaign are just a collection of him sounding pissed off regarding the rejection of postal privatization.)

Note also his joke on neckties and longevity, which in retrospect, is grim. You can download and listen to the speech here, should you be so inclined.

The gold standard in wartime

I was just reading the 1938 edition of “Social Education in Taiwan,” published by the Japanese colonial government, when I came across this rather neat line in the middle of a section (page 76) on how the civilian population was being taught to aid the war effort (Second Sino-Japanese War) on the home front.

個人所有の金の価値が装飾用又は個人の虚栄心を満足させるが如き単に個人的価値を有するに過ぎないが一度国家の所有に移転すれば、国際収支決済の機能を発揮し、延いては国運発展上寄与する所極めて大なること。

This translates to:

The value of gold held by an individual merely possesses the value a piece of jewelry, or of causing vanity, but should that ownership be transfered to the state, then it will not serve a function in resolving the international balance of payments, but also serve as a grand contribution to the development of the fate of the nation.

It then goes on to recommend that citizens (or perhaps “subjects” is a better word)

think of their own personal finances and sell their gold to the government, as it will not only be highly profitable to sell at the current high market price, but that by exchanging the gold official currency, it can be invested in other ways such as bank deposits, where it will bring about a natural increase in wealth [i.e. through interest], which will be far more profitable than letting it going to waste  sitting at home. [Error in my original translation corrected thanks to Aki’s comment below.]

I don’t feel 100% confident about my translation of the latter part, so if anyone has a better translation for 「之を貨幣に換へ、貯金其の他の方法にて運用せば自然財産の増加を来すを以て徒に死蔵し置くに比し極めて有利になること」 than please let me know. Incidentally, this isn’t a section I plan to use in what I’m working on now, just that I thought it would be of interest to all of you.

Now, I wonder how the value of the original gold vs. the paper money held up over the course of the next several years.

Subway planning Japan surge

Great news, people. Subway will open 80 new Japanese locations in 2010 (sub req’d). Most new stores will be in highway service areas and shopping centers where other fast food restaurants have shut their doors. That means you could start seeing Subways where the now-defunct Wendy’s used to be.

That will bring the number of Subways in Japan to around 270. Say what you will about their quality, Subway is the one of the only easy places to get a real deli sandwich in Tokyo. Mrs. Adamu and I love it.

I will be watching developments on this front very closely as I am considering moving out of Ayase at some point in the next year or so. Being near a Subway will be a major plus.

One interesting fact about Subway Japan – about 90% of their locations are franchisee-owned. So that older gentleman watching over the teenage part-timers making your sandwich? He probably has a very direct stake in making sure you’re satisfied. The same goes for most of the 957 Baskin Robbins stores.

The only rule of commuting that matters – just blend in

Reuters has a list of Japanese commuters’ common pet peeves:

1. Noisy conversation, horsing around

2. Music from headphones

3. The way passengers sit

4. Cellphone ringtones and talking on phones

5. Manners when getting on and off trains

6. Applying make-up

7. Littering

8. Sitting on the floor of the train

9. Riding the train drunk

10. Riding a crowded train with a child stroller

Most Mutant Frog readers will probably not find anything new on the list. Even the train companies are aware of them – most are covered in Tokyo Metro’s awesome “Please do it at Home” poster series (above, and read the Sandra Japandra blog if you want to laugh your ass off). Some seem more reasonable than others – can a mother really avoid bringing her kid on the train?

Pet peeves about daily life are simply a part of the human condition – American motorists all get pissed off at people who don’t use their blinkers, and on and on. However, in Japan these complaints seem to take on an extra sense of urgency because commuting on a packed train (often for more than an hour each way) is often so intimate and potentially dangerous. The pressure on your chest as that last person piles on. The feeling of being shoved as people stampede out at a major transfer station. The anxiety women must feel that the hand behind them could start getting too familiar.

With trains as crowded as Tokyo’s, everyone has an interest in maintaining some semblance of order and control. That’s maybe the one thing that keeps people in a tightly packed train from suffering a breakdown (and allows people to concentrate on a newspaper or Nintendo DS).

To deal with this, I think the people of Tokyo (and possibly all Japanese cities) have come up with one unwritten, overarching meta-rule that unites them all – do not stand out. People who stand out violate this order and thus subject themselves to the furtive glance of doom, that momentary registering of disapproval.

Even those who violate a few of the pet peeves themselves will feel annoyed at others who do the same. That’s because this rule is enforced by a million individual pet peeves manifesting themselves passive-aggressively. For example, I sometimes eat chocolate on the train but hate it when someone eats a sandwich or something I can smell. In my head, I feel like my eating is cleaner and therefore less rude.

This might be a stretch, but as a foreigner I feel like I automatically violate the rule just by being different. Once people see a white man they can never be sure if I’ll follow all the rules. Hence, just about every time I enter a reasonably packed train car I am greeted with half a dozen glances. I don’t necessarily think it’s racist–for most people it’s based on experience and it’s no more hostile than the automatic glances that would be directed toward other potential scofflaws – construction workers, thuggishly dressed kids, gyaru, etc etc.

Day in and day out, I share the train with the people who glare at me, and I start to glare back. I get territorial about my comfort zone – the handrail in front of the bench seats gives you enough room to read – and resent anyone who would violate it. I start to understand why people go out of their way to avoid talking to strangers. And I definitely get why people don’t bother giving up their seats to old people and pregnant ladies. Those people are breaking the rule!

This is why I think alleviating the insanely crowded train situation is vital to improving the national mood. I ridiculed Roger Cohen for talking about the gloomy attitude in Japan, but on that point he was right. People look like hateful, unhappy zombies during their commutes. The train companies are doing their best, but I feel like the media and politicians avoid really focusing on it because it’s one of those tough, intractable problems with no good solution. Better to let the plebes focus on how awful it is that some celebrities use drugs. But why not try some bolder solutions, like a second, identical Yamanote line, or double-decker train cars?

As a man with a short commute, I should be the last to complain about this. But I can’t help but thinking about it. It’s a national obsession, and in almost three years of living here it’s become mine as well.