Tsushima has lots of fun places to visit. What I like particularly is that, despite traveling on a weekend in the pleasant spring season, there were literally no tourists to be found at all the sites I visited. This post will overview some of the highlights — and save the very best place for part 3.
1. Russo-Japanese War Memorial
The Battle of Tsushima was the decisive naval battle where Japan decisively won the Russo-Japanese War. On the northern tip of Tsushima sits the memorial to the battle, erected a few years later when the locals were in a nationalistic mood. A hundred years later, Russia and Japan together erected a new memorial nearby, commemorating Russian-Japanese friendship. That monument also lists all of the victims of the Battle of Tsushima, and the roster is telling — there are thousands of Russian names, and just a handful of Japanese names.
It’s about time I finally gave a shout-out to everyone’s favorite American butcher living in Nagoya. I’m of course talking about The Meat Guy. Whether you’re looking to buy Australian steaks, mutton, real bacon, Polish sausages, American BBQ sauce, unique meats such as ostrich or crocodile, or even your very own American-style outdoor cooking grill, The Meat Guy is the place to go. He ships all over Japan, and it’s high quality meat that is welcome change to Japan’s delicious but nonetheless lacking in variety meat markets. The Curzon estate has been very happy with the bacon, sausages, steaks, chops, and spices bought at TMG.
You can meet the Meat Guy here. I’ve only heard his biography as rumor from fellow fans of his service, and from what I generally understand, his family farm in Nebraska produces Wagyu for American markets. He married a Japanese woman, moved to Japan, and set up this operation more than ten years ago. Now, thanks to the power of the Internet, he ships his goods all over Japan.
In case you didn’t catch it, you can watch me commenting on the other night’s election results with Ken and Garrett from Transpacific radio and special guest International Attorney Christopher Gunson.
Skip around a little because apparently there are parts where the sound didn’t quite work. All the same you can hear us cover:
Our election predictions, which are almost instantly shown to be way off
How the lower house members are chosen
Breakdowns of several races
What the religious parties New Komeito and Happiness Realization Party are all about
What kind of makeup politicians use to smooth out all their wrinkles to achieve the signature “Ichiro Ozawa as slimy salamander” look (thanks to viewer Kozo, we now know they use a kind of grease-based face makeup known as ドーラン in Japanese).
And much more!
Once again, thanks so much to TPR for putting everything together and making it a spectacular evening (and for all the pizza too). Also thanks to Marcus for going out of his way to do the sound and video (he even brought a TV light!)
In line with the overall nationwide trend, voters chose DPJ candidate (and ryokan heir) Tairo Hirayama to represent Tokyo’s 13th district (covering all but the western end of Adachi-ku). Hirayama beat LDP incumbent Ichiro Kamoshita by a small margin of 3,000 votes. Kamoshita will stay in the lower house as a proportional representation member, which will make things awkward if they ever run into each other in the halls of the Diet building.
In a statement on his website written last night, Hirayama adopted the same cautious tone as PM-to-be Hatoyama. He thanked supporters but said he considers the votes to be not for him personally but instead as votes for a change in government. Since he had already taken some painkillers to combat his lower back pain (ぎっくり腰 a new vocab word for me) he expected to stay up all night before heading to Kitasenju Station this morning to thank voters for their support.
At 62.82%, voter turnout in Tokyo’s 13th was lower than the 69% national average and not much higher than turnout in the July Tokyo assembly election.
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Hirayama might want to shake hands with Kazumasa Fujiyama, his rival candidate from the Happiness Realization Party. Though Fujiyama received less than 3,000 votes or 1.1% of the total, that was just about in line with Hirayama’s margin of victory. Had those voters gone LDP the race would have been much closer. Even considering that the HRP voters were almost all Happy Science followers, Hirayama should thank his spirit guide that Okawa didn’t decide to throw his weight behind the LDP this time around.
Nationwide, the HRP failed to win a single seat or even surpass 1% of the popular vote in most districts. Without any significant voter support, the party stands to lose over 1 billion yen in security deposits for the more than 300 candidates it fielded.
Happy Science’s political movement, born of guru Ryuho Okawa’s vision of a nuclear holocaust, has failed. At one point it appears they considered giving up before the election, but in the end this was a bad idea that took on a life of its own. In a personality cult, once the leader sets his mind to something it can be very hard to stop. The leader himself may hesitate to admit to a mistake out of fear he’ll lose credibility, and of course his followers who think he’s a divine being would never go against his wishes.
I hope the authorities will keep a close eye on this group as it’s possible Okawa may still feel the urgent need to save Japan from certain doom by taking control of the government.
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Perhaps the biggest national story set in Adachi-ku is the DPJ’s defeat of New Komeito President Akihiro Ota in Tokyo’s 12th district (covering Kita-ku and the western tip of Adachi-ku) was yet another humbling setback for the ruling coalition. Former DPJ President Ichiro Ozawa had considered running against him but decided to field a different challenger, singer and DPJ upper house member Ai Aoki (see photo above) instead. It ended up working, and Ota, who had not run in a PR spot, will have to turn in his MP badge (and of course resign as New Komeito leader).
Now that I’ve covered my local race, now it’s time to take a brief look at some of the more notable candidates for Tokyo’s 17 proportional representation seats. I am limiting myself to candidates who are only running for PR seats, not those who have doubled up with a simultaneous candidacy in a single member district (With two exceptions: The DPJ’s Tairo Hirayama and LDP’s Ichiro Kamoshita are both running as PR candidates in the first spot in addition to Tokyo’s 13th). This means we are scraping the bottom of the barrel – candidates included just in case the party does well. We can’t be sure any party really believes in these people, but they are trustworthy enough to gain party backing.
Keiichiro Nakayama, political commentator (People’s New Party, never before elected) – A former Yomiuri reporter turned independent commentator who served as a member of Yoshiro Mori’s PR team when he was prime minister (not exactly a stellar record…) He ran for the upper house in 2007 under the PNP ticket but lost. He has penned several books, apparently getting his big break covering the short-lived Takeo Miki administration (Miki took over from Kakuei Tanaka following the Lockheed bribery scandal and overreached in his efforts to achieve political reform), and seems to have made his career as one of those political reporters who becomes a mouthpiece and fixer for the politicians he’s supposed to be covering as a journalist.
Kazuo Ishida, LDP Tokyo Prefecture staffer (LDP, age 65, never before elected) – Ishida is the 28th and final candidate on the LDP’s PR roster. In 2005, their last choice for PR candidates was Taizo Sugimura, who got in and has come to be widely considered a disaster. It’s possible they decided to go with the safest possible candidate (a lifelong party man who has no delusions of grandeur or, from the looks of it, any real ambition).
Junichiro Yasui, lower house member (LDP, never before elected) – Yasui is one of the Koizumi children who won his diet seat in 2005 on the wave of LDP support for Koizumi’s postal privatization plan. He’s a dropout of Waseda University but was known as the head of the Waseda retail district (one of the familiar-looking shotengai that you see around Japan). Once again he is low on the PR list and will probably not make it in this time.
Masaaki Kuniyasu, former ambassador to Venezuela, former ambassador to Portugal (LDP, age 71, never before elected) – This guy doesn’t look happy to be running for election with such slim hopes of victory. He’s also toward the bottom of the LDP’s Tokyo PR list. According to his Asahi questionnaire, he’d like to see Japan known as a “an environmentally advanced nation.” It appears that he (or someone with the same name) wrote a book in 1996 titled The Truth Behind The Philippines’ People Power Revolution.
– The New Komeito are running two people named Takagi next to each other in the Tokyo PR block, but they appear to be unrelated. One, Yosuke Takagi, is a former Mainichi Shimbun reporter.
Eiko Ishige, NPO board member, author (DPJ, age 71, reelected three times) – Thanks to Jiji I know she her sign is a Leo. Her field of specialty is elderly benefits, and she has written several books on the topic, including The Elderly and Welfare (A Book to Understand the Elderly). Judging from the title of one of her books, she considers herself a citizen activist. Her name has a difficult kanji for Ei that won’t show up when you try to search for it.
– The Happiness Realization Party has adopted a strategy of placing recognizable names in their PR spots. The bassist from the Blue Hearts, a manga artist, and shady inventor Doctor Nakamats are all there in the Tokyo block. The former two are apparently believers, but Nakamats is just looking for cheap promotion just as he was when he ran to be Tokyo governor in 2007. He charges exorbitant amounts for dubious-looking inventions such as the Love Jet 69 sex toy available for 30,000 yen plus shipping.
OK, that’s it for now! You can see me tomorrow night with the live coverage of the election results with the good people at Transpacific Radio.
The final candidate in Tokyo’s 13th district is Kazumasa Fujiyama, running under the Happiness Realization Party ticket.
Before I get to this guy’s profile, I want to quote from an excellent piece on the party from the Irish Times:
Founded earlier this year to offer voters a “third choice”, the HRP has an eye-catching manifesto: multiply Japan’s population by 2.5 to 300 million, overtake the US to become the world’s premier power, and rapidly rearm for conflict with North Korea and China.
If elected, its lawmakers will inject religion into all areas of life and fight to overcome Japan’s “colonial” mentality, which has “fettered” the nation’s true claim to global leadership.
… A new book, The Guardian Spirit of Kim Jong-Il Speaks , by party founder Ryuho Okawa explains that earlier this month at a session in the party’s Tokyo headquarters, the voice of Kim’s guardian angel warned of his plans. But at least Kim is alive – Okawa also claims to be able to receive the thoughts of Japan’s notorious wartime monarch, emperor Hirohito (1901-1989), and his deceased predecessors.
Being able to commune with the dead is but one string to Okawa’s bow. A reincarnation of Buddha, he achieved great enlightenment in 1981, according to the party’s website, “and awakened to the hidden part of his consciousness, El Cantare, whose mission is to bring happiness to all humanity”.
Before he founded the Happy Science religion in 1986, Okawa wrote books under the names of Muhammad, Christ, Buddha and Confucius. Conveniently, if improbably, speaking in Japanese, some of the prophets had much the same message: Japan is the world’s greatest power and should ditch its constitution, rearm and take over Asia.
…
The Happies boast that they have sold 11 million copies of their bible, Shoshin Hogo (The Dharma of the Right Mind), in Japan since 1986, and opened 200 temples.
Okawa’s books, mixing new-age philosophy with self-improvement tips and political views, have sold millions more, apparently providing the funding for the campaign. Translating those beliefs into political power, however, has proved easier said than done. Tokyo voters shunned the Happies’ candidates in this month’s municipal election, which ended LDP rule in the city and set the DPJ up for a historic national win next month.
Also, you might be interested to see the Happy party’s new manifesto video. It’s very similar to the one they produced for the Tokyo assembly elections (that animated treasure was unfortunately taken down), only this time slightly more professional:
Now, to the candidate:
Profile: An architect by trade, Fujiyama became a full-time Happy Science member in 1995 and has since risen to become a leader in Tokyo – he previously served as the head of the Science’s Nippori Branch and Adachi Branch before being named deputy leader of the Tokyo Branch in 2009.
Before becoming a full-time Happie, Fujiyama was an employee of Haseko Corporation, a construction/engineering firm that’s listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It’s unclear whether he was a member of Happy Science before 1995 or if he
One of Fujiyama’s bases of operations is the Science’s Nippori branch (seen here on Google Street View), which I happened to spot during a walk the other day:
Policy: As all Happiness Realization Party candidates appear to be carbon copies of one another, it’s no surprise that Fujiyama supports all the planks mentioned in the above video – slash taxes, smash North Korea, and somehow make Japan the world’s biggest economy by 2030 (I suspect they’d have to destroy all other countries to do this).
When asked in an Asahi questionnaire about how he would like the world to see Japan, he answered as “a great economy.” (経済大国)
Fujiyama claims in a blog post that the owner of a building near Kameari Station said she’ll support him because she hates paying consumption taxes.
Something interesting: Fujiyama bears an eerie resemblance to party founder and leader Ryuho Okawa:
Fujiyama:
Okawa:
OK, I’ll admit that their parts are on opposite sides, but don’t you think they both have a sort of “divine salaryman” look going on?
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My next and final profile post will look at a few of the Tokyo proportional representation candidates.
Profile: Watanabe is a former Adachi-ku assemblyman running on the JCP ticket. At 69, Watanabe is liver-spotted and somewhat frail-looking when campaigning. He is an old school communist – he never went to college but instead joined the party in 1960 after finishing technical school. Three years after graduation he began working as a sanitary inspector at a clinic for the poor, where he was an active unionist who pushed for improved benefits for workers. He entered electoral politics in 1971 and won a seat on the Adachi-ku assembly, where he has won re-election nine times (I assume consecutively). He has apparently retired from the assembly to run in this election.
Chances of winning: I don’t think he expects to win. True to the JCP’s commitment to being a vocal minority party, I think the point of him being there is to try and direct the debate in favor of the JCP’s policy platform. He doesn’t even have his own real website, so I kind of doubt the party’s commitment.
Policy: Watanabe is running on a typical JCP line of protecting employment. See my earlier post on the JCP to see why I find them unacceptable.
Something interesting: I can’t say for sure, but something tells me this guy is related to Yasunobu Watanabe, the Tokyo Prefectural Assemblyman who handed his seat to JCP candidate Yoshie Oshima in July.
I am running out of time before the election (and have lots of research to do before my major live-streaming/blogging event tomorrow night), so I’ll be quickly running down the rest of the ticket in Tokyo’s 13th district:
Tairo Hirayama (DPJ, age 37) – This guy has been just about ubiquitous around Ayase recently, much more so than his LDP rival Ichiro Kamoshita.
He is originally from Iki, a tiny island in Nagasaki prefecture between Kyushu and Tsushima where his parents run a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn). I assume he is running in Adachi-ku because that’s where the DPJ placed him. He does not claim any prior affiliation with the area.
A turning point in his life came in 1995 when as a student at Waseda University he volunteered for the rebuilding effort following the Great Hanshin earthquake that devastated the Kobe area. It was there that he learned how to lead people; it’s also where he met his wife Sachiko, with whom he now has three children.
Policy: His campaign vans and literature all feature a big sticker announcing his support for the DPJ’s childcare cash handout program. Under the program, most families with children will receive 26,000 yen a month until their kids finish middle school. He’s made that the centerpiece of his campaign. He’s also been emphasizing his youth – the masthead of his website contains a logo with the word “age 37” in flames.
In an Asahi policy questionnaire, he said he’d like Japan to be known as a nation of “peace and culture.”
Chances of winning: The Nikkei-Yomiuri joint poll showed Hirayama slightly ahead. I’d say he will probably win backed by the groundswell of support for a DPJ-led government. He has the backing of 80% of DPJ supporters.
Something interesting: Hirayama’s wife Sachiko (apparently in her early 30s), who worked at a local Kyushu TV station before getting married, is no slouch – she won a female entrepreneur award in 2007 (with a 3 million yen grand prize!) from FujiSankei and Daiwa Securities for her creative business plan to open a “next-generation store” in Tokyo based on her online business Ikimonoya, an online retailer of gourmet Japanese food. The site is run under the brand of the Hirayama Ryokan, the traditional Japanese inn located on Iki that has been in her husband’s family for three generations. She is president of the ryokan company and her husband Tairo is the Representative Director (some sources say Tairo’s mother is the okami-san, the Japanese term for lead hostess/general manager, while others say it’s Sachiko now). Unfortunately the site shows no indication that they actually opened a store since she won the award in March 2008. She reportedly lives on Iki full time, so it must be very lonely for her husband in Tokyo.
Today’s Nikkei print edition has a great Q&A about Japan’s proportional representation system. Here is my explanation for how it works, borrowing from that Q&A and some Internet sources:
There are 180 seats (of the lower house’s 480) that are decided by PR. The country is divided into 11 regions, or “blocks”, which each receive some of the 180 seats. In addition to voting for a candidate in their single-member district, voters write in the name of the party they wish to receive their region’s PR seats. Votes remain valid if they are for an individual running on that party’s PR list, or if they are for the party leader.
Seats are awarded using the D’Hondt method. Though somewhat complicated, this is a fair system for allotting the seats as intended. Putting it in my own words would be tough, so I’ll just quote Wikipedia:
In a closed list system, each voter casts a single vote for the party of their choice. In an open list system (such as Japan’s), the voter votes for a candidate personally, but the vote is principally counted as a vote for the candidate’s party.
After all the votes have been tallied, successive quotients or ‘averages’ are calculated for each list. The formula for the quotient is , where:
V is the total number of votes that list received; and
s is the number of seats that party has been allocated so far (initially 0 for all parties in a list only ballot…)
Whichever list has the highest quotient or average gets the next seat allocated, and their quotient is recalculated given their new seat total. The process is repeated until all seats have been allocated.
If you don’t want to go through the calculation, you can use the following shorthand for your region – for example, for a party to win one of Tokyo’s 17 PR seats, it needs to garner 1/17 of the vote, or 5.9%. Every 5.9% of the vote after that gets it another seat. It’s not precise but it’s a rough indicator.
Parties are required to submit a list of PR candidates in advance, with candidates prioritized by region. For example, the LDP’s list prioritizes incumbents, many of whom are also running in single-member districts (see below).
Candidates are allowed to run both in a single-member district and one PR block. This means if the candidate loses in the single-member district, he or she can still be sent to the Diet if the party wins in the PR block.
It is possible to give two or more candidates the same level of priority if they are running in single-member districts (they then act like understudies for each other). A double-candidate who wins in the single-member district is automatically withdrawn from the PR list and the understudy takes his or her place. Note that in the LDP’s list, the first 22 candidates are all tied for first in priority. If only one wins in the PR block, then all 22 will get seats before the 23rd candidate.
PR candidates who were given equivalent priority who lose in the single-member districts are not given sub-ranks ahead of time. The seats will be alotted among them in order of who came closest to winning in their respective single-member districts. So if Yukari Sato loses in Tokyo’s 5th district by just 1,000 votes and Yuriko Koike loses in Tokyo’s 10th by 2,000 votes, then Sato would be given priority over Koike.
If a party wins in an unexpected landslide, there is a possibility they could fail to field enough PR candidates to satisfy the voters’ mandate. In that case, it sucks to be them because the seats go to the party who got the next greatest number of votes. This happened in 2005 when every candidate won on the LDP’s PR list in the South Kanto block, resulting in the election of 25-year-old Taizo Sugimura. They had enough votes to get at least one more seat but had to give it up to another party (story courtesy of Lord Curzon). This strikes me as a little undemocratic, since that means a party that the voters specifically voted against will win a seat.
My current lower house representative in Tokyo’s 13th district is Ichiro Kamoshita, an LDP man who is now seeking his sixth term in office in the August 30 general election. He’s also a licensed psychiatrist who’s written more than 90 self-help books.
Early polls show him facing an uphill battle against DPJ challenger as anger at LDP rule rises, but that doesn’t mean he’ll go down without a fight.
To help promote some of his policy ideas as he seeks re-election, Kamoshita has borrowed a fun idea from the Scientologist playbook: stress tests! Those who visit his website or receive one of his pamphlets can take a test entitled “Working 2.0” (働き方 2.0).
The test asks, “Is your mind stressed out?” (心のストレス、たまってませんか？）. To answer, the reader must go through a list of symptoms and check all that apply. Here is the full list:
I feel like meetings and discussions are actually meaningless
I keep working hard but I remain poor as ever
I have at some point felt like throwing it all away
I sometimes feel like I want a life where I can spend all day looking at the ocean
I sometimes feel like I want to liquidate the past and start over from scratch
I can more or less predict what my life will be like in 20 years
I have been doing the same exact job ever since joining my company
I have recently stopped chatting with family and coworkers
I have at times felt suddenly lonely in closed-in spaces such as the subway or elevators
I have called someone just to hear their voice, only to hang up after the second or third ring
It has become painful to go back and forth between home and work
It makes me jealous to see the empty trains heading the opposite way during rush hour.
Results
Here is my paraphrase translation of the results
If you checked 0-3 items: You’re the type who is good at dealing with stress. As someone with the capacity to process pent-up emotions, you realize it’s not worth it to get mad at your idiot boss. You know you can either take action or ignore it.
4-7: You need a mental detox. Just as removing toxins makes your skin look healthier, removing stress will make each day brighter and help you become better at many things. Why don’t you try and talk with friends or those around you about the things that worry you? Talking to someone will help you sort out the things that have been going back and forth in your head when you were thinking about them all by yourself.
8-10:Try and improve your lifestyle. Stress is the worst when you cannot escape it. You might need to switch jobs, take a vacation, or do something to get out of the group of people you are having problems with and break with the status quo. You might benefit from vegging out in the bathroom for 30 minutes or skipping a day of work sometime.
How did you do on the test? You can take it in Japanese here. I think I got around 4, but then the test seems designed to put everyone in that range. Who hasn’t thought about living at the beach?
Kamoshita’s plans for you
After the results, the next page is a list of labor-related policy proposals (note that at this point the reader still doesn’t know this is a political pamphlet, let alone from LDP man Kamoshita). They are:
Telecommuting – With almost 70% of workers in the services sector, it is possible for more and more people to work using technology instead of commuting to an office.
Working closer to home – Under this proposal, people would have two homes – a small room in the city close enough to their office to let them get their by bicycle, and a larger weekend house in the country where they’d rest on holidays and retire in old age. This would eliminate the issue of packed commuter trains.
More flexible working hours – By allowing flextime and diverse employment schemes such as temp work, people would be able to choose their working style while being eligible for the same social programs.
Kamoshita understands
In the final two pages Kamoshita reveals himself, tells of his own experience, and pledges to fight for the hard-working salarypersons of Japan.
You see, until age 44 Kamoshita also had to ride crowded trains to work. He even occasionally had to get off midway due to the stress (thankfully he got elected in 1993 and has probably never ridden a commuter train since).
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According to the Yomiuri, Kamoshita wrote this pamphlet himself and is immensely proud of it, noting that this original pamphlet might be the first of its kind in Japan.
, where: