Category: The Americas

Look at me, I’m complaining about journalists who write about themselves!

As someone who reads far too many news articles for his own good, I may be somewhat more sensitive to media cliches than your average news consumer. For instance, I have a whole category on this blog for “kabuki” metaphors.

But today I want to talk about another of my pet peeves in the English-language news world: when the reporter flips things all around and makes him/herself the focus of a story. While some people might be interested in the daily life of some freelance writer who rides his bike around town, probably most of us don’t want to read about what substantively is no different from following a homeless man around all day and writing about it (though wait, that would be a good idea). And speaking of homeless people, I almost broke my mp3 player in outrage when I heard this pointless “report” about a man who decided to write out of a storage unit in New York. He should have tried that in DC – he’d have ended up getting arrested if he was lucky, but more likely had his ass handed to him like the rest of the crackheads who try that stunt.

Or consider the reporter who freaked out when he was deemed unworthy of a Wikipedia entry for lack of notability. He spent a full two pages on the subject, and once published the article apparently made him immediately eligible for an article again. This naked display of the writer’s fragile yet gargantuan ego leaves me almost speechless but I will say this: You use Slate to whine to the world that you’re underappreicated, and then that whining (intentionally or not) simultaneously pressures the source of the perceived slight to recognize you once again? You should be ashamed of yourself! (I am not mentioning the writer by name or linking to the article in the hope that he won’t ever find this and have a mental orgasm over seeing his name in print because of something I wrote. I wouldn’t be able to touch the keyboard again).

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Journalists can be pretty egotistical, and as writers they no doubt have a burning desire to tell their story. Or perhaps sometimes they’re just dicks (“I got Bill Clinton to threaten me!”). Foreign correspondents especially seem eager to put themselves in the reporting, which is usually justified (“My convoy got hit with an IED!” “I got kidnapped!”) but too often an unappealing by-product of the expat experience (“Look at me, I am getting paid to walk around China!”). And often it’s less about autobiography than it is a cheap stunt (“Look at me, I got waterboarded!”). Whatever the case, it just doesn’t sit right with me when there are real things to report about. Much like nonbinding resolutions directed at foreign governments, these articles seem to be lost on their way to somewhere else.

Since I haven’t been around for very long, I am going to assume that this practice has been around for a while — HL Mencken seemed to like writing about himself for one thing, and you can see traces of Hunter Thompson in a lot of these kinds of projects. But at the same time this practice seems like some unholy amalgamation of gonzo reporting and the Today Show with Katie Couric meets livejournal, which would make its growth more recent.

There are better ways for a reporter to talk about him/herself as part of the story than to simply say what is happening and then try to link that to some cosmic truth or the zeitgeist or whatever justification you use to get printed in a news publication. The best use of personal narrative that I’ve seen in recent reporting is Nicholas Kristof, who has used the sheer power of his reporting to play a pivotal role in keeping alight what little focus the US has placed on resolving the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, not to mention his efforts to force people to take a hard look at the state of child prostitution in Cambodia from a much more dynamic perspective than almost any other source would have the guts to give. That might be setting the bar high, but I think it has to be pretty high or else we’ll never hear the end of Budding Journalist’s Amazing Tales of Public Transportation.

Superman meets Charisma Man

I’ve been back in the US for about two months now, and while I’ve settled back into the full-time student routine here, I can’t get over the feeling that I’ve left something better behind.

A few weeks back I came across this post by Debito while I was having a minor bout of insomnia, and it sums up the feeling perfectly.

I liken a trip back to America to Superman making a trip back to Krypton.

When Siegel and Schuster first made the Man of Steel, they had to inject a little science into their fiction, because comic-book hero or not, an invulnerable superhuman was a little hard to believe. So they talked about Clark Kent coming from a planet called Krypton, which being more dense than Earth has a higher amount of gravity. So when Clark crashlanded on Earth, he was superstrong because things were physically lighter, and he had X-Ray vision from eyes attuned to a different opacity. Superman’s nemesis was, of course, fragments of rock from his home world–Kryptonite–which made him lose all his powers.

Hence America becomes my Krypton because I feel absolutely sapped of strength there, even at the most interpersonal levels.

Here in Japan, I can relate more to people; they generally give me the time of day and listen to what I say. This could be due to their interest in America, their tendency towards deference with White people, or my ability to describe in Japanese what I see around me–my X-Ray vision, so to speak.

In terms of strength, here I feel I can accomplish more in a negotiation than the average Japanese–with the right mix of loud voice, humility, deliberate ignorance of custom, and choices of which battles to fight.

Then there’s the financial and emotional integrity in Japan (something which even Clark Kent, with a shitty job as a reporter at the Daily Planet, didn’t have); here, I’m not troubled for money, bored with bad food, starved for pretty women to gaze at, or frustrated by a lack of intellectual challenge.

Now, anyone who’s been in Japan for a substantial amount of time probably knows about Charisma Man, the little comic book about a Canadian “geek” who goes to Japan and becomes the ultra-cute “Charisma Man.” Charisma Man can clear a train car in 5 seconds and scare away oyaji by showing off his elephant-like penis. His arch-enemy, naturally, is Western Woman! who can turn him back into a geek just by looking at him.

It’s a true enough phenomenon. Western guys who go to Japan all become Charisma Men to some degree, and the ones who have charisma before they come to Japan become practically superhuman. But the mystery is: why? And everyone seems to have their theories.

I talked about this with Roy, and he seems to believe that it’s a question of audience selection: there’s just a subset of Japanese people who are interested in foreigners (particularly women interested in men), and that’s the attention that turns foreign guys into Charisma Men. That’s probably not a bad theory.

But there’s another half to it, and I think Debito hits it squarely on the head. When you aren’t brought up in Japan, you don’t worry about being the deru kugi–the nail sticking up–and that puts you ahead of those who do. I think it’s a lack of that dreaded word from elementary school: self-esteem. I vaguely remember trying to explain that concept when I was in high school in Osaka. I had to look it up in my electronic dictionary. That communicated the word, but not the concept. The teacher said: “Oh, like selfish?”

And indeed, when I talk to Japanese people in America, many seem to feel the exact opposite effect as Debito and I do. They come to the US, and often they become Charisma People (men and women alike), living freely without a society telling them what to do.

Maybe it’s just psychosomatic. Maybe we just have to be in the environment that we enjoy. So maybe it’s more appropriate to give each their own. Let Mariko have freeways and beaches and pizza: let me have subways and sakura and sushi, and we’ll be even. Which is why I’m all about a world with fewer borders.

A message for whom?

Kyodo news service reported yesterday (via Japan Times) that:

An international convention banning states from abducting people will spur Japanese moves to resolve the North Korean abduction issue and send a “strong message” to Pyongyang, Vice Foreign Minister Masayoshi Hamada said Tuesday.

“We were able to send a strong message that it’s not only Japan that is telling North Korea” about the abductions, Hamada said after a ceremony in which 57 countries, including Japan, signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

The treaty is the first of its kind to focus on state-sponsored abductions. It will be put into force once 20 nations ratify it.

The pact does not apply to cases that took place before its ratification, exempting North Korea’s abductions of Japanese in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I understand that Japan’s primary concern with this treaty (text here) is the North Korea abduction issue, and the fact that these crimes have a special exemption to the statute of limitations is a testament to the efforts Japan has undertaken regarding this issue, but how many of the other 56 countries are really thinking about North Korea when they ratify this treaty?

The treaty has been in the works since at least 2001, and while a 2001 article from Human Rights News states that “The practice of forced disappearances plagues many parts of the world, including Algeria, Colombia, Iraq, and Sudan, as well as Chechnya in Russia,” I expect that many of today’s signatories are actually thinking of so-called “extraordinary rendition” by the United States when they sign it. Since they are most likely committing actions that would violate the treaty, The United States is naturally not one of the signatories at present, but interestingly they were also opposed to the treaty back in April of 2001, before 9.11.2001 and any US-instigated “forced disappearances” that I am aware of.

It makes sense that Japan would not want to call attention to the lack of US support for this treaty, I find it very odd that Kyodo news has written such a shallow article, leaving out any non-Japan related background on the treaty, which reads more like a government issued press release than a news story.

Globalized Donuts

Regular readers of the blog will remember Adamu’s saliva-speckled posts on Krispy Kreme donuts. Well, I’ve just found out via Michael Turton’s blog that Dunkin Donuts recently announced plans to expand into Taiwan, and then eventually through them into China. As far as I know, this will make Taiwan the second country after the Philippines to have both a Dunkin Donuts and a Mister Donut franchise, a condition that if you know the history of both companies suggests an incongruity of much the same character as the fact that light is both a wave and a particle.

Before coming to Japan I had never heard of Mr Donut, and was a bit incredulous when I was first told that it was originally an American company. Noticing that their advertising makes notes of the fact that it was started in San Francisco Chinatown (some locations have Chinese-y menu items like dumplings or noodles to play off of this), I assumed that it was just one of those American chains which, despite being fairly big regionally, had just never made it from one coast to the other. Except for wishing, whenever I passed a Mr Donut in Japan, that it was a Dunkin’ Donuts instead, I never thought of them again until I moved to Taiwan to study Chinese in 2004.

I arrived in Taipei in May, apparently no more than a couple of months after the introduction of Mr Donut to Taiwan. Unlike in Japan, where it was nothing but a common vendor of sweet and sometimes sticky pastries, Mr Donuts in Taiwan was a phenomenon, with desperate young consumers waiting on lines so snakishly long that they were later to be my frame of reference when my rarely present nominal flatmate Dmitri described to me the experience of waiting in line to get into that first Pushkin Square McDonalds to open in Russia after perestroika.

Having been impressed by the utter ordinariness of Mr Donuts product in Japan, I was rather shocked by the amount of enthusiasm there was for the product here, until I noticed the promotion campaign. To see what the centerpiece of that campaign is, just visit out the Mr Donut Taiwan web site and check out the title:

Mister Donut Japan No.1 Donut Shop

While in Japan the brand image of Mr Donut is based around its American-ness, with a minor strain of Chinese-ness from the San Francisco heritage, Mister Donut Taiwan is being promoted entirely on the basis of its popularity in Japan. While Taiwan certainly has nothing against American products or fast food, the Japanese link has a much stronger association with the high class. For one illustrative example of how the Japanese image is helpful for marketing in Taiwan, notice how dry cleaning stores are always labeled as “Japanese style dry cleaning,” despite (to my knowledge at least) there being any particular historic link between Japan and dry cleaning. We can also see an interesting choice in the removal of any marketing or products associated with Chinatown. After all, why would the idea of third-rate Japanified Americanized Dim-sum be remotely appealing in a city where you can find the same type of thing at lower prices and higher quality in almost any direction you turn?

If you look at the order and location in which stores were opened in Taipei, you can see a clear attempt by the planners of Mr Donut Taiwan to instill establish Mr Donut as a high class brand.
(1) Tianmu – a high class neighborhood with many expensive stores.
(2) Breeze Center – A department store. I don’t know if it’s Japanese owned, but it has a strongly Japanese style to it, and even contains the Taipei branch of Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya.
(3) New York, New York – High end shopping center located at the base of Taipei 101, currently the tallest skyscraper in the world.
(4) Taipei Station – Not actual in the station, but in the underground shopping center, right by the door connecting it with the neighboring Shin-Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store.
After this they began branching out into somewhat less stylish areas, and now have a total of 17 stores including one in Xinzhu and three in Gaoxiong, but by associating the early stores both with high class shopping districts and Japan, the company did an excellent job of beginning to establish their brand as something more more at the level of Starbucks than McDonalds.

By now you may be thinking, but didn’t this start with Dunkin’ Donuts, not Mr Donuts? Well, let’s look briefly of the history of these two brands.

Mister Donut was founded by Harry Winokur in 1956 and had locations across most of North America.

Mister Donut was the largest competitor to Dunkin’ Donuts, which was founded by Harry Winokur’s brother-in-law William Rosenberg in 1950, prior to being acquired by Dunkin’ Donuts’ parent company, Allied-Lyons, in February 1990.

After the acquisition of Mister Donut by Allied-Lyons, all Mister Donut locations within North America were offered the chance to change their name to Dunkin’ Donuts. Now only a scattered few locations still hold the name Mister Donut.

In 1983, Duskin Co. Ltd of Japan acquired the rights to franchise Mister Donut throughout Japan and Asia. Mister Donut is the largest donut chain operating in Japan.

[From Wikipedia]
For some reason there remain sixteen Mr Dont locations in the United States that have not transitioned to the Dunkin’ Donuts brand, but for all intents and purposes they are now a Japanese company, under the aegis of Duskin Co. Ltd., and the Mr Donut brand has spread to the Philippines, and now Taiwan, as an offshoot of the Japanese company. There was a Dunkin Donuts operation in Japan for a time, run as a joint venture with D&C, the holding company of the internationally famous Yoshinoya brand, but currently the only East Asian country with Dunkin Donuts is South Korea, although it is quite common in Thailand, and in the Philippines one can even find Dunkin Donuts right next door to Mr Donut. Will we ever see such a site in Taiwan? Will Dunkin’ Donuts take hold? Will we ever see Krispy Kreme opening in a vacated Mr Donuts shop next to Taipei 101?

For a good taste of Taiwan’s Mr Donut hysteria, circa February 2005, check out this Taipei Times article. For a taste of how they may fare in the future, check out this man on the street interview from the very same article.

“It’s the best donut you can get in Taiwan, but it’s not as good as Dunkin Donuts,” Fu told the Taipei Times. “If someone bought some for me, I’d eat it,” he said, but indicated that he would not buy the doughnut again for himself.

Harvard-educated Burma democracy activist Adam Richards, 1996

Back when I was just 14 another Adam Richards was making a difference. From the Burma Library Archives:

FBC: HARVARD DUMPS PEPSI: CONCERN OVER CONNECTION TO
FORCED LABOR
April 8, 1996
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Cambridge, MA

Cambridge: Harvard University dining service has scuttled a $1 million
contract with Pepsi after Harvard students raised concerns over Pepsi’s
activities in military-run Burma.

Harvard is not the only top university where contracts with PepsiCo are
under fire: Stanford University Burma democracy activists have more than 2000
student backers for an effort to keep Pepsi-owned Taco Bell off their
campus. Dozens of high school and college campuses across the US are
involved in similar efforts.

“I’m a businessperson who says that we have to be socially and ethically
responsible” says Harvard Food Services director of dining services
Michael Berry. Regarding Pepsi he says “I do think there is a problem
doing business with such a company.”

As recently as Feb. 22, a Pepsi memo sneered at the Harvard students,
noting that a Harvard demonstration against Pepsi “involved a mere 25
students.” “This shows the power of the information we provided on
Pepsi,” says Harvard senior Adam Richards.

“What you have is America’s ‘best and brightest’ challenging PepsiCo based
on the facts” says senior analyst Simon Billenness of Franklin Research and
Development. “Students are at the heart of Pepsi’s target market. Pepsi
is extremely vulnerable.”

Pepsi entered Burma shortly after military authorities quashed an
overwhelming (82%) May, 1990 election victory by the NLD party of Nobel
Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. NLD spokespeople have repeatedly
called for Pepsi to cease operating in Burma. Pepsi’s Burmese partner is
also chairman of a joint venture with the military called JV3. In Burma,
“the army controls all major businesses. Not even a small scale merchant
can survive without solid army connections” says the authoritative Far
Eastern Economic Review.

To repatriate its profits from Burma, Pepsi engages in “counter trade” by
purchasing agricultural goods for export. Recent reports by the United
Nations and human rights groups note that forced labor has become pervasive in
Burma’s agriculture sector. The Burmese army has a practice of confiscating
farmland and using the evicted farmers as forced labor.

Despite several enquiries, PepsiCo has not disclosed the parties from
which the company buys farm products or provided any evidence that
PepsiCo is trying to avoid buying from farms that use forced labor.
Despite rising concern over its presence in Burma, Pepsi’s lawyers each
year work diligently to keep such issues off of the shareholder ballot at
its annual meetings.

Pepsi’s revenues in Burma, $14 million in 1995, are dwarfed by US sales of
over $10 billion.

Other US companies, including Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss, Eddie Bauer, Liz
Claiborne, Amoco and Columbia Sportswear, shun Burma. UNOCAL, Texaco and
ARCO remain, and along with Pepsi are the targets of consumer and shareholder
activism.

F R E E B U R M A C O A L I T I O N
For More Info Contact: Adam Richards

How to tell the New York businessman from the Tokyo businessman

When something goes wrong, the New York businessman gets angry.

Old-Guard Japan
By Stephen Roach | New York

In a stunning blow to central bank independence, the Bank of Japan seriously bumbled its January 18 policy decision. After setting up the markets for the second installment of a “normalization-focused” monetary tightening, the BOJ buckled under political pressure and passed — electing, instead, to keep its policy rate unchanged at 0.25%. While this may end up being nothing more than a painful detour on the road to normalization, the incident speaks volumes about the Old Guard political dominance of Japan’s deeply entrenched LDP ruling party. It is a major credibility blow, with potentially lasting damage to the New-Economy image of a revitalized post-deflation Japanese economy.

But the Tokyo businessman says he’s sorry.

Our Apologies for Erring
By Takehiro Sato | Japan

To date, we had steadfastly maintained our view for an additional rate hike in January. The result, however, was a postponement. We would like to first apologize sincerely to all our readers for having misread the timing of the rate hike.

(Both quotes taken from the always-excellent Morgan Stanley Global Economic Forum)

What might have been?

Speaking of the Philippines and historical predictions, there is a great discussion going on over at the blog Coming Anarchy over the past, present and future status of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines were all transferred from Spanish to United States control together, with the 1898 December 10 signing of the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Spanish-American War (as well as a payment of $20 million from the US to Spain.) Both Puerto Rico and Guam remain unincorporated territories of the United States of America, but the US and the Philippines parted company long ago. Reading this discussion gives you a pretty good idea of why the Philippines was spun off into an independent country instead of being either incorporated into the union or kept in colonial status. Today Americans are concerned about being demographically overwhelmed by Hispanics, but true annexation of the Philippines would have been a massive and sudden demographic shock that would have profoundly changed the subsequent development of both. For the people who think the Puerto Rico situation is complicated, try and imagine what might have happened if the Philippines, with a population twenty times that of Puerto Rico, and speaking a polyglot of languages, had all become US citizens overnight.

If only they had known…

You know that feeling you get watching a suspenseful scene in a movie, where you know for example that the vampire snake is on the other side of a door, a hapless character says something like “gosh, I’m glad that vampire snake went back to Las Vegas,” puts his hand on the door and you just want to yell out STOP to the screen before certain doom commences?

For the non-English majors out there, I’m talking about dramatic irony, defined so on Wikipedia:

Tragic (or dramatic) irony occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King.

This morning I encountered something much like dramatic irony when reading a 1966 article about the foreign relations of the Philippines. Within the piece were two specific statements that made me wish I could send a telegram back through time warning Mr. Onofre D. Corpuz about the horrible misfortune to come.

First was this one, in his section discussing how an orientation in economic relations towards Southeast Asia would be good for development.

The Philippines is well situated to play a leading role in this process, and economic interests, therefore, promise to lead the nation’s foreign policy closer to Southeast Asia. Barring a sudden deterioration which could result from escalation of hostilities in Vietnam, we are presently on the threshold of a period in which the necessary economic underpinnings of diplomatic projects, such as ASA and Maphilindo, will emerge.

[Note: ASA is Association of Southeast Asia, predecessor to ASEAN]

So, how did that Vietnam thing go after 1966? I forget now. Anyway, I’m sure it couldn’t have destabilized the regional economy or anything.

The second quote mixes retrospective irony with a case of be careful what you wish for.

As a result, political power is widely dispersed and the bases of power are fragmented. No Philippine president has ever been re-elected after a full presidential term of four years. There are no political institutions in the Philippines that have enabled a leader to stay in power as long as have Indonesia’s Sukarno, India’s Nehru, Burma’s Ne Win, and Malaysia’s Tungku Abdul Rahman.

1966 was the second year of Ferdinand Marcos’ first term as president, after which he would in fact be re-elected, just like Mr. Corpuz was hoping. What Corpuz probably was less happy about was when Marcos declared martial law in 1972, and continued his Presidency until 1986, when he was driven from office by mass protests indirectly in response to the assassination of opposition politician Benigno Aquino.

Another Bush administration official who needs to pack his bags

Of all the asinine things that come out of Washington, this latest tirade by Charles “Cully” Stimson, the Defense Department’s point man on the Guantanamo detainees, is ridiculous. In an interview on Thursday, he went through a laundry list of large New York law firms which are representing the detainees… and then suggested that this was inherently wrong, and merited reprisals from big-money clients.

From the Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog:

Said Stimson: “I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Trés daft. The right to counsel aside, and every American lawyer’s [aspirational] obligation to do some pro bono work aside, Stimson had just pointed out that almost every big firm is involved on the defense side in the detainee cases. So where are these corporate CEOs supposed to send their legal work? India?

As if this wasn’t enough, he then went on to suggest that foul play was afoot:

“Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving monies from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Despite being a GMU law graduate and Navy JAG, Stimson must have missed the defamation section of his Torts class. I hope that someone actually drops a major law firm on these grounds, so the firm can sue the living daylights out of Stimson.

Anyway, there are some good reactions coming out already: Senator Leahy came out against Stimson and the Defense Department stated that Stimson’s comments were not representative of the Department.

Newsflash: Hawaii doesn’t have enough Japanese people

The state of Hawaii is facing a minor crisis: not enough Japanese tourists. So they’ve enlisted advertising megafirm Dentsu to sell the state to people in Japan. And, since every ad in Japan needs a cute face, they brought actress Mayumi Sada on board.

Well, okay, she’s not that cute. More “sophisticated.” Anyway, the Honolulu Advertiser reports:

Through November, Japanese visitor arrivals were down nearly 9 percent. Takashi Ichikura, executive director of Hawai’i Tourism Japan, blamed the decline on fewer airline seats from Japan to Hawai’i, rising fuel surcharges on air travel, rising hotel charges and a weakening of the Japanese yen. Hawai’i Tourism Japan was hired by the state to promote Hawai’i in Japan.

“With the rising fuel surcharge and other cost factors, Hawai’i now looks expensive in Japanese consumers’ eyes, and they expect Hawai’i to be a refined and sophisticated destination to match the price they are paying,” Ichikura said.

… The campaign, called “Discover Aloha,” is meant to depict the experiences of a female visitor who experiences the feeling of aloha through various encounters that could only happen in Hawai’i.

My dirty mind had high hopes when I read that last part, but Dentsu let me down.

The effort includes two posters featuring hula and lei-making and another showing Sada reflecting on her Hawai’i experiences from a lanai overlooking the ocean.

It still sounds kind of like running “Visit Texas” ads in Mexico, doesn’t it?