The Americas – Page 25 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Now your entire meal is embargoed

We’ve all been hearing so much about how the mad cow disease related beef embargoe is going to damage Japan/US relations so badly that we might as well be going back to the day before Little Boy fell out of the Enola Gay, but according to this article in The Mainichi, there’s actually been another large-scale food embargo going on for some time.

Japan will allow foreign potatoes into the country for the first time, accepting a U.S. proposal to brush or wash off all dirt before shipping, send them in sealed containers, and limit their use to processed potato chip snacks, an official said Wednesday.

Japan decided to accept the proposal after 17 months of deliberations, which included sending a team of experts to the United States from July to August 2005, said Masashi Kaneda of the Plant Protection Quarantine Division at the Agriculture Ministry.

Until now, Japan banned imports of foreign potatoes to keep out potato wart fungus and a potato eelworm, the ministry said.

Potato wart fungus has been eradicated in the United States since 1992, while potato eelworm has been limited to areas in New York state, the ministry said.

If potatoes had been banned until now, why is beef attracting so damn much attention?

2008 Summit to be Held in Kansai?

Nikkei on the Ambassador’s visit to Osaka (some far less serious coverage of his visit can be found at the Osaka Consular Office’s website):

US Ambassador Meets with 3 Kansai Governors, Voices Support for Attracting G8 Summit
Feb. 9, 2006

US Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer met with the governors of Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo prefectures in Osaka City on Feb. 8. The three governors asked for the ambassador’s understanding of their bid to lure the 2008 G8 Summit meeting, and the diplomat voiced his support for the effort, saying, “I understand that Kansai is working to bring the summit, and I want them to do their best.”

Governors Fusae Ota of Osaka, Keiji Yamada of Kyoto, and Toshizo Ido of Hyogo attended the meeting. Schieffer pointed out that 80% of American federal direct investment in Japan is concentrated in Tokyo. He went on to call for the creation of an arrangement for exchange [between Kansai and the US], saying, “I’d like you to create centers in Kansai where information from JETRO (Japan EXternal Trade Organization) and the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan can be easily obtained.”

Talk about structural barriers. 80%! Greater Kansai is a huge metropolitan area rivaling Tokyo (and Osaka, for its part, is an overwhelming destination for inward FDI in Japan), but in my own completely unfounded opinion, the Kansai region outside of Osaka City gets so little FDI love from the US for a few reasons: a) Americans see Japan outside of Tokyo as a kind of netherworld; b) Domestic investment is also heavily skewed toward Tokyo, meaning that foreign companies’ business partners/clients are also there; c) The government is all in Tokyo; d) Relative lack of support infrastructure (international schools etc)/smaller expat communities in Kansai; and e) Prolongued economic malaise.

Dishonourable men use the internet, heaven forfend!

Since I’m heading back home soon and still haven’t gotten final word about the job I’ve applied for in Japan I was looking around on craigslist for jobs in NYC when I ran across this entry, accidentally searching in the general listings instead of the job section.

Japanese Girls Be Careful of Japanese Language partners!
Reply to: see below
Date: 2006-02-03, 5:05PM EST

Please be careful of some English language partners.

Some guys pretend to like Japan.
Maybe they want to hurt Japanese girl.

My girlfriend came from Japan.
She had a bad experience with New York guys.

When my male friend answer their ad, they did not want to meet him.

Please be careful.

Good Luck.

“They’re going to have to pry my monkey from my cold, dead hand.”

But owning a monkey isn’t inherently political.

Link.

I think what he’s trying to say is that the second ammendment protects my right to bear deadly robotic monkey arms.

Japan / US relations illustrated visually

macarthur hirohito
September 27, 1945

bush koizumi
November 16, 2005

What a letdown

This headline was much more interesting than the article.

Japanese vs US Blogs

High praise from Curzon at Coming Anarchy:

Educational and entertaining in one healthy dose, [Mutant Frog Travelogue is] probably the best East Asian blog around.

Thanks, I think we’re pretty great too! But that made me wonder — what do other East Asian blogs look like? What about, just for example, the highest ranked Japanese blogs on Technorati?

(Note about Technorati from their About section: “Technorati displays what’s important in the blogosphere — which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence, and the speed at which these conversations are taking place.” Hence, these rankings are a measure of what people with blogs are linking to, not the number of page views, influence, revenue, or any other factor (as far as I can tell))

For starters, let’s see what’s out there. Here’s a quick rundown of the top ten blogs in Japan and the US/English-speaking world (for comparison):

Japanese blogs:

1. がんばれ、生協の白石さん！ “Fight on, Shiraishi of the Co-op!”

This is the blog of a Mr. Shiraishi, “very very average” employee of the Co-op (student cooperative/school store) at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. Shiraishi gained fame for being the writer of responses to comment cards that students would write to him. The comment cards are a well-known phenomenon at Japanese universities as the answer are often posted outside the Co-ops on a bulletin board. He differs from other such Co-op employees in that he actually answers the stupid joke comments that he gets rather than giving them a quiet death in the round file. For some reason this has become majorly popular in Japan, probably because college students throughout the country have wondered just what kind of weirdos answer their comments.

Gaining Perspective from Tragedy

Lock your door at night:

Dorm incident may lead to changes in sex assault law

February 3, 2006

STORRS, Conn. — An incident involving three men accused of masturbating over a sleeping University of Connecticut student is sparking calls to change the state’s sexual assault laws.

The men, who are also students at the school, face disorderly conduct and public indecency charges. But they will not be charged with sexual assault because there was no physical contact with the female victim during the September incident, said Elizabeth Leaming, the assistant state’s attorney prosecuting the case.

“It’s a frustration that there is no ability to charge a sex offense for the kind of conduct alleged,” Leaming said Thursday.

The incident occurred after the woman fell asleep in Skvirsky’s dorm room on Sept. 24.

The young woman discovered what happened after she woke up. She filed charges three days later.

I’ve been accused of being both a Japan apologist and a Japan basher. I admit to both readily. I love Japan, but it is screwed up. I have been somewhat hard on Japan, you might say, by translating reports of some fairly depraved activities.

But at times we all need a bit of perspective. That is why am grateful, in a way, that someone from my hometown (Somers, Connecticut) has helped remind me that Americans can be just as perverted as Japanese people, and sometimes the law is caught with its pants down, so to speak, when it comes to dealing with the devious bag of tricks that is the human imagination.

The gun that won the West

ToastR’s comment on my post about Japan’s arms trade reminded me about this article I saw in the New York Times a bit over a week ago.

It’s in the subscriber only archive, so I’ll just past the text below.

A Hard Kick From the Gun Of John Wayne
By STACEY STOWE (NYT) 974 words
Published: January 21, 2006

Come spring, the Winchester rifle, immortalized as the gun that won the West and rode into the sunset with John Wayne, will be made in Portugal and Japan.
Continue reading The gun that won the West

My name is cursed with violence!

Three killers sentenced to life in prison

THREE vengeful thugs responsible for the “senseless and savage” killing of an innocent party-goer in a South Yorkshire street have been jailed for life.

Richard Wray, aged 38, and Adam Richards, 24, were yesterday handed life sentences after being found guilty of murdering Shaun McDermott following a trial at Sheffield Crown Court last year.

Wray’s son Lewis, aged 17, also convicted of murder, was remanded into Her Majesty’s pleasure – which the judge said was the youth equivalent of a life term. They were among an “armed to the teeth” gang who leapt out of a van and attacked the Bentley joiner in Welfare Road, Woodlands, on June 25, last year – after they mistook him for somebody else.
Mr McDermott was knocked out and beaten as he lay on the ground.

He was then stabbed in the heart and died later that night in Doncaster Royal Infirmary. The defendants were sentenced to a total of at least 37 years behind bars.

Richard Wray, of The Crescent, Woodlands – said to have wielded the knife – was jailed for a minimum of 15 years.

Adam Richards, of Tudor Road, Woodlands, who prosecutors said knocked Mr McDermott out at the beginning of the attack, was ordered to serve at least 13 years.

Lewis Wray, of South Street, Highfields, who had no previous convictions, was handed a minimum sentence of nine years in custody.

01 February 2006