Category: The Americas

Japanese rastas

Wiki:

A small but devoted Rasta community developed in Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rasta shops selling natural foods, Reggae recordings, and other Rasta-related items sprang up in Tokyo, Osaka, and other cities. For several years, “Japan Splashes” or open-air Reggae concerts were held in various locations throughout Japan. For a review by two sociologists of how the Japanese Rasta movement can be explained in the context of modern Japanese society, see Dean W. Collinwood and Osamu Kusatsu, “Japanese Rastafarians: Non-Conformity in Modern Japan,” The Study of International Relations, No. 26, Tokyo: Tsuda College, March 2000 (research conducted in 1986 and 1987).

Where are these Japanese rastas today?

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)

The horrors of local government

For a while I was taking comfort in the notion that if I ever lost my job, I could naturalize and become a local politician like Anthony Bianchi or Jon Heese. At least it would be a more interesting experience than the salaryman grind, right?

Well, watching this clip of city council petitioners in Santa Cruz, California has really made me question that idea.

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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!

A birthday present for Charles Darwin

From the Cape Cod Times:

WOODS HOLE — A federal appeals court recently upheld a ruling from a lower court that dismissed a lawsuit from a former Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researcher, who claimed he was unjustly fired for not believing in evolution.

Nathaniel Abraham, who was hired as a postdoctoral investigator in fall 2004 for his expertise in working with zebrafish, sued WHOI for discrimination in 2007. Abraham claimed he was fired after admitting he was a Christian who believes in creationism and the infallible word of God.

However, WHOI officials told the Times that Abraham’s job description clearly stated he would have to apply evolutionary theory in reviewing the results of research.

A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in April 2008 because Abraham did not file his discrimination claim within three years of being fired.

On Jan. 22, the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

Abraham’s last known job was teaching biology at Liberty University in Virginia, a college founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. He could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Academic freedom is a grand thing, but to deserve academic freedon, one should probably be doing academics-and of course fulfilling the actual job description one agreed to when hired. As a personal note, I’ve spent a lot of time near the WHIO, located in Woods Hole, Cape Cod, Massechusets as Woods Hole is a division of Falmouth, where my father’s parents used to live when I was a child, and where my father now owns a second house. The aquarium was a lot of fun as a kid, as well as the tiny bridge that opens for passing ships, which I thought was the coolest thing ever when I was small enough for the bridge to seem big.

Stimulus or investment? Japan vs. USA

Ever since the start of our current financial disaster various economists and pundits have been comparing first the US banking problems with Japan’s, and then more recently the infrastructure-heavy stimulus program with Japan’s construction state. Today’s NYT has a substantial article that easily marks the most high profile comparison yet. I’m certainly no economist and I’m not even taking the time to look at numbers right now, but my quick take on the issue is that the comparison is being significantly overblown, but it is still a very worthwhile comparison to make, so that Japan’s various successes and mistakes can be absorbed as lessons. See the following summation of Japan’s massive pork spending:

Dr. Ihori of the University of Tokyo did a survey of public works in the 1990s, concluding that the spending created almost no additional economic growth. Instead of spreading beneficial ripple effects across the economy, he found that the spending actually led to declines in business investment by driving out private investors. He also said job creation was too narrowly focused in the construction industry in rural areas to give much benefit to the overall economy.

He agreed with other critics that the 1990s stimulus failed because too much of it went to roads and bridges, overbuilding this already heavily developed nation. Critics also said decisions on how to spend the money were made behind closed doors by bureaucrats, politicians and the construction industry, and often reflected political considerations more than economic. Dr. Ihori said the United States appeared to be striking a better balance by investing in new energy and information-technology infrastructure as well as replacing aging infrastructure.

Japan’s huge boom in public works spending was less a national stimulus program than a gigantic rural welfare program of pork-barrel projects designed to prop up the ailing LDP in its long decline. The money was largely directed not to the areas where it would benefit the largest number of people, but the areas where it would benefit the largest number of politicians. This was not done entirely out purely cynical political motives but also due to a genuine desire to arrest the decline of the rural regions themselves, in the face of continuing urbanization and a decline in Japan’s traditional and lionized (if anachronistic) agricultural lifestyle. Regardless of intent, a huge proportion (I won’t use words like “most” without looking at actual numerical research) of the spending was “stimulus” but not “investment”.

I am very, very wary of the general principal of “economic stimulus.” I am not opposed to government spending, or even large amounts of government spending, as long as it is being spent on something that is actually necessary or build further value in the future, i.e. services or investment. I think this attitude should be obvious from the mass transit funding letter I wrote and posted here a few days ago. In short, I worry that the discussions on spending currently ongoing in Washington may turn into a series of worthless boondoggle projects oriented at unpopulated rural areas, combined with random tax cuts and other expenditures poorly aimed at short-term (i.e. one election cycle) economic recovery, while continuing to ignore the trillions of dollars in outstanding repairs or upgrades as well as vital new investment that the country needs. I think it’s safe to say that politicians are going to spend this money. The question is, what will it buy us? Would we rather have a bunch of bridges to nowhere, vacant museums and amusement parks in virtually deserted rural towns, and paved-over mountain tops, or would we rather have a modern electrical grid, mass transit that at least meets late 20th century standards if not 21st century, a safe and reliable water system, bridges rated to not collapse, and maybe even an adequate system of public health care?

A hypothesis regarding Japanese universities

The Japanese university model of education is in reality more like a European model in which most of the work is focused on seminars and final projects, and where most lectures and other courses are borderline optional. However, due to post-WW2 reforms the Japanese university system is institutionally based on the American model, and therefore has a superficial structure of grades, credits, homework, etc. that is often but weakly related to the more important areas. This disconnect makes Japanese universities (which do have serious problems) look even worse than they really are, and in fact contributes to their degradation.

As a hypothesis I haven’t thought about this too hard or looked for any evidence but would like to see some discussion. Thoughts?

The original fortune cookie

This may shock you, but fortune cookies are not Chinese food, nor are they really Chinese-American food. They started out as a Japanese product, and were copied by Chinese-Americans in San Francisco decades ago to form the dessert staple of cheap Chinese restaurants across the US. (This was detailed in a New York Times article last year, and linked by Roy in a post which I somehow missed; I learned of it from watching the author of said article, Jennifer Lee, give this fascinating presentation on the evolution of Chinese food outside China.)

The predecessor of the Chinese-American fortune cookie is the tsujiura senbei, a cookie made of flour, sugar and miso which is sold at certain shrines. According to Wikipedia, it comes from the Hokuriku region. But after some Googling, I found out that these are still made and sold at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, and since I was visiting the city anyway, I decided to track some down. Sure enough, they were being sold in a few shops near the shrine, including one shop where they were being hand-made by an old fellow with a cast iron machine (as per the NYT article, which I didn’t discover until later).

As you can see, it’s larger than a fortune cookie, and the fortune (omikuji, actually) is held by the cookie’s fold rather than inside the cookie itself. In fact, there’s another surprise inside the cookie:

Those are dried soybeans, which serve to give the cookie a pleasant rattle as you shake it around. Hence the alternative name suzu sembei or “bell cookie.” I’m sure this was intended to please a hard-of-hearing Shinto deity, or something like that, but to me it was just an interesting modification on the fortune cookie style I grew up with.

The actual fortune looks like this:

And I’m pretty sure that it’s funny when you add “in bed” to the end. Some things are simply constant across cultures…

[Updated by Roy]

Unfortunately I had forgotten to charge my camera battery that day, but I got a few shots of the cookie making process before it died. They aren’t great, but I think you can get a fair idea of it.

What Joe forgot to mention-and this is critical information-is that they are miso flavored! There was a sign in all the shop windows saying this, and advertising that no eggs are used. Trying for the vegan market?

Mass transit pleas sample letter

I’ve posted the sample latter I published here the other day on a few relevant Facebook groups to try and spread the word, but I want to remind any registered-to-vote American readers to follow up on this. I know everyone reading this is a train fan. You’ve either been to Japan or Taiwan or you want to go, and that means you appreciate what real mass transit infrastrucute can do for a county. If you decided to go ahead and send my letter or a modified version, great-and if you decided to write your own, send it to me or post it here to share.