Out of my deep civic pride and dedication to the cause of getting FREE MONEY NOW from the government, here is my translation of the announcement from Adachi-ku about the current status of preparations to hand out the free cash. Watch your mailboxes to receive application forms between late March and early April:
We are currently preparing to pay out the fixed-sum cash handouts, etc.
Updated: March 5, 2009
We plan to send applications to eligible payees by registered mail (kan’i kakitome) between late March and early April.
[Eligible recipients]
Persons who meet either of the following conditions as of the reference date (February 1, 2009)
(1) Persons listed in Adachi-ku’s official residence registry [tr: anyone registered as living in Adachi-ku in their juuminhyou]
(2) Persons listed in the official alien registry (gaikokujin touroku genbo) [tr: this means anyone with an alien registration card (gaikokujin tourokusho)] (persons on short-term visas are excluded)
[Payable amount]
12,000 yen per household member
(persons aged 65 or older or 18 or younger as of the reference date will receive 20,000 yen)
[Application procedures]
(1) Enter your account number on the application form and affix your official stamp (mitome-in) (you cannot use a stamp seal) [tr: Not sure, but you should be fine using the seal you used to open your bank account]
(2) Place the application form in the attached reply envelope and drop it in the mailbox.
* Due to the large number of eligible persons, we expect it will take 1-2 months for the funds to be deposited in each specified account. If you give a Japan Post Bank account, it will likely take even longer.
We will also pay a Child-rearing Support Special Allowance (for second children, third children, etc., born between April 2, 2002 and April 1, 2005) at the same time as the cash handouts.
Please watch out for fraud schemes posing as the official cash handout process.
If you receive a suspicious phone call regarding the cash payments, please contact your nearest police station (or call the police consultation line (9110)) or the Adachi-ku office assigned to cash handouts.
Use the attached sample for help filling out the application form (PDF).
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!
The mysterious death of former porn-star turned memoir author and TV celebrity IIjima Ai has been big news in Japan. I wouldn’t normally mention something like this due to lack of really caring much, but I was alerted to a rather interesting twist in a comment by Taiwanese TV Journalist Michella Jade Weng at Michael Turton’s blog. Weng linked to an a Mainichi article explaining that IIjima’s death has been unusually big news in Taiwan for a surprising and fascinating reason. I’ll give a translation of most of the article below.
Due to the import of adult videos starring Ms. IIjima in the early 90s when Taiwan was democratization and the opening of society were proceeding, Ms. Iijima became a “symbol” of freedom of expression and culture. The [December] 25th edition of China Times, one of Taiwan’s big four newspapers, had a front page article above the fold article which, along with showing a photograph of Ms. Iijima, stated that Iijima Ai “became the common shared sexual dream of Taiwanese men born in the 1960s to 1970s.”
Note that China Times now has a special feature section on their website, under the amusing folder name of “sexgirl.” UDN, another of the big four papers, also put together a special feature on Ms. Iijima, describing her as “a memory of all the men of Asia.”
Assistant Editor of China Times, Zhang Jing-wei, explained this treatment by saying “The period when Ms. Iijima was active overlapped with the period when Taiwanese politics and society were opened up. We were not trying to be funny at all, and decided that Ms. Iijima’s death has social significance.”
In 1987, Taiwan’s 38 year period of marital law ended, and restrictions on cultural expression such as newspaper publication and songs were lifted. The Japanese adult videos that began pouring into Taiwan in the 1990s were considered a symbol of social liberalization.
Weng also reports that her editor explained it in more direct terms. “In addition, she was the common link between nearly all men born in the 60’s and 70’s, because almost all of them hid in their bedroom and watched her videos at one point or another.” Including her editor.
I’ve been looking at some of the bills passed by the Diet earlier this year, one of which amends a law which I should have known existed but had never seen before: the Act Regarding Special Provisions for the Treatment of the Gender of Persons With Gender Identity Disorder (性同一性障害者の性別の取扱いの特例に関する法律).
So now I can give a legal opinion on how to get a sex change in Japan. It’s a simple enough process to understand, although rather arbitrary. Here are the relevant provisions in full:
Article 2. Definitions
In this Act, “person with gender identity disorder” means a person who, despite having a clear biological gender, is persistently convinced that they are mentally of another gender (“other gender”), who has a desire to physically and socially conform themselves to the other gender, and with respect to whom two or more physicians having the knowledge and experience necessary to properly diagnose this [condition] have given corresponding diagnoses based on generally accepted medical viewpoints.
Article 3. Decision to Change Gender Treatment
A family court may decide to change the gender treatment of a person with gender identity disorder, upon that person’s request, who:
1. is twenty years of age or older;
2. is not presently married;
3. does not presently have children;
4. does not have reproductive glands or has permanently lost the function of the reproductive glands; and
5. has adopted a bodily appearance which closely resembles that of the other gender in the area of the genital organs.
The law also amended the family registration laws to allow a person who has undergone a legal sex change to have a new koseki issued reflecting their new sex.
The new amendment changes item 3 of Article 3 to read “does not presently have minor children.” It was apparently pushed by the DPJ and JCP with the LDP staying completely mum on the issue (per Yahoo Minna no Seiji). The bill passed nonetheless and is effective December 18 of this year.
Incidentally, since we haven’t mentioned it on Mutantfrog yet, Japan happens to have one of the few transgendered elected officials in the world: Setagaya city councilwoman Aya Kamikawa. Kamikawa was first elected in 2003, a year before the transgender statute was passed; while she was legally male at that time, she purportedly refused to fill in her gender on the candidate application form, and thus appeared on the ballot as genderless. She completed the family court process in 2005 and is now legally female. (I am an Aya fan, if only because she has a comical domain name and an equally comical physical resemblance to Ann Coulter.)
In my new job I deal a lot with the stock market. Here is one fun fact I learned at work:
Sazae-san is a better indicator of Japanese stock performance than the US
Sazae-san (episodic story of a quirky but happy Japanese family, sort of like the Simpsons but more like Leave it to Beaver in the execution) has been the top-rated animated TV show in Japan for almost 40 years. A Daiwa Institute of Research study showed that there is a 0.86 correlation coefficient between Sazae-san viewership and TOPIX movements. This is even higher than the correlation between TOPIX and the NYSE composite index, even though the US markets are supposed to be one of the main drivers of Tokyo trading.
The explanation for this phenomenon is that people tend to go out on Sundays when the stock market is booming and people have money to spend and stay home to watch Sazae-san when it’s slumping and everyone is broke.
Now, just because there is a correlation, that doesn’t mean that you should break into Video Research (the Japanese ratings house) on Sunday night to plan your Monday morning trades. At any rate, if you want to read this theory in detail it is available in paperback.
Much to the annoyance of Mrs. Adamu, I have a soft spot for enka, Japanese-style country music that sings of tragic loves, unhappy marriages, and the sheer beauty of Japan’s natural landscape. One aspect of this music that I like is that, perhaps thanks to Japanese colonialism, this style of music is found all over Asia with the requisite local twists. Wikipedia’s article is a great summary:
Modern enka (演歌 — from 演 en performance, entertainment, and 歌 ka song) came into being in the postwar years of the Shōwa period. It was the first style to synthesize the Japanese pentatonic scale with Western harmonies. Enka lyrics, as in Portuguese Fado, usually are about the themes of love and loss, loneliness, enduring hardships, and persevering in the face of difficulties, even suicide or death. Enka suggests a more traditional, idealized, or romanticized aspect of Japanese culture and attitudes, comparable to American country and western music.
This video features a recent NHK performance of Sayuri Ishikawa’s 1977 hit song “Tsugaru StraitsWinter Scene.” The singer’s haunting wail and that swank, sleazy saxophone pay tribute to the utter sadness of taking the four-hour ferry connecting Honshu and Hokkaido. Specifically, the woman in the song takes the (then 13-hour) trip from Tokyo to Aomori before getting on the boat. According to pre-song banter, the ride was a good way for women leaving their lovers in Tokyo to come home to Hokkaido to “get their thoughts together.” Here is a quick, fairly unpoetic translation of the lyrics:
Since the time I stepped off the train originating in Ueno
Aomori Station is surrounded by snow
The masses heading back to their homes back north are silent
Listening only to the sea
I get on the ferry, alone
I stare at the gulls in the cold
I am crying
O, Tsugaru Straits winter scene
“Look! that’s the Tappi Headlands, far to the north!”
Says a stranger, pointing
I wipe the the window, which has steamed with breath
All I can see is mist in the distance
Farewell, my love! I am going home
The sound of the wind sways my heart
As if commanding me to cry
O, Tsugaru Straits winter scene
Farewell, my love! I am going home
The sound of the wind sways my heart
As if commanding me to cry
O, Tsugaru Straits winter scene
So what makes this song obsolete? The opening of a highway tunnel in the 80s meant that the main ferry (the Hakodate Ferry) closed and this melancholy feeling, perhaps experienced by thousands of women hailing from Hokkaido, is now a thing of the past. It’s worth noting that since this song was such a huge hit and Ishikawa has stuck around as an enka veteran, its obsolescence hasn’t affected its status as a classic.
I could have sworn that the “Westerner’s Fear of Neonsigns” blog was written by Marxy on a gaijin-baiting stint, but apparently that’s not the case. Whoever writes it, however, is amazing and I especially love his post “How’s your Japan blog?”
1. Japan is unintentionally hilarious – in particular, misuse of English – or Engrish – is so funny that I devote considerable time to documenting and disseminating it. To avoid a similar fate, I will not be blogging in Japanese.
2. Japan is barbaric – it fails to treat sacred Western food with due decorum (bread in a can) and celebrates Christian festivals all wrong (Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas Eve). Check my blog for further examples.
3. Japan is sexually deviant – society operates in the tacit knowledge that Japanese men are paedophiles by default. Look at all the photographic evidence I have amassed to prove it. They just don’t know how to treat a woman properly. That I do is the underlying message I want you to receive from my blog.
4. Japan is a visual paradise (1) – all Japanese have a heightened visual sensibility; they spend their coffee breaks contemplating tiny design modifications to plastic cups and bathe in the juice of fonts come evening. Not actually living in Japan, I can safely say that they never drive ugly white minivans or fill their tatami rooms with tat.
5. Japan is a visual paradise (2) – the thing I love about Japan is how it allows me to me indulge in the objectification of women without guilt or reproach. The pornography here is just fantastic. Oh, of course, this will be known as The Great Unmentioned in my blog.
6. Japan is spineless and work-addicted – people will do any job rather than lose esteem by not working. Look at this old man waving past cars with a pair of red wands – you wouldn’t catch me stooping to do such a demeaning and unnecessary job. Oh, excuse me, I’m late for my English conversation school class.
7. Japan is childish – public announcements are only heeded when they are delivered by curtseying cartoon characters. To prove it, I will photograph them all. Even though the large incidence of such messages is obvious, I will continue to treat each one as a fantastic novelty.
8. I am childish – only in Japan can I indulge my secret love of toys and games while presenting it as sociological research. I never miss an opportunity to make the sweeping observation that Japan is populated by inadequate geeks. I visit Akihabara every weekend in search of corroborating evidence, but it’s purely research you understand.
9. Japan loves me – it’s always saying how tall I am, how handsome I am, how intelligent I am (admit it, I am pretty hot at producing those L/R sounds), how good I am at sports, how amazing it is that I am a man and yet I cook for myself. Nobody said anything in my home country except: “So, are you finally going to get laid in Japan?” Deeper awareness of Japanese social etiquette would have saved me the trouble of believing any of this.
10. Japan is mine – I am the Alpha Gaijin. If Japan can be said to exist at all, it is only because I have brought it to life with my intellectual efforts. Other foreigners intruding on my turf better be able to withstand the fire of my comments. Japan will thank me for everything I have accomplished once it knows who I am. Until then, I have an immersion experience more impressive than yours to attend to.
I feel like I was the opposite of other Japan bloggers, at least by this person’s definition – I was more into blogging about Japan when I wasn’t here. Now that I live here it is all so uninspiring.
This analysis of Japan blogs is as spot-on as it has been curiously absent in unfiltered form. Still, in defense of Japan blogs I will say that it is often a lot of fun to post and discuss the interesting and weird stuff in a foreign land, whether that’s Japan or elsewhere. It is definitely shrill-sounding when people make their experiences out to be more than they are (god, there are thousands of expats just in Asia, you’re not that special), but really the antidote to Japan blog fatigue is to just tune them out.
The truth is I am sad we weren’t even mentioned (though in a separate post he calls translation one of the “brilliant arts” so maybe I don’t get called on my own cultural imperialism. Or maybe I just didn’t get noticed by not posting when the blog launched…)
Speaking of cautionary tales and immersion experiences, I took no less than 4 friends on a wild goose chase the other day to see what was supposedly an exhibit of Nazified kimonos celebrating the tripartite alliance in the WW2 era. This is all we found next to a display of books on wartime Japan:
Meanwhile, today’s Asahi (I read the print edition now, screw the crap online version!) ran a feature on a sweet sounding historical fiction “Tokyo Year Zero” about a double murder in early postwar Japan. The author, David Peace, grew interested in postwar Japan after teaching English here in the early 90s and reading Seidenstecker’s Tokyo Rising. He later returned to his native England and became an award-winning mystery writer on non-Japan related subject matter. His new book is enjoying a simultaneous bilingual release and a major PR push from the Japanese publisher Bungei Shunju.
Just goes to show, if you’re willing to shed a little baggage and be friendly to the like-minded (most of the research for his new book was apparently provided by the in-house Bungei Shunju translator after the two hit it off during negotiations for translation rights to an earlier Peace book), you too can have success and avoid the stench of “slow-burning underachievement” that apparently afflicts the expat population in Japan.
Continuing my dirt-digging exercise in the last post, here are some edits that Nikkei, Japan’s leading business newspaper, has made about itself in the “Nihon Keizai Shimbun” article:
Deleted passage (2005): “The upper floors of the company headquarters are shared with (top business lobby) Nippon Keidanren headquarters, and there are critics who characterize its editorial stance as “the official gazette of Japan Inc.” I can’t tell if this is true from Google Maps (and I’ve never been there) but they are at least right freakin next to each other. Similar (and somewhat harsher) language has survived in the current article.
Deleted mention that the company plans to move its head quarters to Otemachi in 2011 (just the mention of Otemachi not the 2011 move). (2005) Mention of Otemachi now survives and the move is characterized as “part of redevelopment of the Otemachi area.”
Diluting responsibilty over its treatment of the three Japanese hostages in Iraq in April 2004 (edit made in April 2007): A passage which read “In its reporting, [Nikkei] posted the detailed addresses of the three hostages on the Web. While it deleted the information after reader complaints, the addresses were widely distributed and are belieted to have aided in the harassment, insults, and embarrassment endured by the victims’ families” was changed to include “as other companies did.”
An edit made over the same time period deleted a passage: “One reason the mass media does not report these several scandals (including an insider trading scandal and a faked photograph that I will mention later) despite their being open to the public owes to the dubious tradition unique to the mass media in which they protect each other by hiding each other’s scandals. Perhaps that is why no apologies are ever posted on Nikkei’s website. Though it mercilessly attacks companies that commit crimes or cause accidents, it actively hides competitors’ scandals as if in collusion with them. This perhaps reveals one extreme example of the Japanese media’s closed nature.” This is the sort of editorializing that may not belong in Wiki, but it is funny that someone within Nikkei felt the need to get rid of it. The “we were not alone” passage survived (after being deleted more than once, evidence of some back-and-forth) and the deletion of the anti-Nikkei rant has also survived to this day.
A passage on a 2003 faked photo scandal, in which a Nikkei reporter covering the release of Sony DVD recorder PSX photographed himself for a photo of a random “man buying a PSX” and passed it off as actual reporting (great photo here). The original passage read “criticism mounted by people claiming the incident was a faked stunt” since the reporter’s armband was visible, and continues “Nihon Keizai Shimbun admitted that the man was a Nikkei BP reporter and apologized.” The text in quotes was deleted and replaced with “Nihon Keizai Shimbun admitted that the man was a Nikkei BP reporter and apologized since he was negligent in his duties while reporting.” Interestingly, this shifts the blame from the company as a whole to the one misbehaving reporter.
Comments that writing for Nikkei’s back-page “My Resume” column is “considered the greatest honor for people who have been successful.” This passage was deleted and then re-added and remains.
That’s about it for interesting edits… there are also the usual mundane ones on actors, economy-related stuff, cars, etc. More to come!
I am generally quite careful not to post anything work related on here, but this particular quote from an internal corporate employee survey I’m translating was just too choice, and utterly anonymous and unidentifiable.
I am opposed to foreigners in the front office. Since it is difficult to convey minor nuances of Japanese within the company it must be even more difficult for customers to understand when conversing with them. I have received two whole claims about this.(One claim said they could not understand what they were saying, and the other said, a foreigner huh? A Japanese would be better.)
For contrast, here is an excerpt from a customer survey from some rich asshole country club in the US that was forwarded to me a few weeks ago.
I am personally upset about the use of the Mexican labor on the golf
course. I understand you have contracted, and it is the contractors
who are responsible for hiring, but the club is responsible for hiring
the contractor. We get letters about “responsibility” and “right and
wrong,” well, I think the club management had better look at itself.
If all these workers are legal, then I will apologize, but I very much
doubt they are legal. This is a very poor example of judgment and
sends the wrong message. I know I am not the only one that thinks like
this, and if my concerns are unfounded, then the club should issue an
explanation and correct the image.
It’s well worth remembering that there is a certain extent of xenophobia in any country, and I believe that suffering from it firsthand when traveling or living abroad-such as the minor (or major in some unfortunate cases) annoyances that many of us have experiences in places like Japan-is actually a rather good learning experience, which can make one more sensitive to despicable attitudes back home that one may have overlooked before.
