Korean president “really jealous” of PM Koizumi’s ability to “gamble”

Asahi Daily, August 24, 2005, 8:23pm:

“I am so jealous of how Prime Minister Koizumi was able to take the gamble of dissolving parliament for the sake of reform,” South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun revealed on August 24th to a reporter on the presidential beat.

While the Korean president controls both the national government and international diplomacy, he is prohibited from uniting with any political party. His term is limited, and he has no power to dissolve the parliament. Invoking Prime Minister Koizumi’s situation, he fumed about how due to the inability of the ruling and opposition parties to work together, attempts at reform have stagnated.

“What the hell is the president of Korea? I can’t even risk my party or my job,” he whined, while expressing his desires. “A great flood can sometimes change the course of it’s own river. I want to make fundamental changes in the political structure and culture [of South Korea].”

Did North Korea market missiles to Taiwan?

I have here an article from the July 18 Chuunichi Shinbun. For some reason it is no longer avaliable on the website (404 error), but luckily you can still see the original Japanese text in Google cache.

Did North Korea market missiles to Taiwan?

Seoul- Kiyoshi Nakamura.

According to the issue of Korean Magazine ‘Choson Weekly’ which went on sale July 17th, a former representative (72 years old) of North Korea’s People’s Supreme Congress (basically their ‘parliament’) who recently defected to the South said in a statement to South Korea’s National Information Institute that the North “visited Taiwan for the purpose of exporting North Korean made missiles.”

When asked about the nuclear problem he said, “North Korea is manufacturing kiloton capacity nuclear weapons.” On the other hand, “The North has little confidence in their large nuclear weapons, and so are also manufacturing 500 kiloton nukes.”

According to the same publication, this representative was also a researcher at the “Oceanographic Industrial Research Facility”, which is a subsidiary of the Secondary Economic Association that covers the entire munitions industry. They primarily develop such things as missiles, and are responsible for production and external business.

The representative let known his desire to defect in May of this year, in a third country.

He was allowed into Korea by the National Information Institute, and investigations are continuing.

Has anyone seen this story reported anywhere else? I’m particularly asking you Korean-speaking Marmot readers.

Update: Adam, your correction is noted.

Photos of homemade Gundam

Saw this page listed over on Gizmodo with a plea for translation, so here we go.

According to their report page, these photos were taken July 30 2000 in a field in the middle of nowhere, Okayama prefecture. The Gundam was constructed not out of “Gundamania” but because they “wanted to build a bipedal walking vehicle.”

Gundam photos in Kume, Okayama prefecture.

For now we just picked it up.
It was heavy, but we managed…
You won’t get any larger photos by clicking.
Sorry, next time.


Photographer: Yohman
Taken from below.
Cockpit closed.


Photographer: Hamu
Rear-view. Bad angle (sweat)
Taken from a nearby field.


Photographer: Yohman
View of the scenery from inside the cockpit.
Continue reading Photos of homemade Gundam

Repliee

All of a sudden we’re getting large numbers of search engine referrals from people looking for videos of the Repliee Q1.

I was wondering what could have caused this sudden surge, until I realized that BBC News just wrote about it.

Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised – a “female” android called Repliee Q1.

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.

She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe.

I wrote a post about the Repliee a little while back, but for people who may not have seen it, I’ll just repeat the part that I translated from Japanese.

You can also find an older brief article at
National Geographic.

For more information, photos, and best of all video, see the official project website at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory.

The Japanese language website of NEDO (New Energy and industrial technology Development Organization) has some additional information worth mentioning.

The name “Repliee” is supposed to suggest the French word replique (replica).

The Repliee Q1’s skin is made of silicon and colored in imitation of human skin. The android uses air servo actuators to subtly inflate and deflate the chest in imitation of real human breathing. The Repliee has been designed to respond to its environment in the unconscious ways that a human does. For that purpose it has extremely sensitive touch sensors throughout its body, and different kinds of touched trigger different responses. It also has microphones to pick up and respond to human voice.

Size: 680mm wide, 1,500mm tall, 1,100mm deep
Weight: 40kg
Power: air servos (external air compressor)
Movement: Upper body moves via actuators with 42 degrees of freedom
Operation: controlled via serial link to external computer
Usage environment: indoors
Controller size: 1000mm wide x 680mm tall x 850mm deep
Compressor size: 900mm wide x 1360mm tall x 900mm deep

Since the video on the university web site is fairly large and slow to download, my friend Matt has posted a tiny, tiny recompressed version on his website.

Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro sued for insane claim that ‘French cannot be used to count’

Translated from Yomiuru. Do I really need to comment? Whether or not the suit has any legal merit, Ishihara is a complete and total nutjob.

Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro being sued for statement that “French is disqualified from international use”

The head of a Tokyo French language school filed suit on July 13th against Tokyo prefectural governor Ishihara Shintaro (72) in response to his statement that “French is unable to count numbers, and so is disqualified from use as an international language.” In the suit, which was presented to the Tokyo district court, the plaintiff claims that the governor’s statement “damaged my reputation and interfered with my business” and is demanding total damages to the order of ¥10,500,000, as well as a public apology.

The plaintiff is Malik Berkane, head of the Class de France (Tokyo Minato-ku), as well as 21 other French interpreters/translators and researchers.

According to the complaint, the statement in question was uttered in October of last year during a meeting of the General Support Foundation for the Establishment of a Metropolitan University of Tokyo at the Tokyo governmental office. Teachers from the former Prefectural University’s literature faculty, which includes French, were speaking in opposition to the establishment of the new university, which decreased the size of their faculty. Ishihara, in addition to his statements on “French’s disqualification” also said that “it is utterly ridiculous that that these people still clinging to French are opposed to the opening of this school.”

The plantiff’s claim states that “It is in fact possible to count in French, and it is also a common language in international organizations.”

According to the governor’s office, “Because the complaint has not yet been delivered, we cannot offer any comment at this time.”

Hey China, don’t ask Japan for any more apologies!

Last friday I had to go into Manhattan to drop off my passport and visa application at the Taiwanese Consulate Taipei Economic and Cultural Center located near the corner of 42st Street and 5th Avenue, conveniently only about a block away from the New York City branch of the popular Japanese used book store Book Off to look around for a bit and spotted last year’s special March issue of the magazine Bungei Shunju (文藝春秋) containing the two stories that won the Akutagawa literary prize for new writers that year on sale for only $2, and having read the beginning of one of the stories (蛇にピアス / Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara) and I decided to pick it up to have something a little lighter to read for the five hour bus ride to DC than the books on Taiwanese history that I had brought with me. As it so happens, I was distracted by one of the more serious articles in the magazine, a piece by a Mr. Ma Li-cheng.

Ma Li-cheng was born in 1946 in the Sichuan province of China. He become a commentator for Hong Kong’s Phoenix Television in 2003, but in August 2004 quit that position and returned to Beijing. He has written several controversial pieces on Chinese/Japanese relations, one of which has been published in Japanese as Japan Doesn’t Need to Apologize to China Anymore (日本はもう中国に謝罪しなくていい). The following article is a summary of that book’s argument, translated into Japanese and with commentary by Japanese journalist Satoshi Tomisaka. Mister Tomisaka’s comments will be in italics, and I will not put add any of my own, although I may post some of my thoughts after finishing the translation of the entire piece. I am not posting Ma Li-cheng’s article because I agree with everything he says, but I think that he does represent a different position from what is currently avaliable online in the English language, and that readers will find something interesting to think and comment on.

This post will be a centralized table of contents for the article, and as I translate each section I will post it in a new blog entry and update the table of contents below with a hyperlink to the appropriate post.

Hey China, don’t ask Japan for any more apologies!

By Ma Li-cheng
Edited by Satoshi Tomisaka

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: China has also invaded Japan
Part 3: Set aside the history probem
Part 4: Japanese nationalism
Part 5: The ‘Chinese Threat Theory’
Part 6: To a ‘Normal country’

“Planet” connects everyone

The biggest thing keeping me from being an avid fan of history, sports, Roman mythology, Pokemon, or what have you has always been the countless names you have to remember. It’s never enough just to know who Ichiro is or that he steals bases because that doesn’t come close to answering why his team hasn’t been to the world series in years. Who else is on the team? How do they train? Why are tickets so expensive? Why is it so stupid to root for the Yankees when you know they’re going to win? These are questions with no answers, yet they inspire some to spend their entire lives following statistics and analyzing the significance of every trade, every injury, every management change… but even a relatively contained and uncomplicated system such as American Major League Baseball is impossible to completely understand. That’s why you so often see people relying on superstitions (some of my friends swear by their rally caps) and curses to make sure their team wins. But curses, too, are occasionally broken. Where will it stop?! When can my mind finally take a break?!

Thus, it has become clear to me that the daunting task of trying to comprehend the world on a macro level takes up valuable time that could be better spent blogging. As you may have noticed, I prefer to take comfort in the agenda-driven generalizations, half-understood slogans, and other baseless name-calling that make for great blog posts. However, when a cool article such as this one comes out, even I must sit up and take notice (OK, I sat on it for 2 months but who’s counting?). Enjoy my translation:

By Nishida Mutsumi (March 21), editor, Nikkei Shimbun

Few have heard of him today, but once there was a strange man named Hisahara Fusanosuke. After founding Hitachi and Japan Energy he went into politics, eventually to become the leader of the prewar Seiyukai. The man lived a roller-coaster life, eventually being brought before the Marunouchi Military Police Headquarters (the charges were later dropped).

The Planet Revolves” by Furukawa Kaoru (published by Nikkei BP), from Yamaguchi Prefecture (same as Hisahara), is the story of Hirahara’s life. “Planet” was a common nickname for politicians at the time, meaning “surprisingly able but somewhat reckless.”

Hisahara married the younger sister of Aikawa Yoshisuke after being introduced by Inoue Kaoru, but previous to that he was dating a different woman and produced a daughter named Hisako. A young Ishii Koutarou (former House of Peers President) married this Hisako.

Shimomura Nankai, Ishii’s professor at Kobe Business School who later became his boss at the Internal Affairs Ministry, suggested the marriage. “At first Ishii was against it, saying, ‘If I marry a famous person’s daughter, people will think all my achievements are because of him.’ But Shimomura was a skilled persuader, reassuring him, ‘That is up to your attitude. I don’t think you’re the type to break under pressure like that.'” (From “Reflecting on 88 Years” by Ishii Koutarou, published by Culture Publishing). That is what Ishii had to say in his memoirs.

“Besides my older sister, there were several female members including Ishii Yoshiko, but in terms of age, Morimura Atsushi (who went blind at the Imperial Horse Show immediately after the War) was the youngest, and then next was me, then next was Umasugi Kikuko (Later Inoue Kikuko), a master equestrian rider (馬場馬術 — bababajutsu, possibly the coolest word in the Japanese language) who went on to perform in the Olympics after the War.” (From “The Distant Showa Period” by Ogata Shijurou (Asahi Shimbun Publishing)).

The “me” in the previous paragraph is Ogata Shijurou, former Bank of Japan board member who took the job of Vice Chairman of the Japan Development Bank. Here Ogata tells of a prewar youth who enjoyed riding horses at the Tokyo Equestrian Institute.

Ishii Yoshiko, who would later become a chamson singer, was the daughter of Ishii Koujirou and his wife Kumiko. Shijurou’s father was politician Ogata Taketora, and The Distant Showa Period’s subtitle is, “My father Ogata Taketora and Me.”

Back when Shijurou the boy and Ishii Yoshiko were riding horses, Ishii Koujirou and Ogata Taketora were working at Asahi Shimbun together. Both Ishii and Ogata went on to become powerful politicians after the War.

Shijurou’s wife is former UN High Counselor for Refugees Ogata Sadako. If you climb up Sadako’s family tree, you will find that her father was Nakamura Toyoichi, former minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary of Finland, her grandfather was Yoshizawa Kenkichi, a former Foreign Minister, and her great grandfather was the famous former Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, whose assassination signaled the end of Taisho democracy. In Yomiuri Shimbun’s “Witnesses of an Era”, Sadako writes, “If you put the families of my husband and me together, the hidden areas of Showa history may come uncovered.”

How interesting to look at recent and modern history while tracing the connections between people!

Sino-Japanese memorial friendship tree cut down

On April 25 at about 9:20am a message was left by an employee of the’Aimesse Yamanashi’ Yamanashi prefectural industrial relations hall in Kofu city, Ozu-cho at the South Kofu police station stating that “the Sino-Japanese commemorative frienship tree in our grounds has been cut down.”

The commemorative tree was 12 centimeters across and 5 meters tall. It had been cut with a saw-like implement approximately 30 centimeters from the base.

The tree was a 17 year old maple, planted on May 25 1995 to commemorate 10 years of ‘friendship city’ relations between Kofu and Sichuan, China. There had also been a commemorative stone plaque by the tree, but it had been defaced with red spray-paint and knocked over.

Translated from Asahi newspaper, April 25 2005

Quotes from the Tsukurukai text

A quick look at my last posts made me realize I forgot why I was posting: to show excerpts from the new textbooks!

It’s important to remember that the vast majority of the protesters in China and Korea have not read them for themselves. The Tsukurukai realizes this and plans to post free Chinese and Korean translations online in the near future.

Recent arguments I’ve seen characterize these textbooks as “not glorifying war but merely deviating from leftist doctrine that Japan invaded other nations just for the sake of invading.” However, these aren’t scholarly texts, they’re meant to be read by 14-year-olds who have to be told what to think. The fact that Tsukurukai has made texts for such an impressionable audience guarantees controversy and makes it difficult to deny that they are tools of persuasion. And picking battles such as the Nanjing massacre, comfort women, et cetera is like kicking someone when they’re down and belies the more extremist beliefs of the authors.

Anyway, trying to analyze all this is making my head spin. Let’s take a look at some excerpts. I got these from the online newsletter of The Marxist Faction of the Revolutionary Communist Union of Japan (so take it with a grain of salt!):

These “history” textbooks erase both the comfort women and the forced march of Koreans from history, and treats the Nanjing Massacre, the gravest sin of the “imperial army”, as if it substantively didn’t happen with such lines as “There were several killed and wounded among the Chinese army and civilians,” “There is disagreement on the actual number killed” et cetera. Throughout it regards The Japanese Empire’s invasion of Asia as the “Emancipation of Asia”, and makes claims that “Japan’s actions bolstered the people’s of Asia” to “quicken the pace of independence movements” in Asian countries. This text seems to know no bounds for scandal. What’s more, in the “Civics” textbook, the “Constitutional Reform” section romanticizes the Constitution of the Japanese Empire (the Meiji Constitution), comparing it favorably to the “imposition of the GHQ” as our current constitution is characterized. It goes on to rationalize worsening the constitution, emphasizing the rationalization of “the right to self defense” and “the duty of national security”.

↑Seems to repeat the same problems from 2001.

Ministry of Education Instructs revision to say “Takeshima (Dokdo) is illegally occupied by Korea”

They didn’t stop there. The Ministry of Education instructed the textbook publishers to revise the caption “Takeshima, the island over which We are in territorial confrontation with South Korea” under a picture of Takeshima/Dokdo, explaining that “there is a fear that there would be misunderstanding over territorial rights”. As a result, the publishers revised it to say, “This is Japan’s exclusive territory, but South Korea is illegally occupying it.”

That’s all for now. Coming up: choice quotes from Japanese editorials on the subject and the right wing’s reaction. Also I might take a look at Wiki Japan, not sure. Stay tuned!

What Yasukuni says about the Nanjing Massacre, what most Japanese probably know

ESWN was kind enough to post a link to a gallery of photographs from the Yasukuni shrine as a comment on my earlier post on a Taiwanese Solidarity Union politician’s visit to the shrine.

Many of you will probably be most interested in the following picture from the adjoining museum, which contains Yasukuni’s explanation, in both Japanese and English, of the ‘Nanjing Incident,’ or as we usually know it, the ‘Nanjing Massacre.’
Najing Operation
Since the image is a bit blurry and hard to read, I will reproduce the English below. And yes, the Japanese does say the same thing.

Nanking Operation

The purpose of the Nanking Operation was to surround the capital, thus discouraging the Chinese from waging war against the Japanese. Tang Thengzhi, commander-in-chief of the Nanking Defense Corps. ignored the Japanese warning to open the gates of the city. He ordered his troops to defend Nanking to the death and then escaped. Therefore, when the hostilities commenced, the leaderless Chinese troops either deserted or surrendered. Nanking fell on December 15.

Having seen what Yasukuni has to say about the ‘Nanjing Operation,’ let’s look at a more mainstream Japanese source. First I will post my translation the Kojien‘s entry on the Nanjing Massacre (南京大虐殺). For those who don’t know, the Kojien is basically the most popular standard Japanese dictionary (that is, Japanese dictionary for Japanese readers, not to a foreign language), and probably the source that most Japanese would first turn to when looking up almost any term. Therefore it is arguably the most mainstream possible source.

Nanjing Massacre
In the Sino-Japanese war, about December of 1937, in and around the occupied city of Nanjing, the Japanese military massacred a large number of surrendered and captured Chinese soldiers, as well as civilians. Additionally there were incidents of such misconduct as arson, plunder, and rape.

I would also like to present the entry on the ‘Nanjing Incident’ (南京事件) from the 1970 edition of the Kadokawa Dictionary of Japanese History(角川日本史辞典). There are actually two sub-entried under ‘Nanjing Incident.’ The first refers to an incident in March of 1927 when the ‘People’s Revolutionary Army’ fired upon Japanese, British, and American troops. The second ‘Nanjing Incident’ is the one which we today generally call the ‘Nanjing Massacre.’ There is no entry for ‘Nanjing Massacre’ or any note that this is term is also used, but then for all I know the term was not yet in common use in 1970. If anyone knows one way or the other, clarification would be appreciated. Here is my translation of the Kadokawa Dictionary of Japanese History’s entry.

Nanjing Incident
1937(Showa 12). The plunder and ravaging that occured during the Japanese military’s occupation of Nanjing in the Sino-Japanese war. The Chinese army had already retreated before the Japanese entered the city, and the Japanese army went on a rampage that lasted until February of the following year, killing 42,000 Chinese, primarily women and children. Responsibility for this incident was severely pursued after the war by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East [Note: also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal]

The interpretation of history provided at Yasukuni is most definitely an extreme right wing position. I am not going to offer any of my own opinion or interpretation at the moment, but I will say this; having seen both the Yasukuni/right-wing perspective and two different examples of a mainstream, literal dictionary definition of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, it is interesting to see that they are not actually contradictory. Even the Yasukuni museum (at least in this single panel) does not deny that the Massacre took place; they simply ignore the issue. Is it actually likely that there are many people in Japan, even among the 0.3% of middle school students being taught with low quality textbooks drafted by right wing organizations, who are unaware of truth of the Nanjing Massacre?

Since ESWN’s helpfully donated link started this post, I’ll end with as an addendum with a quote from an article posted there just a day or two agotheir latest post:

There is a small number of ultra-rightists in Japan whose comments are magnified in the Asian media. I do not believe that they represent the mainstream Japanese opinion. Yet, the majority in Japan is either embarrassed, intimidated (as in: if you speak up, an ultra-rightist sound truck going to show up outside your home and/or workplace to harrass you 24 hours a day with diatribes of hatred) or too polite to say anything about these ultra-rightists so that the Asian nations now believe that those opinions are mainstream in Japan. This is why there are international crises. It is up the to the majority of the Japanese people to condemn those wayward opinions each and every time in a vociferous manner.

Is the problem really that the right-wingers are influencing popular opinion in Japan? Or are they as few as ever, but increasingly good at making their presence known in the international media? Is it true, as Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times seems to think, that Japan is slowly but surely drifting towards the right?

PS: Curzon over at Coming Anarchy just posted a piece about why he thinks Japan no longer needs to apologize for the crimes of their Imperial period. I’m more interested in what people actually think and know already than abstractions of what they ‘should’ do, but there is obviously a connection between one and the other.