South Korea Bans DPRK Execution Video

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the infamous North Korean execution video has been essentially banned in Korea. (Unfortunately it seems that the location Adamu found last week no longer hosts the video-the web site is only an archive of current the most recent Japanese news programs.)

“We have told of many public executions [in the North]. But officials in Seoul always ask us for material evidence,” says Pak Sang Huk, an escapee from the North. “Now that we have evidence, they don’t want to see it…. The people who brought this tape through China were speechless when they visited KBS [Korean Broadcast Service] studios, and were shunned.” Mr. Pak claims those who filmed the executions risked their lives to do so.

Seoul’s effort to avoid broadcasts of negative images or facts about North Korea is part of a larger strategy dating to the Sunshine Policy and Korean summit of 2000. In this view, unification of North and South can’t be achieved if the South criticizes or acts in a manner that the North deems hostile.

I’m genuinely amazed that the South Korean government has decided to keep this tape out of the media. Sure I understand that they want to engage the Northern regime in peaceful dialogue and tone down the anti-communist propaganda that has filled much of the public discource in post-separation South Korea, but they should realize that reporting factual information about the horrors that occur in the North should NOT be classified that way. By muffling the South Korean free press I fear they may do more long term damage.

On the plus side, South Korea has the highest penetration of high speed internet in the world, and a vast culture of file sharing software. I just hope that some Korean internet sites not associated with big media (maybe Ohmynews?) will take up the slack and make this video avaliable to the Korean population. Maybe someone will be ambitious enough to take the thorough news reports that have aired in Japan, subtitle them in Korean, and then release those videos on the internet.

FCC Gets an F

I think this quote from the new FCC Chairman, Kevin J Martin is definitive proof that the agency has become so utterly worthless that it no longer has any right to exist.

“This order involves a television program that the majority admits ‘contains references of a sexual nature that were broadcast at a time of day when children were likely to be in the audience,’ ” he wrote in that opinion. “Yet the majority concludes that the program, in which a prostitute is hired to sexually arouse a horse by removing her blouse and to ‘extract’ semen from the horse, is not indecent because the prostitute is ‘never seen actually touching’ the horse. Despite my colleagues’ assurance that there appeared to be a safe distance between the prostitute and the horse, I remain uncomfortable. I respectfully dissent.”

Update: For anyone interested in a more serious take on problems with spectrum regulation, read this article.

A Public Safety Wireless Advisory Committee was formed in Washington, and it had one key recommendation: “Public safety agencies will not be able to adequately discharge their obligations to protect life and property” if they don’t get more frequencies within five years. The report was released on September 11, 1996.

And we all know what happened exactly five years later, when public safety agencies still did not have sufficient spectrum for their emergency radio communications network.

Japanese Towns Can’t Keep off the Dole

Just a quick link, quote, and commentary shot straight from my hip for a story:

1 DAY BONUS: Over 40 localities to delay mergers

03/28/2005
The Asahi Shimbun

The delay gains merging municipalities an extra year of benefits.

Localities poised to merge in a central government plan to reduce costs are learning that sometimes it pays to be late.

Of the 44 municipalities that are set to merge nationwide by April 1, more than 90 percent, or 41, will postpone the move to qualify for one more year of extra funds, an Asahi Shimbun study shows.

In fact, 24 of the cities and towns delaying their mergers are pushing the date back only one day to gain the bonus. By delaying, the 41 municipalities will receive between a few hundred million yen and nearly 3 billion yen more in tax allocations, the study said.

This merger is the “Great Heisei Merger” which follows the “Great Showa Merger” and the “Great Meiji Merger”. In the Meiji period, the tens of thousands of feudal hamlets that had existed in the Bakufu period were reorganized into more modern style towns and cities when the Meiji Constitution came into effect in 1888. In Showa, there was further reorganization. There is a great World Bank paper on the topic that I completely missed out on when I wrote a paper about this for class. Doh!

Basically, the Showa merger in the 1950s switched from the more hands-off, autonomous style of the Meiji/Taisho/early Showa eras to a mostly centralized funding system. Basically the towns send all their money to Tokyo and then get it doled back to them. It was seen as more efficient since all policy was being made from Tokyo anyway. This new round of mergers reflects more the changing demographics of Japan than a planned economy. Many towns are simply running out of people, so merging would give people more access to public services etc.

Koizumi wants to go back to the more hands-off approach, allowing the Prefectures and towns to have more tax collecting power. The Keidanren wants him to go a step further and eliminate prefectures altogether, making a 9-member United States of Japan (called doushuusei), but this is maybe a first step.

Funny, then, that he’s using funding incentives to get the mergers going. Local governments who have been nurtured with central government welfare aren’t going to change so easily. They’ll be happy to wait an extra day to get a bigger check.

Japan Goes to East Timor: The Original Soundtrack on MP3


In 2002, Japan’s Ground Self Defense Force (JGSDF, Motto: “There are some people I want to protect”) sent a brigade of engineers to East Timor to aid in the rebuilding after the chaos of the secession movement. Since this was the first time in a while for the SDF to do anything at all, the dispatch was kicked of with great fanfare.

As part of that effort, JGSDF Engineer Katayama Yoshio of the first wave of troops composed the following songs, which the Japanese government was nice enough to make available for download. Allow me to share:

“The Winds of East Timor” — They messed up the links on the site so that both the first and second songs link to the second song. But with my “elite skills” I magically changed the filename from “timor2.mp3” to “timor1.mp3” and PRESTO! all their base belonged to me. The sound? Picture a Muzak version of Southern Allstars crossed with the wussy background music to those public service announcements on Japanese TV.

“The Stars of East Timor” — Sounds like any given anime theme from the early 90s meets any given American sitcom theme from the 80s. Compare this with the ALF or Perfect Strangers theme if you dare.

“The Other Side of East Timor” — OK, now we’re getting intense. You thought East Timor was gonna be some walk in the park? Fuck you then. Every corporate instructional video or infomercial that I’ve ever scene probably had this for opening music.

“The Independence of East Timor” — Final Fantasy ending theme, Karate Kid ending theme, the music for the unveiling of a new car model, take your pick. Never before has Muzak sounded so triumphant. It’s as if to say: “May the East Timorese have a generic and cheesy future full of last-minute soccer goals and defeated bosses.”

“East Timor Jubilee” — Let’s party! Remember the parade song in Final Fantasy VII? This sounds JUST like that. Nobuo Uematsu may have a juicy lawsuit opportunity here. Listening to this makes me think the first thing East Timor did when they gained independence was have a nationwide conga line.

“The Dunes of East Timor” — OK, now we’re back to anime themes. Nothing more to say about the song, really, but I have to admire this guy’s use of a MIDI keyboard.

Don’t believe me? Listen for yourself!

In all honesty, these lame songs make a pretty apt soundtrack to Japan’s efforts in East Timor. They ignored the problem there for decades, instead opting to trade with the Indonesian government out of economic self-interest and (maybe) a belief in macro-economic assistance to raise living standards in other countries. The afterthought of an SDF dispatch is about as uninspired as these songs are, and about as sincere-looking as the guys holding hands at the top of the site.

Thanks to JGSDF, RPGamer, ClassicTVHits.com, and Barbneal for the songs!

【夜行バス転落死】Death on the highway: Girls falls to death on overnight highway bus

You can see where the window can be opened
Here’s the long and short of it:

[Tomeido Accident] Witnesses recall, “She just fell suddenly,” Wind pressure cited as possible cause
The victim
12-year-old Kokubo Misato of Mihama, Aichi, who died in the early morning of March 26 after falling from the window of a large charter bus at the Yakitsu Interchange on the Tomeido Expressway South Yakitsu, Shizuoka. A witness who dialed 110 (Japan’s 911) at around 1:50 am, a Tokyo truck driver (36), told Mainichi Shimbun reporters, “A person suddenly fell from the window of the charter bus as it was moving and rolled on the highway. The car directly behind the bus hit its emergency brake,” describing the scene at the time of the accident. Prefectural highway patrol are investigating the possibility that Kokubo opened the window herself and was then carried away by the wind, and are hurrying with reproduction trials to find the cause of the fall.

The bus’s windows are 1m above the floor, and about 50cm above the seat. They are in total 2m wide, but 1m of the window could be opened slide-style. The bus company maintains that “you cannot fall out of the window while seated.”

A student noticed that Kokubo was missing after a gust of wind from the fully open window woke her up.

The girl’s Japanese abacus teacher, who had led the trip to Tokyo Disneyland, said, “When we stopped at the service area (before the accident), there were children who opened the windows because it was so hot and humid.”

As someone from 2ch mentioned, the cops need to investigate the BUS COMPANY, not a possible hit and run!

What you might not get from these reports is that these buses are SHITTY. These people were returning to the Nagoya area, which is about a 5-hour drive by bus. I’ve ridden them several times (from Tokyo to Kyoto, an 8-hour trip) because they are so much cheaper than the obscenely expensive Shinkansen. The seats are small, the stops few (in one case non-existent) and the drivers unresponsive to demands. I once asked that the heat be turned down because I had a fever and it was completely uncomfortable, to no avail.

The bus company seems to be trying to blame this on the girl. That’s bullshit. Everyone SLEEPS on these overnight buses. No one is playing around the window, believe me. It shouldn’t have taken a girl’s death to show them that they need better bus design and a consistent heating policy.
Continue reading 【夜行バス転落死】Death on the highway: Girls falls to death on overnight highway bus

1000-yen high class burger available at MosBurger





The new high-class hamburger offered by Mos Food Service (MosBurger), the “Takumi 10”. Using safely-raised eggs and domestic bacon, it also comes with a Japanese-style sauce. The odd high price is “the result of emphasizing quality and disregarding commercial concerns.”[Jiji Tsushin]

Comment: I might split this with someone. But 1000 yen for a damn burger?! Forget it.

Report From Kyrgyztan

The following piece was forwarded to me by my friend Charles, currently living in Kazakhstan. My only comment is that the holiday of Nevruz which he refers to was this past Monday (March 21), and I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan visiting Charles on that day last year. It was clearly the most important festival of the year, with much of the city, and even thousands of visitors from provincial areas gathering in the city square and celebrating long into the night. Try to imagine how a mass cultural patriotic holiday like this transitioned into the street revolution that you have been reading about in the news.
For links to continuing coverage, see the Registan blog.

According to the Kyrgyz Republic’s long-lived president Askar Akaev, the recent parliamentary elections passed in “genuinely democratic, transparent and honest” atmoshpere and symbolized a “major success and celebration of democracy”, thus proving that “democracy extended deep roots in the fertile Kyrgyz soil”. Were this idyllic and impeccable depiction true, the Kyrgyz people wouldn’t come onto the streets and rally in front of state buildings to protest the current regime’s scandalous attempt to forge the elections.

As an indignant reader of “Moya Stolitsa Novosti” (MSN) wrote in her letter, the scale of bribing and cheat during the 13 March runoffs was appalling. In the University polling district of Bishkek, where President’s daughter, Bermet Akaeva, ran for seat after the first round of the elections on 27 February, she witnessed as school masters, apparently threatened to be sacked if they didn’t collaborate, brought their employees and relatives from all over the city to the polling station. They concealed photos in their passports with pieces of paper as a sign for election committee’s members, who calmly produced voters’ lists, letting the ardent “constituents” put signatures against bogus names, and dispensed the bulletins, which subsequently went into voting boxes in Bermet Akaeva’s favour. What is even more scandalous, on exit they received from 150 to 300 soms (41 soms equals 1 $) after entering their signatures in a sheet.

Even after the elections were over and all the Kyrgyz people were supposed to unite in celebration of the “deep-rooted” democracy and greet the new parliament members, “honestly” elected by their votes, the extent of the ruling regime’s interventions into the political life was so blatant that sometimes it was ridiculous to witness. On 18 March the US ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic Mr. Stephen Young gave a press conference in the “Akipress” news agency and assessed the past elections. Starting to his presentation, he said that he was prepared to everything and showed a pocket lantern to the surprised reporters, hinting the embarrassing development that took place the previous day. Electricity was cut suddenly and the lights went off completely when ENEMO’s (European Network of Elections Monitoring Organizations) international observers gathered in the same building to introduce their report on the elections.

A month earlier, something similar happened to the Freedom House printing press, the only independent printing house in the country. On February 22 the electrical power was cut off, allegedly due to staff’s violation of safety requirements. By providing professional printing services to over sixty local and regional newspapers, it had been irritating the government since its opening last year. Seemingly, the MSN’s allegations against Akaev and his family served as the last drop, as he accused the newspaper and the Kyrgyz media in general of “systematic information terror” and has declared his intention to file a criminal libel suit against the MSN newspaper, which is also printed by the independent press. The remarkable and eloquent thing about the development is that electrical power was cut off just 4 days before the national parliament elections. The incident was widely accused by local and international media and NGOs. The Freedom House itself, the international freedom and human rights watch-dog based in US, voiced its concern over the development and named it as an “act of censorship” and an “attack not only on a legitimate business operation, but also on democracy”.

Beginning this article yesterday, I did not suspect I would be writing these final lines in an office in Istanbul while my Kyrgyz compatriots are writing history on the streets of Bishkek. Emotions are overflowing me at this great moment. Occasionally it becomes hard to check tears of happiness, passion and hope as I feverishly press the refresh button of my browser to track the pages of websites updating news from Ala-Too square, the main square in Bishkek, practically in the real time mode. These emotions are: happiness to see my people united in the critical time of change, passion at the sight of my brothers and sisters’ blood shed for the sake of this change, and hope for the brighter future for my country. The timing of the uprising, coming right after the ancient holiday of Nevruz, is highly symbolic, too. It has been widely celebrated by all peoples of Central Asia and has symbolized the New Year and change for both nomadic and settled tribes of the region for thousands of years.

The last developments in Kyrgyzstan openly manifest that the elections have been the last drop for the long-suffered Kyrgyzstanis. The Kyrgyz people have been traditionally viewed as the most tranquil and peaceful nation in the Central Asia, not disposed to change the current developments and force out the ruling regime, more so. Yet, however radical and unexpected Akaev’s ouster may seem, it stands in line with the velvet revolutions in the former Soviet Union, and in greater scale, conforms to the flow of history: discontented nations sooner or later overthrow their repressive authorities. Whatever the circumstances behind the latest events in Kyrgyzstan may be, now that Kyrgyz people persisted and managed to express their will, they may be proud to be named as the most democratic in the Central Asia.

So, dear brothers and sisters, accept my genuine congratulations on emergence of a new democracy! Regarding the questions Max raised here, I am positive they won’t take 15 years for the new authorities to answer!

Ritsumeikan University to Move Headquarters

The new law school
New location at Nijo Station, Kyoto to open next fall

Ritsumeikan University announced on March 24 that it would build a new building Southeast of JR’s Nijo Station in Chuo-ku, Kyoto, moving its headquarters operations and law school there from the Kinugasa campus (in Kita-ku). It will begin construction today and plans to finish by September 2006.

The new building will have one basement floor and 7 above-ground floors. The lot area is 8118 square meters, and the groos floor area is 27147 square meters. The land will be purchase from the Japan Post Private Company. Total construction costs, including land costs, will come to 1 billion yen. The building, when completed, will be used by 700 teachers and students.

Nijo Station

In addition to the headquarters operations and law school, facilities for the Business Management Section, which trains business school masters students and certified public accountants, and the “University Administrator Development Graduate School” which develops university management specialists, will also move into the new building. All of these schools concentrate on working adults, so the move near JR Nijo, which is also accesible to the City Subway, takes into consideration those commuting to class.

Besides its Kinugasa campus, Ritsumeikan also has a campus in Kusatsu, Shiga, making the Nijo building the university’s third campus.

Comment: Kinugasa was always a pain in the ass to get to, but that’s what made me the fit individual I am today, so I’m not complaining.

Aichi Expo Opens Today, MFT watches from a distance

Well, it finally started: the Aichi World Expo 2005. It promises to usher in the next wave of technology (Robots), showcase the best the world’s got to offer, and is being held in the economic power of Asia’s fastest-growing city. Thanks to major sponsors, Toyota, for both holding the Expo and building the Nagoya International Airport to support it. Japan’s Yokoso! tourist PR campaign led up to the event, with even Koizumi appearing in commercials welcoming visitors to experience the country of ancient culture and futuristic technology, or whatever he said. Some visitors to Japan will be able to get their hands on special PDAs that will allow them to make phone calls and get pertinent information. Not everyone agrees that Japan is the best tourist destination, though, citing not only language difficulties but more basic tourism problems — Japan’s stores don’t accept foreign credit cards, and there is no reliable hotel information for most destinations.

Despite all the fuss about walking robots, the most popular attraction at the expo is likely to be Totoro’s house, a life-size recreation of the lovable creature’s home in the classic movie, My Neighbor Totoro. For all the hype about this being a World Expo, it’s really going to be mostly Japanese tourists in attendance. Fact is, there probably won’t be throngs of people from all over the world storming the country to get a peek at what the Expo’s got to offer. Like most people who are curious about the bampaku, I am content to read about the highlights online (and I’ll be sure to blog anything good I come across).

I don’t know about you, but the Internet makes me a lot less curious about the world. Now that I can read all sorts of really general information on the Internet for free, I feel like I already have a sense of what those places must be like. The Marmot’s Hole, for one, has completely ruined me on Korea. I have gotten such an inside scoop from Marmot and his blogroll that I kind of doubt I’d be missing much. When you’re an adult and the thrill of going out and getting drunk fades, all that’s left is more going out drinking. Doesn’t matter where you are, if you work full time then you don’t have time for much else. It’s all the same — the minute differences between countries that you care about can be easily digested in a foot-long blogroll.

No wait, I take it all back. I wish I could be there. I really really do.

Hideki Matsui, a Rod Stewart fan?!

Love this picture!
From the always lovable SUNSPO:

Tampa, FL (Tashiro Manabu and Ami Shunsuke reporting) — Yankees outfielder Hideki Matsui (30) took his first full day of rest during this year’s Spring Training on Mar. 23. Matsui has been at his best in the exhibition games, but the secret to his success can be found in the sweet voice of pop singer Rod Stewart (60). It’s been his favorite recently, saying that it’s really great to listen to while training (?!). (Photo: “Godzilla” Matsui takes a ride in his car to get refreshed on his full day off)

“Godzilla” smiles as he does his situps. Even away from the field he cannot take a break from his training routine. With a 333 batting average, 5 hits and 15 RBIs in the exhibition games, the outfielder is at his best. But why Rod Stewart?

“I hadn’t really listened to him before, but the singing and the music are very easy on the ears. It’s great for training, so I love putting it on.”

As Matsui trained the sweet strains of Stewart’s unique voice could be heard on the stereo speakers. When he came to America, “The Great American Songbook Vol. 3” (A cover album of American standards including Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”) was among the CDs he brought with him. He bought it because it had a comfortable sound that he might have heard somewhere before.

He likes it enough that he’s considering getting the previous two volumes, and he listens to it every time he trains at home. The tag team of Rod Stewart and Godzilla will shoot for the stars this season, so watch out!

My Comment: That last sentence conjures up images that I wish I could Photoshop. Who knew Matsui had such lame taste in music? God this guy is hideous:

Ew.