Someone wrote to gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi about how he stays sane in a sea of crazy news. Here is how he responded:
See, what I’ve done, and you all can try this yourselves, is to simply avoid reading the news as much as possible. I read old books and the only periodicals I even look at lately are NFL draft guides. I’ve read Nolan Nawrocki’s draft booklet like 400 times already. To me he’s the greatest novelist since Waugh. That does wonders for my general sanity, but then I’ll have something happen like last Friday, when I went into 30 Rock to do a hit on Cenk Uygur’s show and saw him talking about a poll that had Donald Trump leading the field of prospective Republican candidates. Donald Trump has 26% of the Republican vote right now? What the fuck?
If it weren’t for the fact that my job requires me to be on top of world events, I’d be very tempted to follow his lead.
Many billions of dollars have been spent by Japan’s top companies in the last decade to develop the next generation of robots — famous for such technical marvels as expressing human emotions on a silicon face, bipedal walking, roller-skating, playing musical instruments, and cooking meals. Japanese companies such as Hitachi, Toyota, and Toshiba are broadcasting ads and posting billboards across the globe that show-off their latest robotic achievements. These products aren’t for sale. You cannot buy they for industrial or commercial use. But their existence suggests a fantastic future where robots will be serving us in all sorts of tasks, both menial and complex.
Too bad this is so utterly removed from reality. For all of Japan’s collective effort in developing its robotics industry, TEPCO has had to turn to iRobot, — a Massachusetts-based company — for the Packbot, a simple yet practical robot equipped with simple claws and cameras, to enter the Fukushima plants. The robot first entered the plants on Sunday (a month after the disaster, after it became clear that no Japanese robots were up for the task) taking measurements and photographs of areas where it was unsafe for humans to venture. (Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Japan has refused robots provided by the Chinese military.)
On that note, iRobot is also the company that brought us the Roomba, a robot that vacuums the floor and which is probably the most popular robot among Japanese consumers — showing that Japan Inc.’s investment in robot technology cannot save it, even in its home market. For all the fanfare in recent years, in truth, Japan’s robots are so advanced that they have skipped a generation of usefulness. The robotics on display by Japan Inc. may be useful in ten years, but they are nothing more than gimmicks today.
Coincidentally, just hours after I read the above article on TEPCO having to go to iRobot for robots to use in Fukushima, I was browsing through Michael E. Porter’s tome, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (which is just as heavy a book as it sounds). Published in 1990, one case study in the book addresses Japan’s robot industry, and I found this section prophetic:
The first robots used in Japan were imported from the United States in 1967. The Japanese robotics industry had its beginning in 1968, when Kawasaki Heavy Industries signed a licensing agreement with Unimation. Kawasaki was both a major potential user of robots as well as a producer of related products and services. It produced a broad range of machinery and parts, including engines, motorcycles, aircraft, machinery, complete plants, and ships. In 1969, Kawasaki began to sell Unimate robots, the first robots produced in Japan. Kobe Steel was also an early licensee of American robot designs.
The early Japanese robots produced results that were somewhat less than expected. They were often referred to as “expensive fools” and many were relegated to the corners of factories to collect dust. However, Japanese firms began to improve upon the robots they imported. Kawasaki redesigned some of the parts of the Unimation machines and upgraded its quality. In the late 1960s, the mean time between failures (MTBF) of an imported robot was less than 300 hours. By 1974, Kawasaki had achieved an MTBF of 800 hours. By 1975, this figure was 1,000 hours.
It’s a total cliche about Japanese business from the late 20th century: “Japan doesn’t invent things well, but they are great at improving things.” It’s a cliche so tired that it’s rarely rolled out much anymore. Yet as I read this, I realized that the observation from 1990 is still true, and is being echoed in real life events more than twenty years later.
Japan must get back to doing what it does best — improving, not inventing. If Japan’s researchers were tasked with improving the Roomba or the Packbot, I bet they’d do an amazing job. But left to their own devices, with the task of making something new, Japanese researchers, for whatever reason — dedicate themselves to creating a robot that can cook okonomiyaki and play the violin — and for what? Another generation of “expensive fools” destined to collect dust, due to the minor value the products provide in industrial and consumer markets.
There have been many many reports of what it’s like at the earthquake-affected areas, and now there is a growing number of reports coming from inside the nuclear evacuation zone. According to Google News, the Global Post, the Telegraph, and CNN have reports, and a Japanese team recently posted a video of their trip. Here is what the Wall Street Journal had to offer:
Eerie Hush Descends on Japan’s Nuclear Zone
FUTABA, Japan—In the Coin Laundry, a dryer is still loaded with clothes: an orange hooded sweatshirt, a green worker’s vest and two pairs of jeans, damp and smelling of mildew.
At Joe’s Man restaurant near the train station, a menu lists the lunch specials, starting with bacon-and-eggplant pasta in a tomato-cream sauce. A flyer on the open doors of the Nishio clothes shop promotes a five-day “inventory clearance” sale. Over the road that runs through the town center, a white-and-blue sign proclaims: “Understanding Nuclear Power Correctly Will Lead to an Abundant Life.”
But life, by and large, is what is absent in this town, just a few miles away from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
A little further down the reporters describe an interesting exchange after explaining that the zone isn’t illegal to enter but strongly discouraged:
“What are you doing here?” a fireman asked a reporter walking in the street. From the passenger seat, another firefighter held up a radiation monitor. “You are not supposed to be here. It’s dangerous,” he said. “Please leave soon.”
To me, if there are enough reporters on the ground that they are running into each other in an evacuation zone, something is very wrong here. Whatever value there is to tell the story of the evacuees has been eclipsed by the reporters’ attraction to a sexy location with post-apocalyptic trappings. These people are not looking to provide useful information for a discerning public. They are just entertainers hoping to sell an interesting story to the folks back home.
Most of the time media as entertainment is fine and more or less harmless. The tradition of Westerners reporting back on exotic travels goes back at least to Marco Polo, and it’s only natural for people to have a voyeuristic interest in world events. I’ll even allow that there may simply be no other good way to get digestible information about other countries. It’s just that from the perspective of someone living in Japan with a stake in the quake’s aftermath, seeing these kinds of reports is frustrating and makes me think they’re exploiting a tragedy.
After the earthquake, a lot of foreign residents of Japan received panicked messages from their relatives and friends back home, myself included. In my case, I had to tell my mom to stop watching CNN and turn to more reliable sources like NHK World. Since she didn’t have that on cable, she ended up turning to CCTV9, the international version of China’s state-run TV, because it had much more straightforward, facts-based reports. Other relatives also contacted me, some telling me to consider leaving. One conspiracy theorist relative told me to check the Drudge Report to get “the real story.”
Normally, average people are served well enough by whatever media they choose to access because it never affects their daily lives. People can read well-written articles in The Economist that might be wildly inaccurate because hey, who’s going to know the difference unless you’re actually from the country they’re writing about? It’s all just entertainment for the commute. Sadly, there’s no separation between the entertainment media and where you should turn when there’s real news.
Thanks to the power of exit polls, we already know the results of some of tonight’s polls. For instance, Ishihara will remain governor of Tokyo for another four years (!). For updates on developments in the election, keep an eye on my Twitter feed. No live blogging tonight. Biking around my old stomping grounds in Adachi-ku has sapped my energy.
Feel free to leave comments/reactions below!
Photo: Osaka governor voting today in a track suit.
Tomorrow Japan will hold many, many local elections. The schedule is set by the central government, which prefers to hold all local elections around this time every four years. It’s sort of like Election Day in the States, except it’s on a holiday because Japanese officials actually want people to vote.
Gubernatorial and mayoral elections are decided by majority popular vote (first past the post, no runoffs), while prefectural and local assemblies are a mix of single-member and multi-member districts, though I am not sure which is more prevalent.
In the wake of the massive earthquake last month, many elections in the affected areas have been postponed. Even outside the northeast, many local officials want them put off, to the point that Urayasu (located on reclaimed land, partly sank into ground after earthquake) has steadfastly refused to hold the vote as scheduled. Given the somber national mood, an enthusiastic campaign full of upbeat promises could look unseemly, and voters are understandably distracted by post-quake anxieties.
All the same, the decision has been made, and now it’s up to the public to show up and choose their leaders. There is a very wide field, but a few themes have emerged to keep an eye on as the votes are tallied tomorrow night.
Ishihara the indestructible? Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara is running for a fourth term, and is expected to win handily despite challenges from some recognizable faces.
Ishihara was most recently in the news making and then apologizing for a statement that the recent earthquake and tsunami were divine punishment for Japan’s immorality. If you have been following the quake news, you might wonder, Why is his re-election assured despite such an offensive statement? Well, there are two reasons. First, he has a long history of getting away with being outrageous, banking on the admiration he earned as a writer/celebrity and the large number of people who agree with much of what he has to say. Second, he is a skilled politician who has gained the backing of large blocs of reliable voters at a time when support for the rival DPJ is essentially in tatters (they didn’t even field their own candidate this time) and the turnout of unaffiliated voters is expected to be low.
For more on the first reason, I would direct you to David Marx’s profile of the governor over at Neojaponisme. Key line: “He is not a “loose cannon,” accidentally saying things he later regrets. He likely thinks that success of his endeavors requires raising the ire of groups to which he does belong.” Suffice to say, people expect Ishihara to be outrageous. The only surprising thing about his most recent offense is that he apologized. Probably even some supporters told him to watch his words this time.
As to the second, maybe I can shed some light. You see, the LDP and New Komeito hold influence over a fairly disciplined voting bloc. The Komeito is especially important in this equation because of their numbers and highly reliable turnout.
For example, let’s look back to my coverage of the 2009 Tokyo prefectural assembly election. In Adachi-ku, the LDP and New Komeito delivered around 70,000 votes each of a total turnout of around 250,000. That’s 30% of the vote right there in a high turnout election, and if I remember Adachi-ku was broadly consistent with the overall result. It wasn’t enough to win then because LDP/Komeito support was in the gutter following the financial crisis and subsequent recession, so unaffiliated voters went for the DPJ, handing them control of the Tokyo legislature.
Ishihara’s two major challengers are Hideo Higashikokubaru, the comedian-turned-Miyazaki governor, and Miki Watanabe, founder of discount restaurant chain Watami. Unfortunately for them, now is not a good time for new faces, especially not Higashi with his feel-good enthusiasm, or Watanabe, who just exudes “smarmy corporate big-shot.” These two and other more minor candidates are likely to split the vote, handing another advantage to Ishihara.
According to a recent poll (JP), Ishihara has the support of around 70% of LDP supporters, 60% of New Komeito supporters, and even has the edge in support among DPJ and unaffiliated voters. Unless there’s a major upset, expect to have Ishihara around for another four years.
Regional parties to gain ground. Osaka Governor Toru Hashimoto took to Twitter to join those calling for the elections to be postponed. He may just have been posturing, however, because his party, the Osaka Restoration Association, may well win a majority in the Osaka prefectural legislature tomorrow, with an Asahi poll giving it a lead of several points against the other parties.
Regional political parties, with charismatic leaders and often populist platforms, have gained attention, not to mention power, recently. In Aichi prefecture, elections in February and March gave the upper hand to Genzei Nippon (Tax Cut Japan), a populist party with a platform to slash local taxes.
Hashimoto’s plans for Osaka look even more ambitious. By forming a party loyal to him and gaining control of the legislature, he hopes to push hard for reforms including a plan to unify the administrative functions of Osaka city and prefecture. This, along with infrastructure investment and neoliberal stand-bys like market-testing government functions for possible privatization, he argues will give him the ability to put Osaka on firmer fiscal and economic footing after years in the doldrums.
Japanese speakers can watch this video for an outline set to a Sega Genesis-era synthesizer soundtrack:
Success for Hashimoto could give momentum to ambitious politicians in other regions wishing to open their own “Restoration” franchise. One area where this idea could find traction is in the northeast, where the gargantuan task of reconstruction all but guarantees intense frustration among the locals.
How will the results affect national politics? Until a few days ago, the biggest political news story was the potential for a grand coalition, a sort of unity government to give top priority to quake reconstruction (and maybe throw in tax hikes to pay for social security for good measure). LDP President Tanigaki has thrown cold water on the discussions, reportedly because they want PM Kan to quit as a condition of joining the government. Indeed, LDP Secretary General Nobuteru Ishihara (Shintaro’s son) is now back to openly calling for Kan’s head. Wow, that didn’t take long!
The local elections will likely only give the LDP more reason to keep up pressure on Kan. In a number of key races, the DPJ has opted not to field its own candidates, apparently because it took a hard look at the numbers and decided not to embarrass itself. However, the party has candidates running in gubernatorial races in Hokkaido and Mie–polls show the LDP with a lead in Hokkaido and slightly ahead in a close race in Mie. These will likely be two of the major headlines tomorrow night.
National politics in Japan are stuck in a morass of cautious leaders who end up getting bogged down in petty scandals. Kan’s approval ratings have jumped sharply since the quake, from the 20% range to the 30s. However, setbacks and the usual drumbeat of criticism from the media will likely send it back on a downward trajectory. Since winning big in the 2009 lower house election, the DPJ’s control of the government will likely last another 2.5 years. Even with rock-bottom approval ratings, the DPJ seems more likely to rely on changing the prime minister to gain temporary support from the public rather than calling an early election. Note that the disaster, as well as a recent Supreme Court decision that mandates a lower house redistricting more closely in line with the population, make it next to impossible for Kan to call an election for a while.
Many articles in the foreign press have expressed hope that the earthquake would serve as a wake-up call for Japan’s leaders to enact reforms to put the country on a firmer footing. Count me as skeptical. Constant attention to short-term political momentum, such as the impact of these local elections, ensures rudderless leadership that remains too distracted to form a meaningful political vision. As a friend noted to me over Chinese food the other day, Kan’s post-quake speeches have been long on uplifting rhetoric but very light on anything specific to inspire actual confidence.
Though I am skeptical of Japan’s political system regardless of which party controls it, it’s important to make some distinctions. The government deserves a lot of credit for its post-crisis response, though it bears stressing that no effort will be enough. They have been prudent, fast-acting, transparent, and open to foreign aid where needed. Also, the government is currently debating plans to cut electricity use in the summer in a way that completely avoids rolling blackouts. Given the huge damage to generating capacity, pulling off coordination on that level would be nothing short of heroic.
It’s just that the political system is paralyzed as long as its leaders flail in the face of petty scandals and public perceptions. It’s possible that the central government in Tokyo, itself suffering reputation damage from the blackouts and its perceived proximity to the Fukushima disaster, might start ceding political clout to brash self-proclaimed “restorationists” like Hashimoto who, unlike the past few prime ministers, are adept at shaping public opinion rather than being shaped by it.
Are you concerned about the overfishing of the oceans, but still want to enjoy the delicious sweet raw flesh of fish? The Monterey Bay Aquarium has recently published a guide to what seafood you should and should not eat in specific areas of the United States. There is unfortunately no guide specific for Japan, but there is a US-centric sushi guide that may be of interest to some readers, and may encourage someone to create a version for Japan. (You’ll note that much of it is not useful because it depends on region — uni, for example, appears in all three categories, depending on its origin in the US).
The Asia Times has an article arguing that one factor giving Japan some financial leeway is its continued ownership of Japan Post Bank. It’s an interesting read that reviews the history and recent politics of the issue:
[T]he Japanese government has a captive funding source: it owns the world’s largest depository bank. As US vice president Dick Cheney said, “Deficits don’t matter.” They don’t matter, at least, when you own the bank that is your principal creditor. Japan has remained impervious to the speculative attacks that have crippled countries such as Greece and Iceland because it has not fallen into the trap of dependency on foreign financing.
Japan Post Bank is now the largest holder of personal savings in the world, making it the world’s largest credit engine. Most money today originates as bank loans, and deposits are the magic pool from which this credit-money is generated. Japan Post is not only the world’s largest depository bank but its largest publicly owned bank. By 2007, it was also the largest employer in Japan, and the holder of one-fifth of the national debt in the form of government bonds.
…
Japan Post Bank started diversifying away from low-interest government bonds into more lucrative investments. In December 2010, sources said it was considering opening its first overseas office in London, “aiming to obtain the latest financial information there to help diversify its asset management schemes.”
But that was before the crippling tsunami and the nuclear disaster it triggered. Whether they will finally force Japan Post’s privatization remains to be seen. Other vulnerable countries have sold off their assets only to wind up in debt peonage to outside creditors.
The Japanese government can afford its enormous debt because the interest it pays is extremely low. For the private economy, public debt IS money. A large public debt owed to the Japanese people means Japanese industries have the money to rebuild. But if Japan Post is sold off to private investors, interest rates are liable to rise, plunging the government into the debt trap it has so far largely escaped.
The Japanese people are intensely patriotic, however, and they are not likely to submit quietly to domination by foreigners. They generally like their government because they feel it is serving their interests. Hopefully the Japanese government will have the foresight and the fortitude to hang onto its colossal publicly owned bank and use it to leverage its people’s savings into the credit needed to rebuild its ravaged infrastructure, avoiding a crippling debt burden to foreign interests.
In a sense, having a reliable buyer of government debt is attractive, but this system is not sustainable, nor can it be “leveraged,” as far as I can tell. Japan Post Bank’s deposits have been falling steadily, both because of the aging population and the unattractive interest rates. The whole reason the bank wants an overseas office is because it is interested in chasing yields in riskier investments, a desperate attempt to provide any sort of meaningful return on deposits. Over the short term, keeping the system in place makes sense, but longer term the country needs to wean itself off excessive debt and retool for a declining population, if that’s even possible.
Update: The writer of this piece works for the Public Banking Institute, a think tank organized to promote the concept of government-owned banks in the US.
After meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy today, PM Naoto Kan commented that Japan needs to debate whether Japan’s current electric utility system should exist in its current form. At present, the government grants monopolies to regional utilities, which are private corporations listed on the stock market.
Admittedly, I had not thought much about this issue until this crisis came along, but now I am trying to learn more. Countries take different approaches to who owns the power utilities. For instance, the US has investor-owned utilities that provide around 38% of generating capacity, with the rest a mix of public and cooperative-owned entities.
I don’t have an opinion one way or the other at this point, but I can see how the different ownership structures can skew incentives. According to the best investing apps out there, if you are trying to provide returns to shareholders, you might be more inclined to promote more electricity usage, as Tepco has done by offering discounts to people who use “all-electric” homes with electricity-powered stoves and baths, etc. On the other hand, both privately owned and public utilities can cultivate the types of entrenched, bureaucratic management teams that lead to the types of massive cover-ups and bungling incompetence we have seen at Tepco.
(Disclosure: I own a small investment in Tepco. Take nothing I say as investment advice)
Last Friday I had a clumsy bicycle accident and smashed my right arm into the curb, breaking it just below the shoulder. It is, of course, pretty painful and very inconvenient – especially since I am flying home to New Jersey on Thursday! (Not “fleeing” anything, just that I graduated from my MA at Kyoto University last week and this has been my plan.) I can obviously still type using just my left hand, but it is still pretty tough so I will probably not be posting for a few weeks while my arm heals.
I’m sorry I have to stop now, just as so many new readers are coming in for our disaster related blogging, but the others will continue to post and I should be back in a month ago to discuss both related and unrelated topics.
In English-language news media, everyone is talking about this new word “Fly-jin”, a play on “Gaijin,” i.e. foreigners who have fled Japan in the wake of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear holocaust [/sarcasm]. Take this article in the Wall Street Journal that everyone is talking about:
The flight of the foreigners—known as gaijin in Japanese—has polarized some offices in Tokyo. Last week, departures from Japan reached a fever pitch after the U.S. Embassy unveiled a voluntary evacuation notice and sent in planes to ferry Americans to safe havens. In the exodus, a new term was coined for foreigners fleeing Japan: flyjin.
The first part of that excerpt is true — foreigners really have fled, and lots of Japanese companies are really pissed about it. I just heard a story of a person fired from a (rather domestic, small-minded) Japanese company for fleeing the country and missing 8 days of work. (I think the biggest problem in this sitaution wast the backward employer and the failure of communication by the fleeing foreign employee.)
Too bad this is so utterly removed from reality. For all of Japan’s collective effort in developing its robotics industry, TEPCO has had to turn to iRobot, — a Massachusetts-based company — for the Packbot, a simple yet practical robot equipped with simple claws and cameras, to enter the Fukushima plants. The robot first entered the plants on Sunday (a month after the disaster, after it became clear that no Japanese robots were up for the task) taking measurements and photographs of areas where it was unsafe for humans to venture. (Interestingly, but not surprisingly, 
