Geisha, Interrupted

Denialmon

Imagine for a moment, you are running a nation built upon a feudal tradition of straight-up, no-foreigners-allowed isolationism.  Further alienating yourself from your neighbors, you continually ignore their requests that you formally apologize for massacring their civilians and forcing their women into prostitution last century. More recently, you've managed to irritate the rest of the world by resuming whaling in the Antarctic and by subjecting all non-Japanese (even permanent residents) to fingerprinting and interrogation at the border.  You are also marking the first anniversary of a high-profile murder case which you bungled so severely, the killer of a foreign English teacher managed to escape nine Japanese police officers, barefoot.  And you still can't find him!

This is definitely the time to appoint an animated robocat from the future to be your next foreign ambassador!

No, really...

Japan appoints its first cartoon ambassador

TOKYO: Japan has created an unusual government post to promote animation, and named a perfect figure to the position: Doraemon.

Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura appointed the popular cartoon robot cat as "anime ambassador" on Wednesday, handing a human-sized Doraemon doll an official certificate at an inauguration ceremony...."Doraemon, I hope you will travel around the world as an anime ambassador to deepen people's understanding of Japan so they will become friends with Japan," Komura told the blue-and-white cat.

The appointment is part of Japan's recent effort to harness the power of pop culture in diplomacy....This year, the ministry plans to arrange showings of a Doraemon film in Singapore, China, Spain, France, and at other Japanese diplomatic missions around the world.

Doraemon — through voice actress Wasabi Mizuta, who spoke from behind a sliding paper screen — promised Komura that "Through my cartoons, I hope to convey to people abroad what ordinary Japanese people think, our lifestyles and what kind of future we want to build."

Created by cartoonist Fujiko F. Fujio, Doraemon is a Japanese cultural icon and is popular around the world, especially in Asia. The robotic cat travels back in time from the 22nd century and uses gadgets such as a "time machine" and an "anywhere door" that come out of a fourth-dimensional pocket on his stomach to help his friends, allowing them to travel anywhere and to any time they wish.

Astro Boy, another cartoon icon, was named last November as ambassador for overseas safety.

The Shadow of Aum Shinrikyo

Today was a national holiday here in Japan.  It's nice to get a day off for each of the two equinoxes every year, if only because it gives us a moment to envision the Earth spinning on its axis and feel personally dwarfed by the forces of the universe.

Today is also the 13th anniversary of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. 

In this city, it is hard to ride the subway without being constantly reminded of the domestic terrorist attack carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on March 20, 1995.  That's because there are pictures of three escaped cultists in hanging up somewhere in almost every station. 

At Kasumigaseki (where a couple of train workers were killed) the pencil sketches of the perpetrators are larger than life-size.  And every few years or so, someone redraws the sketches of the culprits to make their faces look older.

When I first moved to Tokyo, I had no idea who these three people were.  For a few months, I honestly assumed that they were three Japanese citizens who had been abducted by the North Koreans, as this was another run-on-mega-issue inside of Japan (and my kanji wasn't so hot either.) 

Then one day, I was taking the metro with a Japanese friend who pointed out one of the posters and simply said "AUM".

Over five years of commuting later, I feel as if I know these pencil-sketched people.  It's almost as if they are old friends, greeting me with the same expressions every morning.  How creepy is that??

In Haruki Murakami's nonfiction work Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and The Japanese Psyche, he offers some pretty compelling thoughts about what may occur inside the minds of some cult members.

"If you lose your ego," he writes, "you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self.  Humans, however. cannot live very long without some sense of a continuing story.  ...Now narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy.  It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. ...At this point you receive a narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego.  You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back instead is a shadow."

And 13 years later, the shadow of these cult members remains.

Crappily Ever After

According to this article in the International Herald Tribune, there's a new novel being released today that's roughly based on the life of Japan's Empress Michiko, the wife of reigning emperor Akihito.  "The Commoner," by John Burnham Schwartz, is said to chronicle the life of "Haruko Endo" (Empress Michiko's literary doppleganger), as she becomes the first commoner to marry into the imperial family.  Much like Michiko, Haruko is subject to great criticism upon her entry into the royal household, and is stripped of basically all her freedom.

And yes, this is another glimpse into the evocatively lamentable life of a 20th century Japanese woman, brought to us straight from the pen of a white, Harvard-educated, American man.  This passage comes directly out of the Tribune article:

Doubleday has already gone back to press once, taking the total copies in print to 30,000. Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, said she expected the novel to sell well.

With its Japanese theme (and white storyteller), the comparison to Arthur Golden's best-selling "Memoirs of a Geisha" is inescapable. "The Commoner" is "a kind of sequel, if you will, to 'Memoirs of a Geisha,' " said Steve Shapiro of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas.

Like Golden, Schwartz enjoyed a privileged childhood...

OK, stop there.

That Arthur Golden managed to write his novel in the voice of a Japanese woman, and this worked out for him, is really more of a freak accident than an indication that the white American male of today might possess some innate understanding of the Japanese female psyche.  Schwartz's whiteness is an obstacle here, not a selling point! 

And yet this is not to say that I'm not off to go buy his book, right now.  What?  It looks interesting.  And I am a royal-family-following geek.

Pirates of the Antarctic: A Game of Cards

As of this writing, two members of a militant anti-whaling group are still being held aboard a Japanese whaling vessel in the Antarctic. These activists boarded the Japanese ship illegally from an Australian conservation vessel.  As more and more people and organizations become involved in the whaling conflict, the standoff continues.  In my opinion, the politics involved here can be best summed up by a simple game of cards. Observe:

Australia draws the first card.  Not surprisingly, it's the:

Cute Sea Creature Card

This adorable creature is considered by many (although not the Japanese, obviously) to remain an endangered species. Look at that face!  She's looking right at you and she needs you to save her.  You!  Save the whales, save the world!!

But uh oh, what's that Japan's holding?  It couldn't be.  But it is.  It's...

The Racism Card!

Yes, a Japanese pro-whaling video that is currently circling YouTube is calling racism.  I have not actually watched this video (it apparently shows graphic images of Australians killing Kangaroos and Wallabies) but it is reported to state that:

"Australians must not use whales to justify the racist ideology...Australians have to eliminate prejudice and racism against the Japanese. Don't forget Cronulla race riots! These riots show the xenophobia and white supremacy. The next victims are the Japanese?"

While the whaler's calls of racism sound pretty far fetched, a British Newspaper has also reported that:

...Australia radio stations were flooded with angry calls (after the capture of the activists), some of which bordered on racism. "I worry for those two young men they have captured," said one woman caller to a Sydney radio station. "The Japanese didn't care about British and Australian troops during the war – look how they were treated – so there must be concerns for those young men on that whaling ship."

Few hands can beat the racism card.

That is, of course, unless you have...

The Terrorism Card!

Captain Paul Watson captain of the Sea Shepherd conservation vessel (which sent the captured activists on their original protest mission) has told various media outlets that: "Holding two hostages and demanding that the whaling protests stop before the men were handed over is nothing short of terrorism," and that: "When you hold hostages and make demands, that is the definition of a terrorist organization and that is the way they are acting."

The terrorism card is hard to beat.  But wait, it's not over!  One more card has come to the rescue, and it looks to be debunking the entire relevance of the Terrorism Card.  It's...

The Piracy Card!

This bit's from the Associated Press

"It is completely illegal to board anyone's vessel ... on the high seas," said Glenn Inwood, a spokesman for Japan's Institute for Cetacean Research, which organizes the hunt. "So this can be seen as nothing more than an act of piracy by the Sea Shepherd group."

And it's backed up in this article too, as

And an Australian expert on international maritime law (says that)...

"The unauthorized boarding of any vessel on the high seas raises, in the current international security environment, significant issues. These actions could be viewed as a breach in the first instance of Japanese law, because it is a Japanese flagged whaling vessel that was boarded," Don Rothwell a professor at Canberra's Australian National University, claimed.

Rothwell said the whalers had acted within their rights to detain the activists.

"Any unauthorized boarding of a vessel under these circumstances gives to the master of the vessel a clear capacity to detain these persons to try to verify their intentions," Rothwell said. "Their detention is perfectly appropriate and reasonable, in much the same way as any person who uninvited entered anyone's home can be detained for effectively trespassing."

So Game Over, at least for now.  Jack Sparrow wins. 

In Memory of Ayu's Left Ear

Last week the goddess of J-pop, Ayumi Hamasaki, admitted to her fans that she has gone deaf in her left ear.  Her condition looks to be the result of loud and prolongued exposure to her own music.  Don't get me wrong though, I love Ayu.  I even bought her new CD, "Guilty," last week!  Although it sometimes seems like her music could have been composed by a computer or cyborg, she sings the soundtracks of the city I live in.  And Tokyo, whether or not it's 'the city of androids' some say it is, can be a sweet assault on the ears at times.

So in memory of Ayu's hearing, I paste here one of her more bizarre and amusing music videos.  It's called "My Name's WOMEN" (not a typo, actual title). Here, Ayu makes a pseudo-feminist point by beating up a bunch of (likely homosexual) male dancers. But don't worry, the video's  not about gay-bashing. It's just... Japanese.

That's a Bit Too Honest, Abe

This morning I translated the final episode of the children's cartoon that swallowed my Christmas vacation and then some.  So I was really looking forward to not having to think about poo for a while, when I sat down in front of my computer to relax and catch up with the latest news headlines pertaining to this lovely country I live in.

Alas, I hope too much...

Japan's Abe says diarrhoea ruined premiership

TOKYO (AFP) — Japan's former prime minister Shinzo Abe, once touted as the fresh young face who would usher in a new conservative era, has said he quit the post because of severe diarrhoea.

"I have come to think that, so as to gain understanding on why I resigned, I should make no secrets about my illness," Abe said in a magazine article.

Abe, now 53, took office in 2006 as Japan's youngest premier in modern times and embarked on an avowedly conservative agenda including moving to rewrite the US-imposed pacifist constitution.

He announced he would resign on September 12, two days after he delivered a policy speech in parliament and vowed to continue his job despite a crushing election defeat, sagging voter support and a raft of scandals.

(...and so on)

Wow, who knew. And to think, we were all under the impression that he had been forced to resign because of all the corruption...

Japan's First (And Last) Thanksgiving

Here we have a particularly telling piece of Japanese history, via the Japan Times article Ainu Pride towers amid ongoing woes.  (The Ainu refers to Japan's largely unrecognized aboriginal population; the remaining natives live mainly in the north, and are characterized by their thick hair and white skin.)

In 1669, the Ainu leader Shakushain, who rose up and united the Ainu in rebellion against Japanese invaders, was called on to observe a truce, and invited to a banquet in his honor. The Matsumae clan, who had established a foothold on the island then called Ezo, now Hokkaido, by building a castle in 1601, had been cheating and robbing the Ainu in their lucrative trade for dried kelp and salmon, and the skins of deer, bear and sea otter. This and other gross injustices spurred the otherwise peaceful Ainu, the original inhabitants of Hokkaido, to pick up their swords, spears and hunting bows to fight the powerful Japanese feudal clan.

Even though members of the Matsumae clan by this time carried firearms, the Ainu knew their country and were fighting a guerrilla war that was proving very costly to the Japanese. Consequently, orders came from the Shogun to quickly subdue this rebellion and take over the resource-rich northern island. Not being able to defeat Shakushain, who was the first Ainu leader to gather the scattered tribes together, the Matsumae leaders called for a truce and laid on a great banquet — then they murdered him with poison.

In a hopelessly cynical sort of way, this banquet almost reminds me of the first American Thanksgiving, which took place some 40 years earlier on the other side of the globe. 

It all rings eerily familiar to learn that in the aftermath of the "feast," the Ainu was driven further and further off of their land by the Japanese expansion of the 17th century, during which time the natives were nearly wiped out by foreign diseases and a series of turf wars.

Yet unlike the Americans, who go on to celebrate their 'friendship' with the 'Indians' despite the bloody battles and eventual genocide that soon followed the First Thanksgiving, some Japanese will do everything in their power to negate the notion that a thriving aboriginal population ever existed on their territories at all.

In a way, this sums up the essential difference between the two cultures.

We're # 91 !

So as not to accuse myself of "Japan bashing," I've decided to outline some statistically positive aspects of Japanese society before dedicating the remainder of this post to Japan's abominable ranking in a recent global survey on gender equality.

That is to say, Japan has the highest  life expectancy in the world, among the lowest incidences of obesity, and can boast one of the lowest crime rates on the globe.  The nation also has one of the top 10 health care systems.

So at the very least, the Japanese live long and healthy lives of gender oppression.  And they are not too fat, although most Japanese women I know would still say that they are. . .

Japan slips lower in gender equality rankings

TOKYO -- Japan has fallen further down the global rankings of equality between women and men, with long working hours and stubborn gender stereotypes seen as to blame.

Despite being the world's second-largest economy, Japan is well known for its "glass ceiling" for female workers, its male-dominated boardrooms and its long working hours which make it hard for women to balance a job and a family.

Japan ranked 91st out of 128 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2007 global gender gap ranking released Thursday, the worst of the Group of Eight major industrialized powers and down sharply from 80th the previous year.

Sweden came top in gender equality followed by other Nordic countries, while Pakistan, Chad and Yemen were at the bottom.

The Philippines fared best out of Asian nations in sixth place.

Japan ranked 94th in terms of political empowerment, with females accounting for only nine percent of lawmakers.

It came 97th in economic participation and opportunity, mainly due to low scores in wage equality and female career progression.

"What makes the most difference between Japan and other industrialized countries is the long working hours," said Aki Fukoin, head of a nongovernmental parents association.

"In the Japanese corporate culture, employees are expected to work until very late at night without consideration to a family life."

Satoko Watanabe, a politician in rural Kagawa prefecture in western Japan, said gender equality efforts have met a backlash in recent years.

Some local politicians now openly stress "need to rebuild Japan's tradition of males having jobs and female doing housekeeping chores,'" she said.

"We have to change the society's mindset first. I'm very worried about the backlash," she said.

The government admitted in a report in June that Japanese women only have a minimal presence in politics and business because much of society believes women should stay at home to support their husbands.

"There still remains a strong illusion that politics is a men's world so the number of women who want to run for elections is limited," said Mizuho Fukushima, leader of the Social Democratic Party, a small opposition party.

"Then there are the long working hours also in the parliament. For me it's hard to juggle childcare and political activities," she said.

A Game of Cat and Mouse

I don't care what the experts have to say about the modification of 'fear receptors' in the brain or whatever: This Mouse Is Drunk! 

Her reckless curiosities remind me far too much of my former self for anything else to be the case.

Watch it, Tom! Japan experts find fearless Jerries

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Fear may be linked to the sense of smell, and can be switched off simply by shutting down certain receptors in the brain, Japanese scientists have found.

In an experiment with mice, the researchers identified and removed certain receptors on the olfactory bulb of their brains -- and the result was a batch of fearless rodents.

To prove their point, the scientists showed pictures of a brown mouse within an inch of a cat, sniffing up its ear, kissing it and playing with its predator's collar.

"They detect the smell of predators ... like a cat and urine of a fox or snow leopard, but they don't display any fear. They even show very strong curiosity but they can't tell the smell is a sign of danger," said Hitoshi Sakano at the University of Tokyo's department of biophysics and biochemistry.

"So these mice are very happy with cats. They play with cats. But before taking the picture, we had to feed the cat," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

. . .

(continued)

Let's Not English!

I was just reading about NOVA again, in Time Magazine this time, when  I was taken off guard by the following passage:

It's unlikely that the scandal will put an end to Japan's $1.2 billion foreign language education industry. Despite a widespread appetite for learning and an educational system that mandates six years of English study, Japan ranks below North Korea on standardized English proficiency tests, according to the U.S.-based Educational Testing Service.

Below North Korea?  This seems like a mistake. I mean, I know that the standard methods of English teaching in this country are basically futile, but do Japanese students really end up worse at English than their counterparts North Korea? Are people even allowed to study English in North Korea??

So I followed up on the source mentioned in the article (ETS), where I came upon a list of average standardized test scores by country.  To calculate these raw the scores by themselves can be misleading, seeing as the study doesn't take into account the number of people sitting for the test in each country or how much each student has studied. Still, I nonetheless found myself inappropriately amused as I scrolled down the list of average TOEFL scores year by year, to find Japan get consistently beaten by unlikely English language rivals such as Afghanistan, Myanmar and yes, North Korea.