Uncharitable Thoughts about a Suicide

As the year came to a close, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs all of a sudden felt a great need to prove that it too could act in a fashion inimical to Japan's interests. With the prime minister's, the chief cabinet secretary's and the foreign minister's repeated provocative statements and the PM's "I'm just an average guy" visit to Yasukuni in late 2005, another year of the Asia Bureau's best efforts (Full Disclosure - I have an annual karaoke outing with Sasae Ken'ichiro) were evidently ruined.

"Might as well just pile on," must have been the MOFA bureaucracy's conclusion.

Otherwise, it is difficult to comprehend what the good ministry was trying to achieve in holding a press conference complaining about Chinese internal security officer's involvement in the suicide of a Japanese diplomat in Shanghai over a year ago.

MOFA certainly could not have been expecting a damburst of remorse flooding out from the Chinese Foreign Ministry in response.

As matters stand, MOFA looks pretty foolish. One of its officers took his life because he was being blackmailed about a sexual relationship he was having/had had with a Chinese woman in violation of...well, what, we do not know. We are not being told the man's name out of concern for his privacy. Forgive for being rude, but if I do not know a person's name, his standing or his story, my concern for him is minimal. Unless he betrayed Japan, my concern is for him is indeed non-existent...and if he betrayed his country, then myconcern shifts to contempt.

If your lust leaves you liable to be blackmailed into betraying your country—do not double your failure by blaming the blackmailer for doing his job.

And if you are the employer of the one with the wandering eye (among other body parts), blaming the blackmailer's employer only makes you look like an idiot for employing the wayward one in the first place.