Sitting On The Dock Of The Harbour

Funny thing about going to places rather than just reading about them is that by just walking around one can learn that which one should perhaps have known but never came across en la vie virtuelle.

Take for example the fine vessel pictured below -- which one can come across if one takes a walk around Sydney's breathtakingly glitzy Darling Harbour. With its shark teeth bow and camouflage paint job, it fits right in with the French fountain display, the graphic laser and 3-D light shows playing across all the buildings at night, the casino and every ersatz high brow, demeaning and incredibly high-priced tourist trap one can imagine.



The S.S. Sam Simon is the fourth and most recent addition to the Antarctic expedition fleet of the Sea Shepherd Society. That one would see this vessel berthed in Australian harbor should not surprise one. After all it was the Australian government that filed the successful International Court of Justice case against Japan's JARPA II Southern Ocean research whaling program.

What is surprising for a dweller of the northern hemisphere is where the Sam Simon is berthed: the pier of Australia's National Maritime Museum. To the right of the Sam Simon is the stern, for example, of the retired H.M.A.S. Vampire, the last of Australia's big gun warships and a part of the Museum's permanent collection.

It is not as though the relationship between an official Australian national museum and Sea Shepherd is a secret (Link). Nevertheless is is freakish that one buys the ticket to tour an ostensibly piratical vessel at the ticket booth of the museum built to commemorate Australia's water-borne heritage.

Australian sympathies as regards the killing of cetaceans are on display at the Museum. It is hosting not one but two exhibitions on whales, while in its little theater the Museum is running a National Geographic produced documentary on dolphins.

Do not call it overkill.

The other facet of the story I did not know -- and which shows either Sea Shepherd's delicious sense of irony, its appreciation for fine ship engineering, or both -- is that the Sam Simon was built in IHI shipyards for the Japanese government. Completed in 1993, it was christened the Seifu Maru (清風丸) and was -- and this is where the irony gets thick -- a scientific research vessel under the control of the Japan Meteorological Agency. It was decommissioned in 2010, bought in a private sale and reemerged on the oceans as the Sam Simon in 2012.

So in the Sam Simon we have a Japanese scientific research vessel, once used for actual research (in a curiously brief 17 year career) careening round the southern ocean pursuing and impeding the actions of the vessels of Japan's highly subsidized and completely bogus research whaling program.

---------------

Looking upon the Sam Simon, embraced and celebrated by the organization tasked with preserving Australia's ocean-going lore, and upon the bottomless punchbowl party of the Australian economy of the last 20 years, turbo-charged as it has been by China's voracious demand for Australia's minerals and hydrocarbons, one senses that whatever Abe Shinzo & Company's plans may be for a union of maritime democracies to resist Chinese expansionism in the Western Pacific, getting Australia on board is going to be a daunting, if not a futile, task.

Which illuminates the scary stupidity of the Abe Cabinet's not telling Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa to just shut his mouth about a restart of a reformed JARPA II and its not telling Minister Amari Akira to stop dribbling the ball and just shoot for the goal in the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations.


Later - And in the more immediate future, Abe-san should not be stupid and offer Soryu-class submarines (Link)  at a discount "because we're friends." Make the offer to Mr. Abbott at full retail price; it's all Chinese money anyway.

Prime Minister Abe On Facebook

The Asahi Shimbun insists that we pay for English language content (Link). Non-Japanese speakers have had to therefore wait for Toko Sekiguchi's account to learn about the Prime Minister's losing it when Tanaka Hitoshi chided the Abe administration for creating the impression of a rightward tilt in Japanese politics.

Japan PM Facebook Foray Draws Allies, Arguments
JapanRealTime

In the year since he opened his Facebook account, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has embraced the social media site in a way that's unlike any of his predecessors, praising it as a direct channel to the public...

[snip]

In a newspaper interview, Hitoshi Tanaka, an ex-diplomat who played a crucial role in the negotiations between Tokyo and Pyongyang over the return in 2002 of five Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970s, voiced his concern that the prime minister’s recent comments on wartime history and his push to revise the constitution were being perceived as Japan's "rightward tilt" by the international community.

Mr. Abe went on the offensive on his Facebook page, reminding his nearly 367,000 "followers" and some 4,800 "friends" that Mr. Tanaka claimed 11 years ago that the abductees should be eventually returned to North Korea as initially agreed to with Pyongyang. Mr. Abe called Mr. Tanaka's decision then "a decisive mistake for a diplomat," dismissing him as "unqualified to speak about diplomacy."

(Link)

Right off the bat, though it was a non-sequitur, the prime minister was right about Tanaka's having been wrong about returning the abductees to North Korea. For the North Koreans to get double-crossed in a brutal, calculating way -- by the Japanese, of all people -- taught Pyongyang to not underestimate the mental tenacity of opponents -- a lesson the new DPRK leadership has, over the course of this last year, seemingly had to learn all over again.

More important, however, is what Abe's lashing out at critics has shown about his character.

First, that despite all the buffing from the message masters at home and allies in Washington, Abe remains insecure and reactionary, with an ability to descend into name calling when challenged. (Link)

Second, that those closest to him still think him a child:

Other lawmakers weighed in on the row. Economy Minister Akira Amari tried to downplay the round of name-calling, explaining this week that the 58-year-old prime minister is a "hot-blooded youth" whose endless duties have left him high-strung.

Amari, who has been gaffe-central in the Abe Cabinet through his inexplicable desire to tell the truth behind the fictions (Link) may have finally talked himself out of a job, post-House of Councillors election, with this last unhelpful "explanation."

Abe is 58 years old and prime minister. That he could still be, in the eyes of those closest to him, a "hot-blooded youth," should give everyone pause.

How much the Facebook posts actually reflect Abe's thinking, and how much is the product of pugnacious, defensive aides (and I am looking at you, Seko Hiroshige) hiding behind the PM whilst lobbing metaphorical bombs at "oppositionists" (Link), is a reasonable question.

Third, there is nothing more delicious than Abe being told by Koizumi Shinjiro, a man half the PM's age, to conduct himself in manner more becoming to his office.

Fourth and finally, someone might want to write about how the denizens of this famous land still, at this late stage of the game, lose themselves in social media -- lolling about in the ids they keep so hidden in other forms of discourse.

While we are on the subject of politicians and Facebook, can someone who knows Democratic Party of Japan leader Kaieda Banri tell him that it is OK to remove scurrilous and irrelevant comments from his Facebook page? It may be a sign of a noble character to suffer the slings and arrows of every single lunatic who spews out his venom, then hits the "send" button. However, no one should have to tolerate the vile abuse being dumped on Kaieda's posts.