Send in the Clown

"Isn't it rich?" asks the song.

The former head of the Asia Division of the CIA's Clandestine Service--the black arm of the world's most sprawling and powerful intelligence service -- cries now to the unblinking heavens that the Administration's removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror hangs the Japanese government out to dry.

Not only will our taking North Korea off the state-sponsored terrorist list strengthen the regime and reward those minimal responses, it is a direct blow to our strongest ally in the region, Japan, which believes it had at least 13 (and possibly dozens more) citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and '80s.

Resolving this abductee issue goes to the fundamental integrity of the Japanese government. If the situation were reversed, and Americans were grabbed off a dark Florida beach by a Cuban patrol boat, we would go to war to bring them home.

But America has pledged to protect Japan in return for the Japanese forgoing offensive arms. Taking the Japanese abductees off the negotiating table while leaving North Korea with its existing weapons may cause Tokyo to question the utility of that pledge. North Korea’s missiles can’t hit us, but Japan is well within the kill zone.

No one should imply that North Korea is an easy nut to crack. Smart folks on both sides of the domestic political aisle have struggled with this challenge. North Korea has shown no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons, and we are unfortunately not in a position to either force or entice it to do so. Despite all the spin out of the talks among the six concerned parties — China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the United States — there is no reason to honestly assume North Korea will ever give up its nuclear capability.

But things are not made any better by pretending that we are making progress, as Washington seems to have decided to do, or by ignoring the real concerns of our allies. Our approach to North Korea calls for a lot more honesty and, in the eyes of those with more at risk, a greater dose of sincerity. There is more at stake here than just North Korean bombs.

One would have thought that telling the Bush Administration in no uncertain terms that wrapping up North Korea inside a package called the Axis of Evil, then having the U.S. military overthrow the government of one member of the Axis, would make it impossible to stop North Korea (and Iran too) from embarking on accelerated nuclear weapons development path.

One would have thought that shutting down A. Q. Khan's clandestine sales network of uranium enrichment technology, part of which purportedly sent a series of care packages to the DPRK, before February 2004 would have been a fantastic thing to do.

Either of those two actions (oh, action...why are you so hard to do?) would have significantly contributed to an increase in Japan's current security.

But I suppose that Mr. Brown had other priorities.

"Resolving this abductee issue goes to the fundamental integrity of the Japanese government."

Give me a break, please.

Resolving the abductee issue goes to the fundamental legitimacy of a certain subdivision within the Japanese political elite, one which is strangely and quite transparently attracted to the purchase and deployment of weapons systems as a means of bringing order and security to East Asia solving Japan's security dilemmas.

Excuse me, Mr. Brown...but what were U.S. taxpayers paying you to do during the 25 years you spent inside the CIA? Oh, I am sure Mr. Brown did his duty.

But since he was one of the principals in the development and implementation of a totally failed set of policies, why can he not maintain a decent silence as his successors try to salvage something from the havoc wreaked?

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Hattip to NP for pointing out this New York Times op-ed to me.

Ask Not For Whom It Tolls

I had sworn to myself I would not write again about L'Affaire Tamamoto.

However, I will break my promise to myself.

At the time of Komori Yasuhisa's attacks on Tamamoto Masaru's character and person and the "suspension" of the JIIA's nascent online essay series "Commentary," apologists excused Ambassador Satō Yukio's caving in to pressure on the grounds that the essays Tamamoto was publishing "were just not very good."

That Tamamoto's effective dismissal (he was madogiwaed) and the effective cancellation of "Commentary" came as the result of his poor judgment over the quality of the essays, not due to his progressive politics.

I would submit, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, for your review, a pair of recent essays from the now properly vetted and reviewed "AJISS Commentary" as evidence:

- Simpleminded or Farsighted? - The US' handling of North Korea

- Japan's Role in a New Paradigm Shift

I am sure you will agree that whatever reasons JIIA may claim compels it to disseminate these two essays, the "quality" of the argument presented is not one of them.

The alarmists were right: the 2006 dispute was very much about politics...and about how close we were to come to witnessing the rise of a very ugly Japan.

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Bell of the Jimmu-ji
Zushi City, Kanagawa Prefecture
July 6, 2008

Mendacity and Hope as Regards Immigration

On blogs and lists, the concern troll is a duplicitous subspecies of the troll. Instead of attacking the values of a person or community directly, the concern troll affects the air of a reasonable, caring person who, despite a great deal of sympathy for the views expressed, has one small problem with the values of the author or other readers. The concern troll then proceeds to advance a reprehensible argument that he or she justifies out of a false concern that the alternative view is simply not viable, either politically or culturally.

On Thursday, July 3, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the country's premier business daily and the Voice of The Establishment, played the concern troll for the entire nation on the subject of immigration.

In an editorial entitled "When the Government is Thinking about Aid for the Education and Training of Foreign Settlers, Thinking About A Human Resources Opening of the Country" (Teijū gaikokujin no kyōiku kunren ni seifu mo shien o, jinzai kaikoku o kangaeru) the editors of the Nikkei wanted to come out and say:

"We do not like the thought of having immigrants coming to Japan to live and work. Period."

They knew, however, that such a bald statement would be seen for what it is: an anachronistic, ethnocentric knee-jerk display of bigotry.

So instead of being upfront about fears that Japan could become a nation of immigrants, the editors expressed their concern -- by presenting a picture of what Japan might become.

For this exercise, they relied on the Liberal Democratic Party's liberal wing for a template.

On June 19 the "Project Team for the Way to An Immigration Nation with Japanese Characteristics" (Nihongata imin kokka e no michi purojekuto chiimu) -- a division of the LDP's national strategy directorate (kokka senryaku honbu) nominally overseen by Kimura Yoshio but widely portrayed as being under the sway of former LDP Secretary-General Nakagawa Hidenao, the LDP's current champion of classical liberalism--suggested that Japan have an immigrant population of at least 10 million, i.e., about 10% of the population , quintupling the current figure, by 2050.

A goal which, given the rate of worker retirements and the low birthrate, and in comparison to European, American and Australian figures, is actually quite modest.

"Aha!" went the shout in the editorial offices of the Nikkei. "So it is 10% foreigner population that is the goal, it it? Hmmm...is there a place in Japan that today has around a 10% foreign population--a microcosm, if you will, of what Japan would be like under this plan?"

Oh, yes. Of course.

"Minokamo City is a city of 55,000 people. About 5900 persons, that is to say about 10.8% of the population, are foreigners, most whom are Brazilians of Japanese ancestry (nikkei brazirujin). Restricting oneself to counting only persons in between the ages of 20 and 29, then one out of four persons in the city is a foreigner. Most are working in Sony Corp. subsidiaries that are manufacturing mobile telephones and digital cameras.

When you go around the corner, what catches your eye are the restaurant signs and garbage separation rules signs, written in Portuguese. Emergency broadcasts in the city are two language, Japanese and Portuguese.

In the public elementary and middle schools, 240 children have foreign nationality. Of those, half cannot understand Japanese. In order to get the children to adjust to student life, the city five years ago established its own classrooms to given instruction on minimal Japanese and Japanese culture. Together with a non-profit organization, it has begun providing Japanese courses for adults too.

What caused the increase in the number of foreigners (gaikokujin) was the 1990 Immigration-Control and Refugee-Recognition Act revision that admitted without limitation persons of Japanese ancestry. It was a means to respond to the dearth of labor during the bubble years. At first most of those taking advantage of the program were temporary workers staying only a short time and then returning home. Now the stays have become lengthy ones, with an increase in the persons inviting their families to come over. At the end of last year the number of Brazilians living in Japan reached 317,000, with 80,000 of them holding permanent residence status (eijūken)."

The editorial goes on from there. It is worth the effort to grab the full text while it is still available.

The above extract nevertheless demonstrates most of the editorial strategies employed.

- Fear of complexity

Rather than coming out and saying, "Immigration would be bad for the cohesion of the nation," the editors instead show how complicated life has become in places where foreigners are numerous--how the city has to print its posters in more than just one language and how emergency messages, announcements that can mean the difference between surviving a disaster or perishing, must be broadcast in two languages.

- Fear of an emerging underclass

A recurring concern theme is how vulnerable the new immigrants are -- half their children cannot function at school, the adults do not have basic life skills. Later on, it talks about how sad it is that companies exploit immigrant workers, who do not know how to or cannot defend themselves against unfair working conditions. Foreigners also do not understand or trust the national healthcare system, leaving them unwilling to seek medical help early on.

- Elision

All throughout this first section and all the way through to the end, the sentences sway effortlessly between foreigners (gaikokujin) persons of Japanese ancestry (nikkeijin) and Brazilians (burajirujin) -- as if these three were interchangeable terms for the same entity.

The net effect of the essay is a profound sense of unease with a strong hint of decay, as if the presence of a proportionally significant populations foreigners in Minokamo and other similar towns in Gunma and Shizuoka has led to communities becoming unhinged. "We are concerned," the editors are hinting, "that what we see in these towns is the future of an immigration nation, where institutions are taxed beyond their limits, where so many cannot integrate themselves into society and where the laws are applied and obeyed only capriciously."

Hinting...but not saying...because the editors know it is a crock.

The disordered situation of Minokamo, Hamamatsu and most other towns with a large number of Brazilian and Peruvian residents is not a consequence of immigration numbers or even immigrant labor --but due to a specific, racist program. The 1990 revision did not open the door wide for immigrants who had specific capabilities, who were enthusiastic about living in Japan or who were escaping from an oppressive or life-threatening political system. It opened the door wide for the admittance of person whose faces, family names and ancestry (blood and semen) would not offend bigots.

The Japanese ancestry readmittance program had nothing to do with immigration--in fact, it was the negation of immigration. In the ideology of the bloodline and the fatherland, the Brazilians and Peruvians were returnees --persons who would fit in in Japan because of their genes, no matter what almost a century of life in Latin America had done to them culturally and psychologically.

That they have not fit in is proof not that entire idea was irrational, racist, unscientific and just plain dumb.

For the purposes of the editors of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, however, the failure of the ethno-centric, racialist program can somehow serve as an emblem of the spectre of an immigrant Japan.

And they are *concerned.*

* * *

The July 3 editorial is a hint of a rapidly widening rift opening up between Japanese multinationals and the small- and medium-sized companies on the subject of immigration.

The multinationals (and the irony of the appellation is not lost on me) are terrified of immigration. Their separate identities are maintained by their vast, seniority-based hierarchies, where loyalty is expected to be lifelong and groupthink is enforced by vast webs of unspoken codes and habitudes. Foreigners simply do not fit in in these structures--they are constantly demand rationality, fairness, honesty and just compensation--demands which are anathema to most managers of Japan's megacorporations (there are exceptions to this--I have met them). If a given multinational has a need to reduce labor costs to remain competitive, then the multinational has the option of simply assigning a non-core task to a foreign subsidiary or foreign supplier. Actual acceptance of foreigners into the core company can be avoided--indeed, one does not even want them living in one's cities and towns because the presence of Others makes things...complicated.

Complicated and distressing.

For medium- and small-sized companiess, the inculcation of lifelong obedience and demand obedience and loyalty from their employees only from the managerial core, which very often is comprised of family members.

More important to medium- and small-sized companies is the simple acquisition of labor, at the lowest cost possible. These companies cannot farm out their labor needs to divisions in other countries--they often do not have such divisions. What they need a way for low-cost labor to come to them.

Hence the split in the revisions of immigration policies advocated by Japan's business lobbies. The big boys of the Nippon Keidanren, while not hostile to immigration, want it to be limited to non-threatening, skilled labor--to educated persons with difficult-to-replicate attributes. This inception of persons with special skills is the kind of immigration that even the Nihon Keizai Shimbun is willing to countenance. I believe it to be the kind of immigration Deborah Milly is talking about in this somewhat jargony piece for CSIS.

By contrast, the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry represents a broader swath of Japan's corporations. It is interested in the legalizing the inception of low-cost, reasonable quality labor -- without caveats or concerns. It does not matter what color the workers skins may be, or that their Japanese is accented or imperfect, or whatever it is they will be doing does not require special skills. If foreign workers are willing to do the job at the wage being offered whilst living in Japan, obeying the laws and adapting as best they can to the unwritten rules of society, then the JCCI wants the government to develop the legal framework making it possible for firms to employ them.

Something for the embassies, trade missions and human rights advocates to keep in mind when investigating "Japan's attitude toward immigration" -- or so I would venture.

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Hat tip the Asia Policy Point newsletter for the link to the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry policy paper.

Thanks also (belated) to D and jam for expressing their views.

A Weekend Away

Evening Light at Morito
(one of the "50 sights of Kanagawa")
Hayama Township, Kanagawa Prefecture
July 6, 2008

Nor anything that is thy neighbors

Let us say you are well-off, pink-hued, native-English speaking citizen of a Security Council P5 country, a country whose mottled history has left its Latin name often prefaced by the word "perfidious." Is there not something a little unseemly about trash talking in a lingua franca publication about Japan's invisibility on the international level?*

Japan goes missing: invisible host at the summit
Financial Times

By Philip Stephens - July 3 2008 19:18 - I have a question. Where is Japan? The world leaders and accompanying media hordes heading this weekend for the shores of Lake Toya need not turn to their atlases. The question is one of psychology rather than geography. Japan is still the world’s second most powerful economy. Politically, it is all but invisible.

(...)

This is all of a piece with its barely visible profile in the global arena. I spend a fair part of my life on the international conference circuit. Never before have governments – of rising as well as mature powers – devoted as much time to peering into their crystal balls in search of a new geopolitical landscape. By and large – I can think of one recent exception – Japan is absent from such events. What is more, Japan's place in the new order rarely merits mention by its peers.

(..)

Scroll back to the late 1980s. Japan was the rising power. Academics and journalists fell over themselves in the rush to predict that its economic might was destined to eclipse that of the US. When foreign policy experts declared that the 21st century would belong to Asia, they were not thinking about China and India.

Politicians in Washington fulminated as Japanese companies snapped up such American icons as New York’s Rockefeller Center and Hollywood's Columbia Pictures. US motorists swapped their Fords and Chevrolets for Toyotas.

And now? Well, western consumers still buy Toyotas; and Sony and Toshiba continue to produce all manner of electronic wizardry. But Japan has become an afterthought in the discourse about the fast-shifting balance of global power. The Asian century is about China and India...

What a wonderful thing it must be to be on the international conference circuit, on expenses-paid junkets from one hotel suite to the next, bumping into individuals as well-coiffed as oneself and, oddly, also on expenses-paid junkets; everyone milling about in hotel lobbies and banquet halls, reading from Powerpoint slides and thinking the big thoughts--never once feeling shame at the hard-earned money of citizens and end consumers supporting all this largesse being shoveled over to persons already rich!

Fie on you parasites! And blwklwdtmp on your thoughts!

First, as a point of rhetoric, can we quit it with the "Japan was a monster in the 1980s" comparative? It has been twenty years since the superwealth of the 1980s was exposed as a mirage, the result of some rather creative accounting by companies and dumb policy moves by the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance. How can a columnist in the world's premier economics daily hearken back to the 1980s as if they were the salad days of Japanese dominance? (Oh, I know he caveats later in the text--but why bring it up at all if it it was mostly a sham?)

As for Japan's political invisibility and its being "an afterthought in the discourse about the fast-shifting balance of global power" - consider this: Japan did the stomping-all-about-the-globe-my-civilization-is-ahead-of-yours-so-I-know-what-is-good-for-you thing -- and lost.

Having lost the war, and finding itself in a neighborhood where everybody not only hated Japan but also had a different political system, democratic Japan learned to keep its head above water and its nose out of other people's business.

So Japan is not an active player the new imperium game, engaging itself in "the discourse about the fast-shifting balance of global power." So it prefers to stay on the sidelines as the new great powers clash.

This is bad?

So many on the international cocktail conference circuit seem to have bought into the rhetoric flashed by a tiny circle of English-language speaking imperial restoration wingers -- because it interlocked so well with their own plans :

"Oh, I know they say naughty things about the Chinese people and the War sometimes but to their credit they understand the world as it really is--the noontime buffet is being sponsored by EADS? Oh, BP. They're doing good stuff with solar, aren't they? Boy, the Russians giving them a time, eh? So EADS is tomorrow. Good. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yes, they know that the world is nasty, brutish and on the edge of chaos, demanding our attention, munificence and strong will."

The revisionists promised the conference circuit moochers veterans an upswelling of popular support for their realignment of Japan's habits and thoughts, making the Japanese people "proud" again, able to seize their "rightful place" in the international community and shoulder the burdens of an advanced nation.

But no.

Meiji is dead.

The covetousness--the horrible, gnawing desire "to have what other countries have" or just take for oneself, no matter the consequences -- the desire to acquire the trappings of power that drove both the early Meiji consensus and the later Great East Asian Co-prosperity consensuses -- that covetousness is restricted today to a hollow-eyed, empty-pupiled minority whose dreams of power and status are judged by decent folk to be unseemly.

Few in the Land of the Rising Sun dream of power and status as their ancestors did. Many if not most have found their own version of the Tenth Commandment, desiring only to get along. The limits of their purportedly ignoble existence are narrow: Study, Graduate, Work, Marry, Grow Old, Receive a Pension and Die in Bed.

Little point is there in clawing and scratching down down the road to glory.

Indeed, to even want to do so is a sin.

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

* If you have something nasty to say about another country, make sure it is translated into the language of the people you are dumping on.

Not Half Bad

On August 1, 2007, Richard Katz and Peter Ennis published an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine featuring predictions for the upcoming Diet sessions in the aftermath of the LDP/New Kōmeitō wipeout in the July 27 House of Councillors election.

Aside from failing to predict the physical collapse of Abe Shinzō (who could have done that?) the two gentlemen did a commendable job of prognostication, methinks.

Nota Bene - If you are wondering where the "near-zero returns on the savings accounts that the elderly use to buy daily necessities" comes from, it is Mr. Katz's contribution to the discipline. Nothing makes him happier than winding it up, putting it on the floor and watching it roll about.

I have always waited for someone, preferably ancient and weather-worn, to rasp, "That's very nice Richard...but if my mind and memory have not gone completely dim, have we not been stuck in deflation for the past decade?"

The Bust Up

TH - Hashimoto. I always thought it would be Hiranuma.
MC - It's the smart move. Hashimoto was always smarter.

So it begins.

Hashimoto issues call to create new party
The Japan Times

By Setsuko Kamiya, Staff Writer - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - Former Kochi Gov. Daijiro Hashimoto said Tuesday he will form a political group with an eye to creating a new political party that will work to decentralize governmental power.

Hashimoto, a half brother of the late Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto said he hopes to launch the new party in time for the next Lower House election.

"People's lives do not exist in the Nagata-cho or Kasumigaseki districts," said Hashimoto, referring to the neighborhoods where the Diet and the government bureaucracy are situated. "They exist in the local communities. This system where the central government controls everything needs to be exterminated."

Hashimoto said his policy plan works to transfer more tax revenue and administrative power to local governments while leaving responsibility for international affairs and national security in the hands of the central government. He also said the central government should shape the policies for ensuring people's livelihoods and boosting economic growth...

Now the let's-make-a-deal, so-it's policy-you-wants free-for-all starts.

Hiranuma Takeo, the Sith Lord of Japanese politics, should be kicking himself with a booted foot. His announcement of the formation of a new party, long threatened, was supposed to trigger the avalanche of realignment.

Instead, he gets pipped by Hashimoto Daijirō, one of the most consistently popular politicians around, pushing for deregulation--a subject which he, a former governor, actually cares about--unlike some commissions we could mention.

What a Hashimoto-led party lacks in strength right now it can more than make up in sense later. From all indications, Hashimoto understands decentralization, both why it is necessary and how it should be done.

Whether sensible policies sensibly carried out can be an electoral winner is a question. The national injury sob story of the revisionist right tugs at the heartstrings of persons on either side of the urban vs. rural divide, the most obvious social division in the archipelago. It has a proven track record as a vote-getter on the national scale.

For at least today, however, the "Hiranuma Conservative Party" spectre has to cede the camera to a less maudlin political project. If the announcement of the formation of Hiranuma's party comes too soon after this announcement, it could even be portrayed as a "rushed response to the Hashimoto challenge."

Hiranuma, who has been noodling about in round after round of ryotei politics, discussing realignment with Japan New Party leader Watanuki Tamisuke and New Daichi Party leader Suzuki Muneo over very expensive meals in exclusive traditional eateries, has blown his chance to be the first out of the blocks.

Then again, a person with an obvious contempt for so many would hardly understand the concept of product rollout and the importance of being first-to-market, now would he?

Later - Oh darn. Tobias Harris of Observing Japan has been bitten by the classic American film bug too.

Faulty (Thoughts About Cooling) Towers

A letter writer to the Financial Times today hammers home a point about the highly publicized demolition of the cooling tower of the Yongbyon reactor:

Graphite-moderated reactors next to rivers do not need a cooling tower.

The Box on the Euphrates, a likely side project of the DPRK's nuclear engineers, certainly was constructed so as to never need one (look at p. 22-27).

And since steam rising from the tower used to be one of the key ways that specialists could tell the reactor was in use...if the powers that be in Pyongyang ever decide to take off the plastic wrap...

I guess the whispered operative phrase around Kasumigaseki and Akasaka Icchōme nowadays is:

"Just don't talk about the river."

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The full Yongbyong reactor disablement gallery is visible here.

Worry as one always must with the DPRK, the site nevertheless looks pretty damn forlorn.

Restaurant at the End of the Liberal Democratic Party

Oh, Amaterasu, no.

When I watched Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Ibuki Bunmei do his imaginary tray and chopsticks routine late last year, I thought the performance a spur-of-the-moment attempt at illustration which had veered wildly out of his control.

It turns out that operating a traditional eatery is his template for living:

Current LDP Secretary General Bunmei Ibuki outshines others with a book displaying his cooking expertise.

Titled "Ibuki Tei Shikino Shokutaku" ("Four-Season Dining Table at Ibuki Inn"), the book is a compilation of essays on his cooking prowess and ideas on foods.

Get this man an apron...and get him out of the Secretary-General's office.

Please.

July's Song - "Marshmallow" live

A seriously twisted 2002 performance of Okuda Tamio's paen to obliviousness by a pickup supergroup featuring Okuda on drums (taking his consistent homage to Sir Paul McCartney a little too far, perhaps?) Yano Akiko (the former Mrs. Sakamoto Ryūichi - eight years in divorce court...no comment) on keyboards, the rather weird chanteuse Onuki Taeko and fairly normal Miyazawa Kazufumi (he who gave karaoke "Shima Uta") on guitars and the old man Suzuki Keiichi on bass.

Okuda sure loves Sixties musical motifs and moods. The weird thing? He was born in '65 -- he has no memories of the time.

June's song is“Marshmallow” performed by Okuda Tamio and friends, on YouTube here.