There Is A Reason They Call It Rocket Science

One can have ideological blinders on and keep warning all and sundry about death raining down from above and drumming up fears about the silly mockups of ICBMs the DPRK government put on parade on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung...or one can read Markus Schiller and Robert H. Schmucker.

Regarding the mockups:

"A Dog and Pony Show" (Link 1)

Regarding the internal structure and the engineering limits of purported ICBMs, if someone ever tried to build an actual missile looking like the ones paraded:

"The Assumed KN-08 Technology" (Link 2)

That "woof" sound you just hear after you finish reading the two papers is the editorial offices of the Sankei Shimbun undergoing spontaneous diurnal combustion.

Both papers come via the good graces of Dr. Jeffrey Lewis and Arms Control Wonk.

Because I'm Bad

There is all kinds of bad writing about this blessed land.

There is put up a straw man and knock it down bad, mated with the ethically questionable reworking of what should have been an interview into an op-ed bad. (Link)

There is I-am-a-world-renowned-social-scientist-who-has-previously-written-about-Japan-from-a-scientific-angle-but-for-this-article-I-just-do-not-have-the-time-to-do-the-research bad. (Link)

The article's redeeming feature? Brutal honesty about its own shortcomings:

"In the absence of rigorous sociological polling, I’ll summarize interviews that Japanese friends have conducted for me."

Wow! Call such a methodology what you will...but duplicitous it ain't.

And then there is fishing for grants and fellowships bad, piggybacked on promoting a new book with a new paradigm bad. (Link)

As for the above, the first thing for the authors to do is research what a weathervane does. They might find that a weathervane follows the wind; it does not point out the direction in which the wind will be blowing.

Having learned about weathervanes, they perhaps can get their historical progressions going in their proper directions.

As for their prognostications about this blessed land's steps to joining a New West, mixing the culinary with the architectural is poor form. A tossed salad should be presented as a tossed salad: it is not the outlines and suggestions of a building.

The Night The Lights Stayed On

Shingetsu News has a tongue-in-cheek report on the shutdown of the Tomari #3 reactor for routine maintenance, as seen from Shinjuku's Kabuki-cho.

(Link)

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Missed Something Here

Those in the know, whoever you are, could you explain when koi became, in the words of Yuri Kageyama of AP:

Thousands of Japanese marched to celebrate the switching off of the last of their nation's 50 nuclear reactors Saturday, waving banners shaped as giant fish that have become a potent anti-nuclear symbol.

(Link)

Except for the coincidental occurrence of the shutdown of the Tomari #3 reactor on the Tango no Sekku holiday, is there some other reason heretofore not widely stated for carp streamers or the giant images of any other fish being "potent anti-nuclear" symbols? Please let me know in comments.

Furthermore, is it not a wee bit misleading to refer to a crowd of 5,500 in Tokyo as "thousands of Japanese"? A crowd of 5,500 is less than five Odakyu express trains pulling into Shinjuku.

By the way, this week's heavy rains wiped out the display of Japan's largest koi nobori (J), trimmed parades and eliminated numerous scheduled outdoor celebrations of spring (J) -- as well as a hacking out an unhealthy chunk of the seasonal revenues of major tourist sites.


Later - Here are some anti-nuclear protest/celebration crowd figures from other major cities:

Sapporo: 450
Nagoya: 250
Osaka: 600
Fukuoka: 50

Update On Nobody Pays Retail

In order to check the figures in my post of the other day, I took a detour to the rice section of my local supermarket. I found that I had been too generous in my quoted figures. Uonuma Koshi Hikari, the most prized rice, was 3480 yen for the 5 kilo bag, not 3850 as I had remembered it. As for the low price substitute, the supermarket had 5 kilo bags of Koshi Hikari from other parts of Niigata Prefecture, the prefecture reputed to grow the best rice, for 2180 yen, well below the 2850 figure I quoted for what are less popular strains of rice from less-well-regarded growing areas.

All this fact-checking was possibly for naught, however. The comments section of my earlier post offers a revelation of spicy duplicity, which, upon reflection, is an obvious bit of cheatin' in order to stick it to the The Man Back At HQ.

Chaos Awaits

Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko managed to slip out of town over the weekend, leaving to Deputy Prime Minister Okada Tatsuya, Loose Cannon Sengoku Yoshito, Environment Minister Hosono Goshi and State Minister for Reconstruction Hirano Tatsuo the unpleasant and somewhat Sisyphean job of trying to convince regional governors and city officials that restarting the Oi Power Plants #3 and #4 reactors is a simply smashing idea. During his absence from Tokyo, the PM managed to slip in and out of the United States without creating much of a fuss or an impression (E - yes, I am aware of the shortcomings of the source). Luckily at the summit, where the PM would normally face probing questions as to what the government of this blessed land will do to initiate the move of Marine Corps elements from Futenma to a replacement facility at Henoko in Nago City, got completely lost in the strategic and human rights nightmare of the Chen Guangcheng Affair, which has so far managed, in remarkable thoroughness, to make everyone including Chen looking bereft of any sort of long-range thinking.

After these two immaculate escapes from tight spots, Noda will be returning to Tokyo, leaving behind only the impression of a heretofore unremarked-upon bulk: "For a Japanese PM, this guy has some weight to throw around."

The Impenetrable One returns to an ambiguous situation in the Diet. The business in the House of Councillors should be grinding to a halt due to the Liberal Democratic Party's boycott of all Diet official business, including committee meetings. Unfortunately for the LDP, however, its electoral and Diet business partner the New Komeito has elected to continue participating in House of Councillors affairs, straining the strong relationship between the LDP and the New Komeito and putting immense pressure on the easily exasperated and not particularly creative LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu to craft a bridge to his erstwhile allies.

Meanwhile, withing the DPJ, the question of Ozawa Ichiro's reinstatement to full party membership awaits. It is not really much of a question: with his trial over, a not-guilty verdict and no chance of the prosecutors refiling charges -- double jeopardy being one of the "Surprise, I Still Got Ya" deviations this blessed land makes from the practices of The Greater Mentor -- the United States -- nothing stands in the way of his reinstatement.

[As regards double jeopardy, I can still remember the look of open-mouthed disbelief on Liberal Democratic Party bigwig Muraoka Kanezo's face when he was told he had been reindicted for his part in the Hashimoto Dental Association Affair. "How is that possible?" he asked, incredulous, his certitude collapsing. He was found guilty in the prosecutors office's second attempt to put him away.]

What Ozawa will do once he is reinstated is the big question. The news media, having the incentive to make politics seem far more exciting than it is, have been predicting that Ozawa, with his allies clustered closely about him rather than loosely as they were in his days of exile, will run rampant through party politics, threatening to withhold their votes on marquee policies such as the enabling legislation for the imposition of a doubling of the consumption tax and for the framework allowing Japan to begin preliminary talks on joining the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.

Truth is, that even despite the suspension, Ozawa and his allies were running pretty rampant before Ozawa's acquittal was handed down on April 26 (one with an implicit warning to Ozawa that the case against him was not proven, that he was not necessarily not guilty of violations of law, only not guilty of the charges under which he had been tried). That they were unable to derail the prime minister's program of imposing the tax, when solid economic arguments against its imposition were available, shows that the Ozawa team is not quite the machine it is purported to be.

As for Ozawa leading his team of intra-party commandos in a torpedoing the Noda Program (and if anyone can tell me what that might be, please leave a comment below), the man in the surgical mask has always done most of his work at home, where no one can see him or out in the countryside. His attendance record at the Diet and at DPJ functions is abysmal.

Getting his suspension lifted will likely not have much of an effect on Ozawa's activities, especially with 77% of the voters (Kyodo news poll of April 28-29) thinking that despite his acquittal, he still has an obligation to go before the Diet and explain the creative accounting practices of his aides and what, if anything, was going on in his name.

Noda himself must face the wrath of the voters, seemingly dismayed by the government's eagerness to restart the Oi reactors, despite a majority of the voters in the cities and prefectures surrounding the plant opposing the restart as premature. The voters of surrounding communities, ones who have not been bought off over the decades by jobs at the plants, top-class public facilities and services and direct subsidies, find that restarting reactors that are guaranteed safe to operate for the most part (omune ni) is an unacceptably qualified state of affairs. Voters around the nation seem to share these feelings. While the Oi restart cannot be directly linked to the loss of public confidence in the government and the DPJ in April (bloody uninquisitive pollsters...) the restart was the only of two significant rows to break out during the month in question.

That the popularity numbers for the Cabinet are poor is a matter of opinion. I have have argued before that the best an active prime minister can hope for is around 30%, after the initial burst of post-election popularity has dissipated. The Noda Cabinet's current reading of 29%, down two points from the March reading of 31% is relatively good in light of the extremely controversial policies (the consumption tax, the reactor restarts) the government is pursuing.

What is in inescapable is that the popularity numbers for the Democratic Party of Japan are dire and that April was a catastrophic month for the party. To the all important question, "What party will you cast your vote for on the proportion ballot in the next House of Councillors election?" the party-by-party numbers for April 28-29 were as below, with the previous month's figures are in [ ].

DPJ 13.2% [20.0]
LDP 22.7% [23.3]
Your Party 6.0% [7.3]
New Komeito 3.6% [4.2]
Japan Communist Party 3.4% [2.7]
Sunrise Party 1.3% [0.8]
Democratic Socialist Party 0.9% [0.3%]
Japan New Party 0.8% [0.6]
Other 2.3% [3.0]

None Of The Above 46.1% [37.4]

In addition to the pell-mell efforts to restart the Oi reactors, the DPJ's ugly and very public internal battles over the consumption tax likely did little to foster confidence in the party's leadership abilities. Internal debate is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when real compromises are weighed and consequences of decisions considered. Just saying "No" to what the other side is suggesting, however, is a sure way to make your assembly look like an overgrown and overpaid PTA.

The real winner in the month of acrimony was, as is seemingly the case with increasing frequency "None of these b___ds" - which pulled in 46% of the vote, up a whopping 9% from the readings a month earlier.

The goals for the Noda Cabinet and the DPJ, if it can hold together as a party, are clear:

- articulate the reasons why the Cabinet sees raising taxes as a necessity

- continue to find ways of driving wedges in between the New Komeito and the LDP

- hope that after exerting every possible effort to restart the Oi reactors and other reactors feeding into the grid served by Kansai Electric Power (KEPCO), their efforts fail.

The last is a cynical but seemingly necessary failure of the imposition of national will over local governmental authorities. Any responsible national government, looking at the predicted shortfalls of generating power in the Kansai, would be proceeding as the Noda government has proceeded. The politicians and the citizens of the Kansai region, particularly the voters of Osaka City and their mayor, Hashimoto Toru, have perversely been those most opposed to the restart of the reactors, despite KEPCO's assertions that it faces a crushing lack of generating capacity of nearly 20% this summer. (J)

Hashimoto and the voters of Osaka have a deep mistrust of KEPCO, extending back to last year. KEPCO's management has been far from transparent about its power capacity and rate calculations. However, this blessed land dodged a bullet last year, the summer being rather mild and the nation's tolerance for energy saving being exceptionally high. This year may be very different, and will almost certainly be most different not in the capital region or the region hardest hit by the earthquakes and tsunami but in the Kansai and Hokkaido, where the power companies were most deeply committed to nuclear power.

Should Hashimoto and other local leaders persist in hampering the restarts of reactors, and the resulting lack of power generating capacity lead to blackouts, either planned or unplanned, the Kansai's current regionalist challenge to Tokyo control will be severely damaged. Hashimoto's political ambitions may indeed be seriously set back, if the government can pin the blame for the power cuts on him, saying, "We told you so, we told you so, we told you so...and you just would't listen."

A brutal political calculus, perhaps. One that even could lead to some persons actually dying for lack of electricity. However, the blame squarely lies on the ambition and blindness of Hashimoto and his ilk, willing to ride a populist wave, even if it leads to disaster.

Constitution Day Readings

It is Constitution Day. The front page stories are about specific Articles of the Constitution. It is otherwise a slow news day, aside from the complete bordel of the Chen Guangcheng affair. On television, the revisionists and the anti-revisionists are slugging it out (on NHK it's Morimoto Satoshi versus Egawa Shoko in a no-holds barred death match. As she is the crusader who took on Aum Shinrikyo and survived, my money is on Egawa).

Michael Auslin has a new essay up at Foreign Policy riffing on the Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's semi-summit (no dinner?) with President Barack Obama, the face-saving agreement signed at the last minute regarding redeployment of U.S. forces currently on Okinawa, the changes in Japan's positions on arms exports and the U.S.-drafted Constitution.  (Link).  It is a reality-based piece, noting what are real changes in the way this blessed land has interpreted the limits set by Article 9. 

I am afraid though, that Auslin goes too far by mentioning two subjects one should not bring up in polite company: the F-35 and Abe Shinzo.  The F-35 program is imploding under its own weight (E) and one observer even declares the plane a threat to the Japan-U.S. alliance . It would be unseemly of me to say I told you so... but I told you so.

As for former prime minister Abe Shinzo, the wiser course remains to pretend he never happened. Even his good ideas are not being copied.

To every Auslin, who knows something about the Constitution and how difficult it would be to alter it, there are a passel commentators blessedly ignorant of it.

The winner of this year's I Don't Know Me No Constitution Award goes to the milbloggers at TIME magazine, who are making this something of a bad habit.

Where to begin when a post begins with this humdinger of an assertion?

The prospect of U.S. and Japanese troops fighting side by side in the next land war in Asia — and heaven forbid the need for either — comes a step closer with a little-noted provision in U.S. realignment plans announced last week.

(Link)

"Fighting side by side in the next land war in Asia" - takes the breath away, does it not?

Yes, I have noticed that the motto of the milblogs of TIME magazine is "Where military intelligence is not a contradiction in terms."

That Southern Sort Of Sanity

Usually the thought of a National Bureau of Asian Research interview of a director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy would send me running for the hills.

However, the NBR interview with Rory Metcalf is a worthwhile read, realist in the most positive sense of that loaded word. (Link)

I must confess a particular affinity for one of Metcalf's propositions, though my heart knows it to be little more than a vain wish:

And certainly the closer the Australia-U.S. alliance becomes, the more confident Canberra should feel in offering candid counsel to Washington about Asia policy.

I had always hoped that the government of this blessed land might play a such a role in its dealings with the United States, that of the friend who grabs the other friend's shoulder and says, "Will you please just calm down and consider the repercussions, for just one second, before you react?"

Having the world's second largest economy and a significant capacity to carry out soft power initiatives should have given this blessed land enough leverage to stand its ground and talk sense to the United States, when the United States, for its own internal domestic political reasons could not make sense of a situation. However, strategic confusion within this blessed land as regards its neighborhood, with the right wing ramping up the DPRK abductees issue and fears of strategic abandonment over Futenma to the point where intelligent debate over Japan's own position in the world was driven to the fringes, quashed the development of an intellectual alternative to whatever-the-United-States-says-as-long-as-we-do-not-have-to-provide-troops bureaucratic default response to any of the world's crises.

Of course, internal strategic confusion was only half of the problem. The U.S. prides itself as the defender of democratic values. However, the sheer size of the U.S. security apparatus means those values do not necessarily extend to the U.S. listening to what any of its friends and allies say. The size of Japan's population and economy could have made this blessed land a worthwhile sounding board for the saner minds in Washington, However, the relationship between Japan and the U.S. was and is radically asymmetric, with the U.S. committed to the defense of Japan while Japan is not committed to the defense of the United States. Japanese expressions of caution would have fallen on deaf ears.

A similar asymmetry exists in the Australia-U.S. relationship. Given Australia's intense economic integration with the People's Republic of China and its diplomatic relations with the DPRK, Canberra should and does have a different and useful take on the politico-economic development of East Asia, one the U.S. could profit from if its government and non-government players choose to listen. Unfortunately, because the U.S. is such a disproportionately huge presence not just in the region but around the globe, it will likely refuse to listen to advice, no matter how sound. "Shut up and take our Marines," will be the response from the Washington echo chamber, where flexibility and patience are not considered the worthwhile counsels of serious thinkers.

Can Someone Else Write This Post, Please?

There is a blog post that probably should be written about a micro-abomination committed by the Asia Society against the reputation of this blessed land.

You have to start with this bit of text on the Asia Society's blog (Link) by Shreeya Sinha. Her bio is displayed to the right of the text.

The text tries to justify the Asia Society awarding a grant to videographer Okahara Kosuke, who has produced a documentary following the lives of six women who cut themselves. The text claims that self-injury is a major social problem among women in Japan, which unfortunately for Ms. Sinha, is untrue.  We know this is so because an article in the journal Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences finds:

The present study clarified that 9.9% of junior and senior high-school students (male, 7.5%; female, 12.1%) reported a lifetime experience of deliberate self-injury at least once. These findings confirm our previous studies using a small sample, which reported that the prevalence of self-injury in male and female junior high-school students was 8.0% and 9.3%5 and that 14.3% of female senior high-school students reported self-cutting at least once. The present results also appear to be approximately consistent to the prevalence of self-injury in other countries: 11.2% of female high-school students in the UK, 12%of female university students in the USA, 13.9% of Canadian adolescents, although only Turkish high-school students had a higher prevalence of self-injury (21.4%).

A hat tip has to be given to Mark McDonald, a writer from The New York Times Rendezvous blogs, whose post on the Asia Society's display of Okahara's work links to the journal Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences article, even though the findings therein undermine the assertion that Japanese young women engage in self-injury at rates that are somehow aberrant.

Getting back to the text by Ms. Sinha, she makes a real go of proving the unprovable by offering a citation (Link).  Unfortunately for Ms. Sinha (I repeat myself) the citation is a secondhand report from a self-published sex memoir of a Jamaican-American former English teacher entitled -- and here would be an excellent place to toss in an "and I am not making this up" -- Black Passenger Yellow Cabs: Of Exile and Excess in Japan. That the citation misspells the name of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and offers no clue as to where one can find the study cited is hardly noticeable in a paragraph where the first sentence has the former teacher claiming to have had sexual relations with 40 women in his first three years in Japan and 20 more after his retirement from playing the field (his italics, not yours or mine).

Having navigated through this jaw-dropping passage, you might want to work in the Abe Shinzo quote the Society is so proud to display on its website:

"The Asia Society has been playing an important role in deepening ties and understanding among the peoples of Asia-Pacific and the United States. I truly expect the Asia Society will enhance this role for furthering the region's stability and prosperity."

Those with some stamina might want to double back to work on the second half of the McDonald Rendezvous post, where he visits with the hikikomori phenomenon, this in order to rekindle the debate on whether or not the hikikomori exist as a statistical or clinical entity.

So, whoever you are, please write this post -- because, frankly typing, I just cannot bring myself to do it.

Nobody Pays Retail

These, according to Business Week, are the prices one pays for goods in Tokyo:

No. 1 Most Expensive City: Tokyo
Quick lunch: $20.80
Beer at a bar: $10.56
Kilogram of rice: $9.80
Dozen eggs: $4.50
Movie theater ticket: $23.80

(Link)

Has anyone ever paid these amounts, even at 80 yen to the dollar, except in Azabu-Juban or at inside an international-class hotel?

The highest class Koshi Hikari from Uonuma in Niigata-ken (Niigata connoisseurs prefer rice from Sadogashima, but that is another story) costs me 3850 yen for the 5 kilo bag at my local supermarket, which works out to $9.63 at 80 yen to the dollar.

But I never buy Uonuma Koshi Hikari. I might accept it as a gift but I would never buy it myself. I am more than happy with Akita Komachi at 2580 yen or Tochigi Koshi Hikari at 2850 yen per 5 kilo bag. However, even these I prefer to buy on sale, which they are at least once a month.

A dozen eggs at $4.50? First of all, you cannot buy eggs in a dozen, not formally: eggs in this blessed land come in packages of ten -- as they should in any country with a commitment to the decimal system. Second, the most expensive eggs at my supermarket come in at 298 yen for a package, which if you upped it to a dozen, then divided by 80 yen to the dollar, comes to $4.47.

Whisper close, but again, I baulk at buying eggs at 298 a package. Eggs at 258 yen for 10 is my speed.

The same holds true for almost every price one sees quoted in these lists, whether they are compiled by ECA International, The Economist Intelligence Unit or whomever. Whenever sees the prices residents in the blessed must supposedly pay, even in high-priced Tokyo, one suspects that the test shoppers made at least one trip to Meiji-ya in Hiro, which is like calculating fruit costs based on a trip to Senbiki-ya -- something one does to get a good laugh, not a serious result.

Even if one drops the likely cost-skewing culprits -- the aforementioned Meiji-ya, Nisshin World Delicatessen and Mitsukoshi (for clothes, perfume and accessories) -- nobody ever pays retail for anything. There is always a coupon, a time-limited sale, a price for employees of keiretsu ally or, if one is willing to gamble a little, a low-cost alternative source.

The gamble sometimes does not pay off, as the unfortunate passengers on a Tokyo Disneyland-bound bus found out in horrifying way on Friday (E). The regular fare on a JR expressway point-to-point passenger bus from Kanazawa to Tokyo Disneyland is 7850 yen. This type of bus transportation is strictly regulated as to its operations, particularly the number of hours a driver can be on the road during a given span of time.

However, the passengers on the deadly bus ride from Kanazawa paid only 3500 yen for the same trip, based upon the semantic subterfuge of labeling the bus a "tour bus." Regulation for the operations of tour buses are much more relaxed than those for point-to-point buses, meaning that the same driver can drive many more hours, lowering the unit labor costs, which make up a significant portion of the cost of the drive. (J)

The accident and the likelihood that cost cutting measures shortcuts were taken demonstrate that outside the purview of the providers of information for the international traveling set, this blessed land is becoming more like other countries. Safety regulations can be and are circumvented -- and as the customers move downscale in terms of their consumption patterns, they will encounter these heretofore atypical tradeoffs more and more often.

An aside, but did anyone notice how it took only a day for the police to raid the premises of the tour bus company and the home of the company's owner in search of evidence of illegal cost-cutting practices -- but a month to decide raid the offices of AIJ Advisors after the story of the obvious Ponzi scheme made the papers and the news broadcasts?

Any chances that in the intervening month, AIJ executives might have altered, deleted or destroyed evidence?

A double standard in an underregulated industry, would you say? (E)