Osaka City Shuffle

In May of last year I published a somewhat weak piece on Hashimoto Toru  at The New York Times's Latitude blog. I was trying to fathom what, other than narcissistic blindness, could have prompted Hashimoto to start talking about sex and war. My conclusion, such as it was, was that Hashimoto could not accept being outside the spotlight, the political appeal of his party and his political insurgency fading. So he just ran off at the mouth until nobody could ignore him anymore.

It seems that this aspect of his character, the need to have folks talking about him, has prompted his latest, expensive, pointless act:

Firebrand Osaka Mayor Calls It Quits, to Seek Re-election
JapanRealTime

His days as Japan's rising political star may be over, but you can still count on Toru Hashimoto to cause a stir...and do a lot of talking.

Osaka's firebrand mayor officially announced his resignation Monday to seek reelection in a perplexing move he described was necessary to break the political logjam hindering one of his key policy goals.

(Link)

As for "and to do a lot of talking" he certainly did do that -- as the Martin post notes, the Hashimoto press conference lasted longer than the supposedly eternal Chris Christie press GW bridge conference. Hashimoto also managed to churn out a blizzard of over 60 Twitter tweets -- after having said nada via his favorite social media platform since January 18.

He loves to explain himself...or at least feels he has a lot of explaining to do.

Hashimoto seems on the fast train back to television, following in the footsteps of his fellow talent-turned politician and until recently fellow party member Higashikokubaru Hideo.

Perhaps the pair will hook up to form a manzai comedy duo.

Two politicians of the last quarter have bucked the system, relying on public theater as an alternative pathways to political office and power: Koizumi Jun'ichiro and Hashimoto Toru. Unlike Koizumi, Hashimoto seems determined to leave office never having actually done anything.


Later - Back on Twitter this morning Hashimoto is revisiting the controversy of last May over his remarks regarding the comfort womens/sexual slaves of the Japan Imperial Forces. According to the recently resigned mayor, the world's treatment of him and Japan is unfair (anfea).

Clearly he has no friend able to take his shoulder, look him in the face and say, "Hashimoto-san. For your own good, put the phone down."

Abe Shinzo And The Right, Rightly

Trending: "Japan tilting/turning/sliding to the right in an alarming way"

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

Example #4

Hmmm...

Japan is probably not shifting, tilting, sliding, skipping, turning cartwheels or anything else to the right. If that were so, we would see hatred of "foreigners" irrespective of origins. Try as one might, one will find little evidence of generalized increased hatred toward non-Japanese. Antipathy and empathy fatigue are focused on two national groups, Chinese and South Koreans, and is it not even an ethnic disdain: Chinese and South Korean tourists are portrayed as a huge and vital business opportunity. (Link - J)

As for remilitarization, Japan presently spends around 1% of GDP on defense. After the Abe military build up, Japan will be spending...approximately 1% of GDP on defense. Do not even get me started on where in an Aging Japan the government is going to find enough youngsters to meet its force recruitment goals.

As for Abe's Yasukuni visit on December 26, he put off his annual visit until the morning of the one year anniversary of his election as prime minister. He was and is going to make visits on an annual basis. Let us take some solace in his having waited until the very last moment.

So what about the secrecy law, the appointment of mediocrity Momii Katsuto as the head of NHK, wannabe fixer Watanabe Tsuneo as the head of the commission on the secrecy law, Education Minister Shimomura Hakubun's new suggestions on what language teachers should use when talking about the Senkakus and Dokdo -- is it not all of a pattern?

Yes.

But the pattern is not one of a shift to the right.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's cronies are getting greedy, grabbing for stuff the public is not quite ready to cede to them, and which the public may never be willing to cede to them. These cronies are rightists, if by rightist you mean skeptical of/loathing China, tired of Japan's having World War II hung around its neck forever (and no, these cronies do not understand why persons hanging World War II around Japan's neck is possible) and pugnaciously defensive of a Japaneseness they alone can define.

It would be foolish for Abe, his sycophants and puppeteers to think the public is not aware of this piggishness and is not marking down in a ledger all the reasons it should not trust Abe and Friends.

The public has been exceedingly and aberrantly supportive of the Abe Cabinet and the Liberal Democratic Party. This support, however, does not evolve out of love for Abe policies, other than for the extremely activist and liberal (and contrary to longtime LDP theories on the national debt) macroeconomic program. According to the polls, the second most popular reason for supporting the Abe Cabinet, after the economic program, is "Because there is no appropriate alternative ready to step in."

Look around the political landscape of Japan today: to say that "there is no other appropriate person" ready to take Abe's place is really not that bizarre.

So "greedy Friends of Abe" + "liberal economics" + "little hope for anyone better" is supposed to equal "a shift to the right"?

I hope that that is not the math.

Tamogami Toshio Live, Live (And Freaking Me Out)

Working journalist MP is tweeting from inside the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan Tamogami Toshio press conference. Sitting down in a random spot, he finds that his table companions are:

Nishiyama Yujiro - a former candidate for governor, whose proposals included disaster drills with all 13 million residents of Tokyo participating simultaneously -- stopping their cars, blocking all access to the Internet. See him try to explain this idea in what was to be his free NHK broadcast gubernatorial election video. (Link - J video)

Motegi Hiromichi - arch-conservative commentator, author of such works as Do Not Be Afraid Of Radiation! and Elementary Schools Do Not Need English!. Watch him explain how the U.S. caused World War II (Link - J) at an event where current FCCJ member and former the Times, FT and NYT bureau chief Henry Stokes was also a featured speaker.

Nishimura Koyu - Advertising writer turned polemicist. Most recent work an article appearing on the website of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Truth entitled, "The Truth of the 'Comfort Women' Intelligence Warfare." (Link)

Oh, MP was also surprised to see Dewi Sukarno in the Tamogami entourage

Why do the things that I predict have to come true?


Later - Also as predicted, MP reports that Tamogami supporter Nishiyama, claiming to be a journalist, grabs microphone to ask The General a question.

Tamogami Toshio, Live

The news slows
People forget
The shares crash, hopes are dashed
People forget
Forget they're hiding.
Behind an eminence front
An eminence front - it's a put-on
Come and join the party
Dress to kill

- Pete Townsend, "Eminence Front" (1982)

The candidacy of former Chief of Staff of the Air Self Defense Forces Tamogami Toshio for the post of governor of Tokyo has been a thing of wonder. First that the general, who lives a very comfortable life off not only his taxpayer-funded pension but also off the revenues generated by his, and this is the organization's real name, “Fight Hard Japan! - All Nation Action Committee” (Ganbare Nippon - Zenkoku Kodo Iinkai) -- the umbrella under which all of Japan's xenophobes and paranoids seem to seek shelter -- is not the smartest in terms of personal cash flow. That he should come out of retirement to take on the job of running the Tokyo Metropolitan District, a place crammed with the very sort of folks his followers want expelled from Japan or locked up in prison, in his first attempt to ever run for anything (the other three main candidates having run and won election to some kind of office in the past) challenges the boundaries of "hubris" and "chutzpah" (the closest Japanese-language equivalent being jishin no kajo, an "excess of confidence").

Second, that the Japanese news media as a whole, not just scared-stiff folks at NHK News (Link) but everyone, has been handling Tamogami with kid gloves. Seemingly The General's email, Facebook and Twitter army of savages has scared the daylights anyone who might deign to ask him about his dismissal early retirement, his organization, his followers, his relationship with Abe Shinzo, his impossible government spending and tax cut promises, his politicization of the ASDF, his participation in a contest rigged to select him as the winner (Link), what he will do to protect the Korean residents of Shin Okubo from death threats and other forms of harassment, his views on the outbreak of World War II (Link), his plans for patriotic education in Tokyo schools, his sexualized campaign (Link - J)...et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

Today, however, Tamogami will appear at a press conference at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan (Link). He will be facing a room full of folks who are rather harder to terrify than Japan's news media producers and distributors. To be sure, there will be ringers in the room -- Tamogami would never put in an appearance anywhere where the crowd is not at least salted, if not completed stuffed, with revisionists ready to sing his praises. These folks will try to grab the microphone and eat up the clock with powder puff and leading questions.

If the non-Japan journalists show up prepped and ready -- and if the moderator cuts off the ringers at the git go -- then this shichimencho may finally feel the fork he has up until now avoid having stuck in him.

We will see how Tamogami responds to a sticking. My bet is that the results will be...unattractive.

Funny Business In The Tokyo Election?

Nuisance candidates, nobodies recruited to run in contests because they have names similar to those of a legitimate candidate, are a recurrent low-level feature of Japanese politics. They can exist because of the quaint custom of requiring voters to write down the names of candidates on ballot papers. Two candidates with similar names would result in a certain percentage of voters mismarking their ballots, with the voter putting down the name of one candidate while intending to vote for the other.

Most of the time nuisance candidates are simply that -- a nuisance -- stealing a few votes away from a candidate, not changing an election's outcome. Their presence can contribute to some eyebrow-raising final election results, though.

There is an argument that nuisance candidacies exist largely in the imagination -- as excuses why a candidate received the vote he or she did. The low number of similarity-of-name problems hobbling the candidacies of LDP candidates indicates, however, that there is actual funny business going on. Their primary goal has been seemingly to prevent Communist Party candidates from capturing the required percentage of the vote necessary for the party to receive a refund of the candidacy deposit (kyotakukin - Link).

Utsunomiya Kenji is likely to receive the 10% of the vote he needs to have his 3 million yen deposit returned to him after next Sunday's Tokyo gubernatorial by-election. That seemingly has not prevented someone -- or a group of someones -- from at least trying to steal votes away from a candidate supported by both the Communists and the Socialists.

Because there is another "Kenji" among the 16 other candidates for governor - a "Himeji Kenji" -- listed as being an individual involved in "building management."

A "Himeji Kenji" would be difficult difficult to mistake for an "Utsunomiya Kenji" most of the time -- even though it pits a "Name of a medium-sized city in Western Japan + Kenji" candidate against as "name of a medium-sized city of Eastern Japan + Kenji" candidate. The kanji would just be too different.

However, for reasons unexplained and yet completely transparent, "Himeji Kenji" chose to have his name listed on the ballot written entirely in syllabic hiragana -- no kanji at all -- and by the purest, most idiotic quirk of the draw, "Himeji Kenji" is in the #1 position of the list of candidates.

Who is in the #2 position, also all by the luck of the draw? Utsunomiya Kenji, written in kanji.

The confusion may cause only a few votes to slide to the nuisance candidate, whose name (ひめじけんじ) is so much easier to write than legitimate candidate's (宇都宮健児). In the case of a ballot marked just "Kenji" in hiragana the vote will be split, each candidate recorded as receiving 1/2 a vote.


Later - In comments, reader 井上エイド informs me that the listing order is not random, as indicated in the above underlined segments. Instead it reflects the order of the receipt of the candidate registration -- which makes the likelihood of "Himeji Kenji" being a stalker all the greater.

Damn You Science! - The Response

Whew, that was fast.

But a single day had to pass after the Obokata announcement of a new and better pathway to producing stem cells, one seemingly consigning to the footnotes the government's 110 billion yen investment in Yamanaka Shinya's induced pluripotent stem cell method, for Education Minister Shimomura Hakubun to announce a plan to dramatically raise both the Riken research center's official status and the Riken staff pay (Link). The Yomiuri Shimbun, perhaps getting a little ahead of itself, speculates that under new guidelines research centers of Riken's new elevated status could offer hot researchers pay packages of USD 1 million per year. (Link - J)

Whatever one may want to say about the Abe Administration, one cannot complain about its moving too slowly and meekly to exploit opportunities to get behind a winning team.

What Japan-South Korean Relations Really Needed

I tend to shy away from the weird stories...mostly because the seemingly dull stories, upon examination, turn out to be tightly wrapped around a hard core of weird.

This tale of too few details, however, is just too weird not to forward:

Official found dead off Kyushu
Kyodo

KITAKYUSHU – A member of the Cabinet Office was found dead last month in a dinghy off Kitakyushu, officials of the 7th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters said Saturday.

The body of the civil servant, aged 30, was clothed in a black jacket and found with South Korean currency notes after the dinghy was located close to concrete wave barriers on Jan. 20. There were no noticeable external injuries on the body.

The 3-meter-long dinghy, which had a motor, was made in South Korea, according to the coast guard.

The coast guard said the man’s death is under investigation and that it is unknown whether foul play was involved. Investigators said the man probably died before around Jan. 13...

For those wishing to learn more (not that there is much more to learn), here is the link.

It is telling that when a real mysterious death of a government official turns up, the anti-Korean xenophobes -- who see spies and conspiracies everywhere -- are not all over the place with explanations.

I guess someone has to come out with a simple explanation ("He loved fishing") to attack before the crazies will speak up.

Damn You Science!

Abenomics is getting the stuffing kicked out of it this week. The Nikkei plunged 500 points yesterday, finishing the day down 376 points (-2.43%), adding to the losses since January 9. The yen has been on a mild strengthening trend, threatening earnings reporting of the big exporters. U.S. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid's rejection of a request for fast-track trade authority has put the Trans Pacific Partnership on hold.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's plans for reviving Japan's economy received another blow, this time from a bubbly 30-year old girl geek in pearl earrings.

Stem cell 'major discovery' claimed
BBC News

Scientists in Japan showed stem cells can now be made quickly just by dipping blood cells into acid.

Stem cells can transform into any tissue and are already being trialled for healing the eye, heart and brain.

The latest development, published in the journal Nature, could make the technology cheaper, faster and safer.

The human body is built of cells with a specific role - nerve cells, liver cells, muscle cells - and that role is fixed.

However, stem cells can become any other type of cell, and they have become a major field of research in medicine for their potential to regenerate the body.

Embryos are one, ethically charged, source of stem cells. Nobel prize winning research also showed that skin cells could be "genetically reprogrammed" to become stem cells (termed induced pluripotent stem cells).

Acid bath

Now a study shows that shocking blood cells with acid could also trigger the transformation into stem cells - this time termed STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) cells.

Dr Haruko Obokata, from the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology in Japan, said she was "really surprised" that cells could respond to their environment in this way.

She added: "It's exciting to think about the new possibilities these findings offer us, not only in regenerative medicine, but cancer as well."

(Link)

Dr. Obokata's paper was published in Nature, whose account of the discovery (Link) fails to mention that it rejected her original paper. According to last night's NHK report, the reviewer told her that her results, if true, would contradict 100 years of research into cellular biology.

The coverage of Dr. Obokata's new pathway to stem cells has been lavish and fawning (Link - J video) -- which is rather inconvenient for Prime Minister Abe. He already has his stem cell hero, Nobel laureate Yamanaka Shinya. They have a mutually beneficial relationship, Mr. Abe plying Dr. Yamanaka with honors (Link) and cash (Link). Dr. Yamanaka's patented induced pluripotent pathway to stem cells was supposed to be the nucleus of a bio-engineering revolution, a showcase of Japanese prowess in technological and business development -- and Mr. Abe was going to be its munificent and enthusiastic patron.

Now here comes this lacrosse-playing, turtle-keeping, media darling young lab rat with a method of creating stem cells that is cheaper, more efficient, faster and with fewer potential complications than Dr. Yamanaka's.

It must all seem so unfair.

Original image courtesy: BBC

Now The Home Wrecker

The Yomiuri Shimbun, ever ignorant of a newspaper's role being that of a reporter of news, not a creator, is playing anti-matchmaker again in the long-running drama Jiko renritsu seiken with its recurring question, "How long can the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito keep pretending they are not really made for each other?"

In the latest episode, the New Komeito, according to the Yomiuri、is "on pins and needles" (piri piri) over Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's overtures toward the Your Party and elements of the opposition. Abe is offering a policy agreement linkup (seisaku kyogi) to the Your Party and elements of the Japan Restoration Party in four areas: reinterpretation of constitutional restrictions on collective defense, actual constitutional revision, East Asian diplomacy and elimination of the power of local school boards. The New Komeito, which has stuck with the LDP through good times and bad, has very definite views on these items which are not entirely in line with those of Abe and his coterie. The New Komeito also has a definite sense of the sequencing of policy agreements: first the members of the coalition agree amongst themselves on the policies, then they approach the opposition or non-aligned parties and MPs with an offer of cooperation. (Link - J)

The link up of the New Komeito and the LDP after years of mutual animosity was one of the miracles of the 1990s, second in its shock value only to the eviscerating (for the Socialist Party) LDP-Socialist Party coalition, which for all time exposed the LDP's raw and bottomless appetite for power. The coalition has been extremely good for both the New Komeito and the LDP, the former for the protection it gives to The Corporation, the latter for the 7~8 million sure votes for LDP candidates in the Diet district and local elections. The loyalty of the New Komeito voters saved the LDP from utter annihilation in the August 2009 House of Representatives election, with approximately one quarter of all votes for LDP district candidates coming from New Komeito voters. The NK really took on the chin in 2009 too: all of its members holding district seats, the party's top leaders, were turned out.

However, the temptation for the LDP to dump the New Komeito after nearly two decades of cohabitation seems too strong to resist. With just the remaining members of the Your Party as partners, the LDP would have majorities in the Houses of Representatives and House of Councillors. With all or part of the JRP in a three party cohabitation (what I call the "Hawks-Hawks-Hawks Coalition" as opposed to the current "Hawks and Doves Coalition") the new policy cooperation arrangement would have a gigantic supermajority in the House of Representatives and a solid majority in the House of Councillors. Not the 162 seats Abe needs in the House of Councillors to pass revisions of the Constitution -- but more than enough seats to pass just about anything else tickling the fancy of the PM and his many advisers and hangers-on.

Abe and his minister of education Shimamura Hakubun cannot and probably never for a moment forget the New Komeito's spiking of Abe's first attempt to impose a more patriotic regimen and regime upon the nation's schools back in 2007. The New Komeito's rejection and rewriting of the first ever revisions of the 1946 Education Act left a bleeding hole in the side of the first Abe Cabinet -- not the first wound the first Abe Cabinet had inflicted upon it, certainly, but one of the most painful.

Ever since that experience Abe has probably been convinced that the coalition with the New Komeito was a marriage of convenience only. Pretty much everyone with a sense of Abe's mindset probably agrees it is now a highly inconvenient marriage for him.

The Yomiuri should nevertheless just stand back and let nature take its course, rather than cheering for the LDP-New Komeito break up.

Let us keep this seemly, folks.

While were are on the subject of keeping things seemly, Temple University Japan's Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies has uploaded the video of my January 9 talk to its You Tube channel. Please check it out (Link) to see if I indeed follow my own advice.


Later - If the above image mystifies, please read Yuka Hayashi's interview.

Later still - The Economist has checked in with an extended look at the subject, with The Corporation mentioned by name. (Link)

Original image courtesy: Nikkan Gendai

Not That Many Dolphins Killed

Trending this morning is a figure, 22,000, for the number of small cetaceans (dolphins and small whales) harvested by Japanese hunters each year (Link).

This figure is inflated. The real figure is certainly less than 10,000, probably fewer than 3,000.

Until the triple disaster of 11 March 2011, the bulk of the nation's dolphin killings were carried out by hunters working out of ports in Iwate Prefecture, with smaller numbers of killings carried out by boats departing from Miyagi and Hokkaido ports. The targets of these hunts were Dall's porpoises (Ishi iruka - Phocoenoides dalli), a small oceanic species. The hunt was conducted well offshore (meaning virtually no photographs or video record exist of it) with harpoons.

Below is the table, the most recent one available (Calendar Year 2010) of the total number of kills of various species of dolphins and small whales -- the latter term being something of a misnomer in the case of the Baird's Beaked Whale (Tsuchikujira - Berardius baidii) which is as big as the IWC-moratorium restricted Minke Whale (Minke kujira - Balaenoptera acutorostrata)*.

Click on above image to open in a larger window.

(Source)

According to these government figures, the total number of small cetaceans killed in 2010 was 6,615. As the report explains the Dall's porpoise kill number is an estimate, based on the total weight of meat processed divided by a general figure of about 50kg of meat per porpoise. The number of dolphins killed outside outside the Dall's porpoise hunt was 1,696, with the bulk of that, 1,629 kills, being done by Wakayama hunters, almost all whom were probably were homeported in the infamous town of Taiji.

2010 was a particular bad year for small cetacean hunting. However, even in 2009, the last good year on record, the total number of small cetaceans killed was 10,501, with the difference coming almost entirely from the Dall's porpoise hunt. This figure is significantly less than the total number of kills allowed under the quotas of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. MAFF's 2013-2014 quotas for all small cetaceans combined, the lowest total ever, is 17,217. (Link - J)

When the tsunami wiped out the fishing gear and ports of Iwate and Miyagi, the Dall's porpoise hunt vanished (the tsunami also ended the Miyagi-based Baird's Beaked Whale hunt). The Dall's hunt has since struggled to reestablish itself -- see page 45-2 of this Japanese language only report from the Fisheries Research Agency. An enterprising journalist might want to ask the Reconstruction Minister what proportion of Tohoku reconstruction funds have been consecrated, if any, to reestablishing the Dall's porpoise meat industry.

With the Iwate hunt moribund, Japan's dolphin industry must rely on the Wakayama hunt for meat. There is, however, no evidence that Wakayama hunters have stepped up the pace of their activities. If there were a crisis in supply one would at least expect MAFF officials to increase the quota number for the species (bottlenose, striped, Risso's, pan-tropical) hunted by Wakayama hunters. While MAFF did revise the Wakayama quota upward last year, the rise was risible, with the total number of kills permitted in 2013~2014 season still below the number permitted in 2011~2012:

MAFF quotas for small cetaceans, Wakayama Prefecture hunts
Season / total kills permitted

2010~2011 / 2,760
2011~2012 / 2,674
2012~2013 / 2,589
2013~2014 / 2,604

(Sources: Link - J and Link - J)

Assuming -- and it is an immense assumption -- that the Wakayama hunters managed to use up all their quota, and the hunters in prefectures outside the Tohoku used up theirs, the total number of small cetaceans hunted this fiscal year would be 4,177.

To get some sense of how unlikely that is, the MAFF quota for Hokkaido harpooners is 1,221 Dall porpoises in 2013-14. In 2010, the last recorded year of the Hokkaido hunt, the number of porpoises taken was 116. Shizuoka hunters are permitted 250 kills under this year's quota -- yet no Shizuoka landings have been reported for over a decade.

The 22,000 figure in the CNN essay is clearly wrong. Likely as not, it is wrong by an order of magnitude.

Later - This post has been revised to include data from previous years's quotas for the Wakayama dolphin hunts.

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

* Virtually all contemporary images and video of cetaceans being butchered come from the Baird's Beaked Whale hunt run out of Wadaura in Chiba Prefecture. This is due both to the community's relative proximity to Tokyo and its willingness to serve as a showcase for Japan's bid to resume small-scale coastal commercial whaling for Minke Whale.