Two Can Play At This Game

Chosen Soren, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, the de facto embassy of North Korea in Japan, had its headquarters seized by the government last year. The court-ordered seizure represented what was nominally an attempt to wrench out of the organization, which at its height controlled 38 banks and credit unions, the public funds used to bail out these financial institutions after they went belly up post-Bubble.

The actual goal, and it is not an ignoble one, was to bankrupt, defenestrate and extirpate Chosen Soren. Like the national government it unofficially represents, Chosen Soren is a front for an extortion racket, prying donations out of the hands of North Korean residents of Japan in return for DPRK regime promises to spare the lives and livelihoods of relatives still stuck inside North Korea.

Bidding on the building and the attached land, situated north of the Imperial Palace in Chiyoda Ward, began on March 13, with Chosen Soren banned from participating in the auction. (Link)

That's the way to drive an evil organization out of the nation's heart!

Not exactly.

The winning bidder in the Chosen Soren headquarters auction? The Shingon School Buddhist, Kagoshima-based temple Saifuku-ji, a religious corporation boasting not just a national congregation, not just a website, not just ties to celebrities (including, according the organization, Nagashima "Mr. Giants" Shigeo and former prime minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro) not just a fabulous YouTube intro video (Link - J) but its own YouTube channel.

Journalists caught up with Saifuku-ji abbot Ikeguchi Eikan yesterday at a branch temple on Ennoshima, in Kanagawa Prefecture.

Surprise, surprise: Ikeguchi is a Pyongyang frequent flyer, with close ties to the ruling Kim regime. (Link - J)

Asked about his organization's plans for the decrepit and quake-damaged structure, Ikeguchi improbably declared the building will be used as a religious training center and, more cryptically, as a center for "ethnic reconciliation" (minzoku yuwa).

Asked to elaborate, the abbot said that the central committee of the North Korean Worker's Party had told him it was willing to use the building as is. He said he was open to the idea of renting out the building to Chosen Soren... (Link - J)

Nice work at covering all the bases, Government of Japan.


Later - For fun, put "在日本朝鮮人総連合会中央本部" into the Google Maps search window and drop down into Google Street View to see the police guard with barricade and the armored police bus parked across the street from the building.

Sweeter Than Honey

Thanks to commenter Graham Leonard, I now have the Ur-text of the "land surrounding the Imperial Palace was worth more than the land of California" chestnut.

From The Economist of 16 July 1988:

The party's over
Land values in Tokyo are coming down

"TOKYO - The nominal value of all the land in Japan is $1,200 trillion-two and a half times that of the whole of America. For the price of Tokyo and the province of Kanagawa, you could buy America once. The land taken up by the Imperial Palace, in the centre of Tokyo, is worth one California. For the price of a square metre at the Ginza crossing, the epicentre of Tokyo's fashion and expense-account entertainment district ((￥60m or $450,000), an Englishman or an American could buy a luxury home.

Prices have been driven to these ludicrous levels by four years of frenetic speculation..." (Link)

Thanks to Mr. Leonard, my heart is at peace.

However, it is thanks to The Economist that the corners of my eyes are crinkled with joy this morning. I have not been the only one unaware of from whence the anecdote comes.

From The Economist of 11 October 2007:

Back from the grave
It has taken 16 years for commercial-property inflation in Japan to turn positive

THERE was a time when the price of the land surrounding Japan's Imperial Palace (about the size of Disneyland) was said to be worth more than the whole of California. Apocryphal, surely, but it summed up the hype during Japan's property bubble in the late 1980s. When prices plunged—by as much as 80% in two years—it took the economy more than a decade to emerge blinking out of the bomb crater. Only now is Japanese commercial property showing renewed signs of life. (Link)

I must admit, I cannot recall much of what I have posted here. I had completely forgotten, for example, having taken the time to produce this.

Still, "I am the source of my own apocrypha!" is a battle cry for a new era of cheerful forgetfulness.

Blegging You Please

- I want to listen to speeches at The University of British Columbia symposium of 23 January 2013 on the results of the 16 December 2012 election and the outlook for the Abe Cabinet. However, every time I try to access the site:

http://mediasitemob1.mediagroup.ubc.ca/Mediasite/Play/ce434facbb64415aa8cd5c2ef4a17d2e1d

the video feed crashes about two seconds after start up.

I have contacted the folks at UBC and they find nothing wrong at their end.

Does anyone have a guess as to what could be causing the crashing?


- Listening to Dr. Ed Lincoln's 2011 (?) Temple University Institute of Contemporary Asia Studies (ICAS) talk on Tokyo as an international financial hub (Link) I realized:

a) Though I have heard the "at one time in the late 1980s the assessed value of the land under the Imperial Palace was greater than the assessed value of all the real estate in California" statement dozens of times, I have no idea whether or not it is true.

Does anyone know of the ultimate origins of this anecdote? What organization, if any, did the assessment of the Imperial Palace's land value -- and on what basis?

I am tired of hearing this chestnut without knowing its origin.

b) Dr. Lincoln is fine up until he gets to the "this is why things are the way they are" part of the presentation. Then he hits the rocks.

I dare not listen to his recommendations, as I might try to loft something into low-earth orbit.

Of course, if not for Ed Lincoln's and Clyde Prestowitz's Asian Wall Street Journal op-ed encouraging Koizumi Jun'ichiro to not just resign as prime minister and call elections but to leave the LDP -- published on the 344th of what was to be Koizumi's 1980 days as prime minister -- Shisaku would not exist.

I leave it to the readers to decide whether the annoyance I felt at that op-ed has had a constructive result.

ICAS is the host and sponsor of my 28 February 2013 talk on the Abe Administration. Email icas@tuj.temple.edu for details.


Later - Thank you for all the suggestions regarding viewing the UBC conference. I found it runs on Explorer but freezes up when I use Chrome.