Sometimes There Is No There There

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I'm the only one and I walk alone...

My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
'Til then I walk alone

- Billie Joe Armstrong, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (2004)

Today is the fourth anniversary of the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan's northeast. The television news broadcasts will be full to the brim with reports on commemorations and the current situation of the residents of Eastern Tohoku.

One reality the reports will not be able to avoid is the modest amount of rebuilding and resettlement completed. Few buildings have be restored in the devastated areas; even fewer businesses have been established. Over 200,000 persons remain displaced, scattered all over Japan or still huddling in tiny, cold temporary housing units.

The delay in or lack of revival (fukko) of the Tohoku despite the cubic kilometers of hot political aired spewed over it is not indicative of a lack of resolve or resources. The minor communities of the Tohoku seaboard were political clients and mendicants, surviving into the contemporary era not due to their ability to generate livelihoods for their inhabitants but due to their ability to attract subsidies and development funds from the nation's core areas. They were, for the most part, places that were not habitable save under severe government intervention.

Which means that Daniel Aldrich may have to provide a modification -- and not a very big one -- to his illuminating thesis on recovery from disaster. High levels of social capital in a community and social exchange in between local residents do seem to be of vital importance in speeding up recovery from disaster. However, for reconstruction to take place, the affected communities have to have had real socio-economic value for the nation in the first place.

Which the seaside communities of the Tohoku have not had for decades...and under any and all reasonable scenarios never will.

So if today you see or read a report condemning the lack of reconstruction as a sign of political failure, feel free to say, "No, the failure to reconstruct is not the political failure. The political failure was the continued existence of these towns and villages."

As a coda, if a public official or former public official comes on lamenting about the communities lost to the rain of radiation from the explosions of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, you can say, "Phooey! The reason why the nuclear power stations were even there" -- this is from another one of Aldrich's books - "was because those municipalities were NOT communities! Communities would have banded together and rejected the plants!"


Later - Please, please, please read the comments where I am excoriated for the above.

Original image courtesy: Mainichi Shimbun

A Political Mystery - Reprise

My morning paper pulp news transmission device has a short list of a few more choice items from the Tohoku/Fukushima reconstruction and recovery budget, supplementing the list of items I passed on a week ago. (Link)

Take a gander at this pair:

30 million -- to the Ministry of Law, for a program labeled, and I am not making this up, "Improvement in the Measures to Prevent the Reoccurrence of Crimes in the Disaster Regions," where the funds were used for the purchase of small-scale construction machinery and educational materials for prisons located in Saitama Prefecture and in Hokkaido.

8 billion -- to the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry, to subsidize Japanese corporations in the opening up of new rare earths and rare metals mines, on the rationale that shortages in these vital materials could have a negative impact on employment in the disaster-struck zones. (Link)

I swear I am not making this stuff up. No one could. Well, obviously a bureaucrat could. But no responsible, caring and, mostly importantly, humble person could.

I must add a postscript to my October 17 post on these peculiar-looking disaster relief budget items. I noted that 4.7 billion yen of the FY2011 disaster relief budget was destined for ITER, the project formerly known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

ITER is a worthwhile nuclear fusion project, as far as fusion projects go (Link). While the tokamak itself is being built in southern France, Japan did extort receive a consolation prize of the construction of secondary facilities in Japan, plus ITER's director-generalship and 20% of the research positions (and they say this blessed land is a pushover - ha!).

In the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, buildings housing the machines used to test the equipment bound for use in the ITER at the Naka Fusion Institute in Ibaraki Prefecture (Link) sustained significant damage. Repairs of these facilities on an emergency basis were justifiable as necessary for the Government of Japan to honor international obligations to not further delay the already well behind schedule ITER project.

By coincidence, ITER's Japan arm, the Japan Domestic Agency (JADA) opens its doors today (October 24).

A Political Mystery

Only a few lines today due to an illness.

The other day I noted the Democratic Party of Japan boycotted a sudden emergency meeting of the Administrative Oversight Subcommittee of the House of Representatives Committee on Audit and Administrative Oversight. (Link)

The excuse the DPJ gave for boycotting this unusual out-of-Diet Session subcommittee meeting -- and for ordering ministry bureaucrats summoned to stay at their posts -- was that the party secretariat had not yet selected a Ranking Member for the subcommittee, which is chaired by a Liberal Democratic Party member.

However, the story behind the sudden call for a subcommittee hearing is not frivolous. It turns out that the supplementary budget drawn up to fund the recovery of the Tohoku region and Fukushima was crammed with pork, projects that could not be justified in the regular budget but suddenly became vital parts of the recovery effort.

The rightist press outlets have been all over this story, as can be expected. However, they have been taking their cues from the leftist and progressive press. The Tokyo Shimbun, a left-leaning paper and an avowed enemy of the Prime Minister for his having championed a rise in the consumption tax, has been plastering its front pages with nearly daily exposés of questionable items in the recovery budget, including:

- 7.2 billion, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to support its Japan-East Asia/North America Network of Exchange for Students and Youths

- 2.3 billion to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, to support pelagic research whaling overseen by the Institute of Cetacean Research

- 40 billion, to the Defense Ministry, for the acquisition of fixed wing transport and cargo aircraft

- 1.2 billion to the National Tax Agency, for maintenance on 12 of their dormitories

- 330 million, to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, for earthquake retrofitting of the National Stadium in Shinjuku

- 47.7 billion to the Ministry of Infrastructure, Land, Transport and Tourism for water control projects, only 30% of which are in the disaster zone

- 3.4 billion, to MLIT, for construction of national highways in Okinawa

and in what can only be the greatest of ironies,

- 10.7 billion to MEXT for the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, an agency promoting the use of nuclear energy. The budget outlay includes 4.2 billion for Japan's continued participation in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

Now just why all these questionable items are becoming political hot potatoes now, as opposed to several months ago, is a mystery. Of course, the compilation of a new budget and a new recovery budget, with the ministries putting forth their requests for the next fiscal year, may have stimulated the news media to ask, "And what exactly has happened to the money you already received?"

However, how was it possible that the uncovering of all these funny budget items seems to have been left to the national broadcaster NHK (Link), the mildest-mannered of the news networks? Why was the no stink made when the recovery budget was initially compiled?

Guesses...surmises...

1) So the new media outlets could put on their best Captain Renault act (Link), shocked at what was promoted as a budget to help the Tohoku being instead a minor festival of pork barrel projects? What country do they think they are operating in?

2) The LDP, in order to force the resignation of Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko, called up their contacts in the news media with juicy bits from the recovery budget's internal working documents just when the government was about to enter into delicate negotiations with the major opposition parties about the extraordinary Diet Session?

3) Prime Minister Noda and the Cabinet, after ostensibly allowing the bureaucracy to run rampant in a bid to win its loyalty, instead gave the bureaucrats enough rope to hang themselves?

I have no clue.

Perhaps They Will Never Know

Today is a day of remembrance, a day when a goodly part of the nation will actually take a break from its usual frenetic Sundays to stand at attention for a minute of silence at 2:46 p.m. The emperor, bless his 78 year-old soul, will take part in memorial activities, despite having had a heart bypass operation 3 weeks ago. He at least believes this a day like no other. We should all think as he does.

In the spirit of the day, I shall restrain myself from my usual fury or glee at the latest shenanigans of the nation's political classes. My mind is consumed at present with a typhoon of contempt for all but a few of the elected and the meritocratic and nepotistic elites. However, I will hold the storm's fury back for this one day.

One point, however. Many publications and broadcasts (and one famous organization, inexplicably still headed by a defrocked imperial prince) have been carping about the lack of progress in the reconstruction of the ravaged and broken areas of the Tohoku (we should not forget that the earthquake and its aftershocks wreaked havoc far from the reach of the tsunami). The failure to begin rebuilding the lost communities, whether once again in the tsunami zones or on the shaved-off tops of nearby mountains, is ascribed to the current divided Diet or, in certain quarters, the inexperienced hands of the Democratic Party of Japan-led government.

No and no and No and NO!

The elites who are charged with guiding us, or at least using our tax money wisely, are not at a loss with what to do with the Tohoku. They are at a loss with what to do with Japan -- and have been so for 20 years now. Oh some of them have a plan, the Abe Shinzo-Shimomura Kokubun-Hiranuma Takeos and their ilk, to turn the populace into authority-fearing, emperor-loving, nation-building automatons...but sorry, been there, done that and no, it does not turn out very nicely, thank you very much (note to government of the PRC: imprison your colonels now, while you still can). The Liberal Democratic Party and the followers of Ozawa Ichiro made it their common cause in the midst of the disaster's rescue and stabilization phase to drive Prime Minister Kan Naoto from office. Now they are trying to do the same to Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko during what is still the recovery phase. If either of these opposition camps were to seize the wheel of the ship of state, however, neither would have the foggiest notion in what direction to sail the Nihon Maru.

The ship has been adrift for two decades. Every so often a steady hand has taken hold of the tiller -- Hashimoto Ryutaro, Koizumi Jun'ichiro -- but it was always to right wrongs ten years too late, when it hardly mattered anymore. The victory by the DPJ was the same -- its program of putting people's livelihoods first was not revolutionary -- it was archaic, practically an anachronism. By the time the LDP had power stripped from out of its cold, near-dead claws, the treasury was empty; the countryside depleted, dependent and despondent; the cities ugly, unkempt and angry.

So today, as the cameras sweep over the barren lots and skeletons of structures for this anniversary, before running off to cover some other epiphenomenon or catastrophe, tune out the blather about the present day political mess. The images are of Japan as it is, as it has been under the veneer of efficiency and equality and beyond Tokyo's glitz and youth and energy. The stillness and lethargy are not aberrant: they are symptomatic of a ruling class without time in their schedules for the people they are supposed to be leading.

Unwinding

T'is the season of reviews and of looking to the future.

Sheila Smith of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York has a published her impressions of 2011 (Link). The piece is geared to an American foreign policy audience and hits most of the major points. I would have included a bit more on the virtual collapse of the chances for the construction of a Futenma Replacement Facility at Henoko among the foreign policy issues of note -- but then again, Dr. Smith has been writing about the hopelessness of the move of the Futenma U.S. Marines assets to northern Okinawa for years. She may be afraid of sounding like a broken record.

(English speakers have just got to concoct a more contemporary metaphor for this condition. Then again, the Japanese equivalent is "sounding like a broken tape recorder.")

Just one question, though: what how does the Nadeshiko Japan victory in the World Cup demonstrate the effectiveness of civil society in absorbing the trauma of 3/11? Is it not the opposite, that the country needed the victory to shake itself of a post-3/11 national depression?

Television and radio journalist Lucy Craft has put together a report for NPR (Link) that is going to get her into hot water with the knee-jerk Japan defenders. While it is true that she does not give equal time to any kind of scientific assessment of the dangers of longterm exposure to low-level radiation (one should perhaps, for example, note that Europeans living in houses made of stone, particularly granite, expose themselves to significant annual doses of radiation, while radon in basements is a worldwide radiation hazard), she does expose what we all have been doing, to a greater or lesser extent: avoiding products from near the Fukushima plants and wondering when the next shoe will drop.

And there are so many shoes to drop, like where all the incinerators and water treatment plants, whose standard operating procedures transform large quantities of waste into small amounts of waste now have to deal with the reality of that they are taking massive quantities of material with low levels of radiation and transforming them into concentrated high-level radioactive muck that has to be buried somewhere.

More to come on this score, I am sure.

Why I Still Think Calling The U.S. Post-Disaster Actions "Operation Tomodachi" Was A Bad Idea

When I heard back in March that the United States military was calling its part in the relief effort after 3/11 "Operation Tomodachi" (Tomodachi sakusen) I cringed.

"Oh Amaterasu," I thought, "anything but that. Call it 'Operation Steller's Sea Eagle' or 'Operation Scrumptious Pantypacker' (OK, maybe that not that one). Just not 'Operation Tomodachi'."

Why?

Because the very first thing I thought of when I heard "Tomodachi" was...well... instead of me telling you, why not try just try a search on Google Images of "Tomodachi" in hiragana?

Just copy and paste in the bit below and see what you get.

「ともだち」

See that? That is the first thing I thought of.

If you are asking yourself, "What the hell is that?" what you are seeing is images of "Tomodachi" -- the masked, genocidal dictator of Japan in the wildly successful manga and film series Nijuseiki Shonen. In the chronology of the series, Tomodachi is to take over Japan in 2014 on the wings of the electoral victory of his "Friends Party" (the Yujinto - now there's a name!). Something that is called "Operation Tomodachi" in 2011 would seem to be part of the master plan.

Now I have had conversations and email interpellations with folks on this. Most responses I get back are polite rephrasings of "MTC, you are nuts."

Still, no matter the noble intentions in the selection of the name, "Operation Tomodachi" just grates upon the ears.

Does anyone else feel this way? And if so, for what reason?