Very Kind Of Them #51

The very nice folks at Langley Esquire have been sitting me down on Friday afternoons with Dr. Nancy Snow and company president Tim Langley to discuss the week in politics. In this most recent iteration, we have a conversation on how scandals grip and then release both the denizens of Nagatacho and the public's imagination. (Link - YouTube Video)

Very Kind Of Them #35

David Pilling delivers a huge thumbs up to the post of December 6. (Link）

Best not tell Professor Noah Smith of Stonybrook. He asked over Twitter what alternatives Japan had. I told him Abenomics done in an integrated way.

As for the article, I disagree with Professor Gerald Curtis (see him at the FCCJ on December 15) who says the two party system has fallen apart. I see a great deal of hope down the line, in two years' to three year's time.

Very Kind Of Them #33

The day after Abe Shinzo made his announcements of

1) delaying the imposition of a 10% consumption tax until April 2017, and

2) his intention to dissolve the House of Representative and call an election

Mr. Steve Miller of Asia Now and I had a conversation on the roll up to the election and the possible aftermath. Mr. Miller recorded and edited our conversation and has posted it to the Web, illustrated with a great image of what must be the Tobu World Square model of the Diet Building:



I make one slip. I say at one point that the coalition controlled 66% of the seats in the House of Representatives. What I wanted to say was that the coalition had a greater than two-thirds majority (326 out of 480, just under 68%).

Kickstarting Abenomics: A Possible Scenario

Click on below image to open in a larger window.





Later - Oh, serendipitous coincidence. (Link - J)

Original photo image courtesy: Sankei Shimbun

Abe Shinzo: Not In the Fab Four

At the APEC meeting in Beijing, the outfits were just way too 1970s.



As for Abe Shinzo, I am not sure whether his answer to the question would be "I've Seen All Good People" or "Long Distance Runaround."

Anyway, he did not make the cut.

Dumbwalking - The Meme

Dumbwalking (Link) is now an international menace and joke -- though it seems the proper American term for the activity is the neutral "distracted walking." (Link)

A propos of which, this seems to be dumbwalking in Vietnamese. (Link)

The Prime Minister's Upcoming Year, In Color, Unseriously

Click on the image to enlarge.



Original image courtesy: The Japan News

Link to source article

A Morning Eye

Glaring at me this morning.



Wing and abdomen of an Omizuao (Actias artemis) resting on my front door this morning. The full image is:



Image courtesies: MTC

What I Wish I Had Told Al-Jazeera

I appeared on Al-Jazeera yesterday, offering two minutes worth of thoughts, such as they may be, on the new Defense White Paper. (Link - and Link J)

What I managed to blurt out was, well, solid, moderate, perhaps even far-seeing -- but definitely not great television.

When asked out how the White Paper defines Chinese actions in the East China Sea, what I should have said was:

"This year's White Paper declares that certain Chinese actions, such as the unilateral declaration without consultation of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) to be 'profoundly dangerous acts.' Non-Japanese media organizations like the Financial Times have flagged the operative adjective here, calling it a condemnation. (Link)

All apologies to the editors of the Financial Times but calling what the Chinese government has been doing 'dangerous' is not a condemnation: it is a simple statement of fact. Indeed 'dangerous' all by its lonesome is an understatement. The authors of the report should have been more prolix, describing China's moves as 'profoundly dangerous, provocative acts, the kind of stupid crap that leads to the therts of wars and stuff' -- and even that would have only been a simple statement of fact."

Oh well, better luck next time...


Later - Writing in The Diplomat, Clint Richards sees the language of the Defense White Paper as unhelpfully incendiary (Link). Richards seems to be arguing that in order to secure of a face-to-face meeting between Abe Shinzo and Xi Jinping the Japanese government should suppress a public accounting of national policies and official interpretations of current events.

Memory Whole: When The Aliens Landed In L.A.

Thirty five years ago today.

Good luck with your cancer treatment, Sakamoto-san (Link). Your country needs you, now more than ever.

Link: "Cosmic Surfin'" from the Yellow Magic Orchestra's August 4, 1979 performance at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, YMO's first North American concert appearance.

Dancing Toward A Better Japan-South Korea Relationship

On the occasion of Tokyo Governor Masuzoe Yo'ichi's 40 minute summit meeting with President Park Ge-Hyun (keep in mind that until the Abe-Kuroda devaluation, Tokyo's economy was assessed to be bigger than Indonesia's - Link) a gratuitous embed of World Order's "Permanent Revolution" - where Sudo Genki and the boys posit their Japanese Ultra Everymen as the agents of an East Asian concord in such sharp contrast with the current, discouraging discord.

(In HD - so do click on the Full Screen button)

It has been a lousy several weeks and months for the human species - where we seem hellbent on spinning out ever farther from Sudo's definitely quirky (and deeply skeptical of the role and motives of the United States) appeal for hitotsu no sekai e.

Later - The concantenation of ironies of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's having to rely on freshly minted Governor Masuzoe, who had been Abe's nemesis during Abe's annus horribilis of 2007, in order to get the president of South Korea, a fellow U.S. ally, to talk to him, is not lost upon me.

Later still -For those who catch it -- in the scene shot in front of Seven & I Holdings's world headquarters, Sudo demonstrates he has issues with the Masons too.

From The Folks Who Gave You A World Cup In Qatar

I'm the Burning Bush
I'm the Burning Fire
I'm the Bleeding Volcano!

- Jagger & Richards, "She's So Cold" (1980)

Today is six years to the day of the proposed start of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The shade temperature at the site of the new main Olympic Stadium is at this hour a balmy 36ºC (97ºF for you of the U.S.A. persuasion). The temperature in the waterfront areas, where many of the Olympic venues are to be concentrated, is a brisk 35ºC (95ºF).

I put to you the proposition that the date of the opening of the 2020 Olympics may need to be pushed into October -- as it was in 1964.

Later - More on the heat from the good folks at JapanRealTime. (Link)

Image courtesy: NHK News

A Minute With The Minister In The Garden

On Monday at the Quatorze Juillet reception at the French Embassy I had a remarkable chance to speak one-on-one with a member of the Cabinet, Minister A. After an exchange of name cards and my brief self-introduction, I asked him a simple question: on a scale of 1-100, how would he rate the performance of the Abe Cabinet? His response was that it should receive a score above 90%, first for its ability to execute on its program, second for Mr. Abe's identifying from the outset Japan's need to exit from deflation. A prime minister's committing himself to ending inflation was a key achievement in and of itself, and Mr. Abe deserves credit for his identification of the problem. All indications are, the Minister continued, that the policies initiated by Mr. Abe's commitment to exiting deflation are taking effect.

What was striking in my conversation with the minister, aside from his extreme kindness in offering his opinion to lowly me, was his expression of the Abe government's commitment to the idea of exiting deflation as a goal without his ever mentioning the target rate.

I have been wondering about the government's actual stance on the goal of an exit from deflation. Richard Katz has mocked the idea of targeting an inflation rate, likening it to trying to cure a fever by putting ice on a thermometer (Link). Katz's love of his metaphor, and it is a good one, possibly leads him away from understanding the Abe's government's true goal. My sense of is that the stated figure of 2% annual CPI is more of a placemark -- a stand-in for a more iterative and elusive figure where the Japanese economy is on a self-sustaining growth path in spite of chronic deflationary pressures.

It may be that the Abe program, at least on the monetary side, is Shirakawa defeatism turned on its head and hidden under a faux Taylor rule cloak. Former Bank of Japan Governor Shirakawa Masaaki's feeling that there is no way to generate 2% inflation may be correct -- but the fact that the task of hitting 2% inflation is impossible is the reason why you try to do it. If you cannot -- cannot -- fight deflation through monetary means, where is the downside from trying anyway? Sure, you will have to come up with some cover story about the reasons why you are not hitting the target rate at the predicted time. However if GDP and wage growth have ignited in the meantime, who is really going to care?

Paul Krugman back in the mid-1990s was advocating that the Bank of Japan pull Japan out of its rut though a commitment to unlimited irresponsibility -- that the BOJ promise to do anything to pull the economy from out of the liquidity trap. Promising to be irresponsible with the nation's money is a tough sell in any democratic state, which is probably why the idea never caught on.

However, a government committing oneself to an impossible-to-achieve goal does not sound half as crazy as unlimited irresponsibility, even though it is effectively is the same thing.

So come next year on the 14th, if I meet the minister (he may not be a minister at that time, we shall see what happens in September) again under the tent in the garden, and the CPI inflation rate is not at 2%, and if he again grants me a minute of his time, I will ask him what score he would give, on a scale from 1-100, for the Abe administration's fight against deflation.

Very Kind Of Them #21, #22 and #23

I have been in remiss in thanking those who have mentioned me in print or on the radio.

Dr. Noah Smith of Stonybrook, with whom I have bitter collisions on Twitter, was kind enough to note this humble site in an essay for Bloomberg published one month ago;

Click - "Japan's Abe Is the World's Best Leader"

I am not quite as enthusiastic about Abe Shinzo his plans as Dr. Smith. Still we both agree he is a whirl of activity in a sea of turgid counterparts.

The Economist, a publication that has been exceedingly kind to me in the past, mentioned me as a rare fan of the Third Arrow reform announcement of last month:

Click - "The battle for Japan"

My caveat to my quote is similar: all is relative. As compared to what other governments are proposing to do, most of which is a fat load of nothing, Abe's "thousand needles" reform proposals look grand.

On the concept Jesper Koll espouses -- that the most recent bundle of 240+ proposals is like a venture capital portfolio; some policy changes bad, most washouts, a few really great -- a worry. If this throwing darts at a dartboard mentality inhabits the minds of those running the reform program, then they need to have explained to them the difference between a venture capital fund, which is taking investment and trying to forge it into a businesses, and government, which is taking revenues extracted forcibly and using them to try to build a safety net for the taxpayers.

Only those who have a plane tickets and a passports out of a country, in case things go haywire, should ever be considered an act of government just one slice of a portfolio investment.

Finally, and this is a surprise, Alex Marshall of the BBC sends an audio letter from Tokyo based upon my heretofore-decidedly-unsuccessful neologism "dumbwalking" (in Japanese, sumafo aruki):

Click - "Dumb Walking in Japan"

With the pleathora of warnings now appearing on the subways about the many ways smart phones make you a dumb walker, the proliferating letters to the editors of newspapers about the phenomenon and the news networks now compiling "death by smart phone" statistics (currently overshadowed by the national panic over traffic accidents caused by folks high on so-called "extra-legal herbs" - dappo haabu - Link J) I can hardly claim title to the individual most uptight about the consequences of the 100% rise in the use of smart phones in the last 18 months.


Image: Ring Tailed Lemurs (Lemur catta) at the Food and Agriculture Museum, Setagaya City, Tokyo Metropolitan District.

Lemurs? At the Ag Museum?

Yep. Probably more lemurs than even in the Aye-Aye Forest at Ueno Zoo. (Link - J video)

Even If This Is The Only Halfway Intelligent Thing I Say Today It Will Still Be A Good Day

Advocates for changes in the status quo in Japan tend to presume a personal knowledge of what is real and normal.

Not all of them. But most of them.


Later - In The Japan Times, Colin P. A. Jones of Doshisha University explains how twisted "normal" can be. (Link)


Image: Poppy field in Showa Kinen Park. Tachikawa City, Tokyo Metropolitan District on June 14, 2014.
Image courtesy: MTC

What The Third Arrow Always Needed Was A Soundtrack

Sadly, I can so see Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and First Bro Seko Hiroshige holed up in the PM's office at the Kantei, air guitaring to the arpeggios and grimacing while playing imaginary synths.

Rock on, courtesy the Prime Minister's Residence.

Yes voters of Japan, someone, perhaps a whole gaggle of individuals, got paid to put together this video celebration of the Prime Minister's growth strategy.

Your tax yen at work.

I have to admit, I am torn. I cannot tell which scene I like better: robosuit-assisted Abe lifting up an unidentified object and putting it back down again to no purpose...or the sudden almost dead stillness of a uniformed Abe driving the tea leaf harvester.

To Die For -- ROTFL Mr. Abe

Yesterday Prime Minister Abe Shinzo launched a new blog about the empowerment of Japan's women.

The blog is causing quite a stir in Japanese cyberspace -- but not for its message of transformation in these fraught times. (Link)

No, people are sharing it for the blog title's inadvertent hilarity.



"Shine!" is of course supposed to be read as [ʃaɪn] - the imperative case of the English language verb "to shine" -- in Japanese 輝け: kagayake.

A not insignificant number of wags are reading the title not as English but as Romaji -- which is to say they are wondering whether or not the pronunciation should be [ʃineɪ] - the imperative case of the Japanese verb "to drop dead" -- in Japanese 死ね : shine.

So, women of Japan, your prime minister says unto you, "Shine!"

Read it as you will.

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

Tip of the hat to JM at The AS, who alerted me to this and another to David Line, who provided me with a clearer English expression for 死ね！



Later - A treatment of the tale, in Japanese. (Link - J)

For The Abe Corporate Income Tax Pledge, A Poem

As a follow up to my post of this morning, a reader's senryu from the editorial page of my daily dead tree news delivery device:

減税を
献金で買う
大企業

Genzei o
kenkin de kau
daikigyo

Big Business
which buys tax cuts
with donated cash

- Koyano Takeshi
Higashi Yamato City

Source: Tokyo Shimbun, 14 June 2014, page 5.

So unclear are the merits of the corporate income tax cut proposal that Mr. Koyano way out there in the far eastern section of the Tokyo Metropolitan District can only think it has been put forward as the consequence of a corrupt quid-pro-quo.

In Terra Australis

MTC is away from his desk, annoying the marsupials.

He will likely have something to say about

- the current status of the corporate tax decrease proposal

- the electoral significance of Ishihara Shintaro's ASSHAT (Ai Sarenai Shin Hoshu Aikokusha To) group of Liberal Democratic Party wish-they-could-bes

- existing home refurbishment

- a proposal to defuse the Senkaku Islands dispute

- the intra-coalition collective self-defense talks (oh, the parties agreed to agree on two of the painfully obvious gray-zone scenarios they were already in agreement about. Bully for them)

- the continuing tragi-comedy of the Kaieda Banri led-Democratic Party of Japan

- the real significance of the saw attack on members of AKB48

- the potential sale of Soryu-class submarines to Australia

- thoughts on why LDP conservatives obsess about ribenji poruno (and love to say the words "ribenji poruno")

- whether the attendance at the emergency meeting for reducing the consumption tax on newspapers and books says anything about who parliamentarians think are their most important constituents

- the advisory committee for the Tokyo Olympics, and

- the looming Third Arrow announcement, Version 3.0.


Just not right now.


Later - In comments I am told that the correct declension of the title is In Terra Australi

Very Kind Of Them #21

Patrick Zoll of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung provides a written introduction to a new roundtable series at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan, the first iteration of which saw organizers possibly unwisely giving me a microphone. (Link)

Both Kiuchi Takatane and I would probably like to have a word with the session's photographer.

The FCCJ has posted a full video record of the event on YouTube (Link). I would suggest that the session is a bit easier to consume as a purely auditory experience - i.e., click on the link, then open another a window on your browser to something more pleasing to the eyes, like let's say, this.

As for the Political Roundtable, it has its next session tomorrow night (Tuesday, June 3), featuring the seasoned and experience Yonenaga Harunobu and the incredibly well-informed Chris Winkler . (Link)