As Heresies Go, Mine's Not Going To Make Me Too Popular

Let me just toss this out, as it has been annoying me for a while.

"Womenomics" -- the precise term invented by Goldman Sachs analyst Kathy Matsui (Link) and the Abe Government's fluffier set of programs intent on improving the status and numbers of women in corporations and government -- promise(s) to increase the size of Japan's GDP per capita and in total. By injecting the talents of women into the established sectors of the economy, corporations will have greater sales and government will become more responsive, bettering people's lives.

Really?

When since the beginning of the Meiji Period has Japan's problem been a lack of talent? Put another way, when since those very few decades after the Restoration has there been a massive need to import skilled labor?

Has not the problem in Japan been, and acutely so since the collapse in the Bubble, corporations and government sitting on talent, misapplying it or allowing it to wither?

If so, how will luring more women into the corporate and career government paths improve the performance of these entities? Without a fundamental reform in the way labor is used -- with workers allowed to flow toward more profitable and efficient enterprise -- having more women in the corporate management and government might mean only women will be gaining an equal chance at having their talents go to waste.

As for society at large, the triumph of "Womenomics" could significantly decrease public welfare. A consequences of the poor uptake of women into career path Japanese corporate and government positions has been a surplus of talented women seeking to become professionals (doctors and lawyers), working for non-Japanese corporations and establishing their own businesses and NGOs. By increasing the percentage of the women gaining access to higher level positions in The Establishment one would be shrinking the pool of talent available for these often much more socially constructive courses.

Already improving opportunities for women in corporations and government could be one of the factors behind the trend identified in a hard-to-read but still fascinating recent graph from plotted//grundriss. Entrepreneurship, rather than equalizing in between the sexes, has become an increasingly male activity. (Link)

While other factors may be in play -- the large lump of mostly male Baby Boom retirees looking for something to do with the last two decades of their active lives, for example -- the decreasing percentage of women entrepreneurs corresponds with the expected outcome from greater opportunities opening up for women in government and established corporations.

In a broader and less fair sense, should we not be more skeptical about ideas hatched in the Goldman Sachs fun factory? Kathy Matsui may be a fine human being (I cannot say, having only chatted with her that one time at that bizarre conference) but any analysis finding "the world would be a better place if more persons were able to become like us" has to be seen as at least potentially unsound -- especially if the definition of "better" is "that which allows us to sell more of our precisely targeted investment instruments."

I get it that in the aggregate having more women working increases the number of wage earners and thus the size of the economy. However, that "Womenomics" has never been shy about being a nakedly regressive nationalist social policy, pushing Japanese women into the workforce to take up mostly the sorts of jobs other societies have immigrants do -- receiving thunderous applause from international circles in the process -- that I do not get.

What Womenomics Can Achieve

I have on-gain/off-again Twitter wars with the opinionated Professor Noah Smith of Stony Brook University on subjects Japanese. In a recent exchange I lost patience with the good doctor, for which I am only slightly sorry.

Dr. Smith asked a simple question: why did Japanese women's fertility (number of births per woman) fall when the level of participation of Japanese women in the workforce was still low? To which I offered a simple answer: because age of first marriage rose. (Link)

In the economics explanation women have fewer children based upon calculations marginal utility and opportunity cost. While in agricultural societies children represent potential increases in labor force and output, in industrial and post-industrial societies children represent zero increase in output. Furthermore, for the woman in developed societies the birth of each child represents an economic subtraction, time and energy that could have been spent furthering their careers or increasing their take-home pay.

In Japan's case, however, declines in fertility preceded and exceeded possibilities of tradeoff between work and childbirth.

Hence my answer -- that in East Asia behavioral effects of calculations of marginal utility and opportunity cost are small compared to the effects on fertility of later marriage and the social stigma/economic catastrophe of out-of-wedlock birth. In contradistinction to the economic explanation, married women in Japan are having children at the same rate they always have -- lost economic opportunity turns out to be a feeble predictor of Japanese fertility.

The policy implications of this for the second of the Abe Administration's New Three Arrows -- raising the number of births from 1.4 per woman to 1.8 -- are clear. More day care, including day care centers inside corporate buildings (Link- J)? Largely irrelevant for fertility. Relevant for the workforce participation rate? Sure, flattening the infamous "M Curve" (Link). But largely irrelevant for fertility.

To raise fertility, the government can:

1) Convince Japanese to marry in their early twenties like they did in the 1970s.

2) Eliminate the social stigma and economic consequences of out-of-wedlock birth.

3) Increase the rate at which women above 35 years of age have children or extend the window of fertility by a delay in the onset of menopause, or

4) A combination of all three.

Good luck with the above.

But don't take my word for it. Check out the amazing slide presentation of Saito Jun of the Japan Center for Economic Research on Japan's capacity to overcome its lower fertility and shrinking population (Link). The whole (expletive deleted) argument over Japan's demographic limits to growth is laid out in detail.

Those with a little more time can check out the Tokyo on Fire videos for discussions of these matters. Like this one perhaps.

Class dismissed.


Later - There are many, many debates where I am rooting for Dr. Smith, such as the one he is currently having with John Cochrane on inter-generational fairness. (Link)

Very Kind Of Them #58 and #59

The Economist this week examines the unnecessary pressure being put on Japan's new media to conform to Abe government-approved ways of thinking or to avoid examining the government's actions at all. A generous author includes a minor observation of mine. (Link)

Meanwhile, as a part of an ongoing series of conversations regarding the burning issues confronting Japan, Timothy Langley, Nancy Snow and I have a long conversation on rural depopulation, taking a big, necessary detour through the socio-economic roles of women.

Mr. Langley misspeaks at the outset as regards the ageing of Japanese society: only 1/4 of Japanese are above 65 years of age and 1/8 are above 75 years of age. Mr. Langley's percentages are for rural communities or for the so-called New Towns, the satellites cities built on farm and forest land in the 1960s. In the villages, with very few exceptions, and in the danchi, the giant public housing projects in the New Towns, the proportions of senior citizens is at 40% and on the way to 50%.

Coming Up For Air - A Brief Discussion Of The Ontology Of Abe's Womenomics

Shisaku is still on hiatus. However, I just had a conversation with Professor Noah Smith of Stonybrook on Twitter which is not entirely without interest. I nearly bring the exchage to a halt at one point with what is in retrospect is only a mildly amusing jest. To his immense credit, Professor Smith ignores my feeble attempt at humor and furthers the investigation.

Here's an even better chart of smoothed female & male working-age labor force participation in Japan and the U.S. pic.twitter.com/By3Z5JDkXS

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) May 3, 2015

@MichaelTCucek A disproportionate share of fire-able workers are women.

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) May 3, 2015

@MichaelTCucek But if there has been a trend break, then Womenomics is winning big.

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) May 3, 2015

@MichaelTCucek That has happened in the U.S.

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) May 3, 2015

@Noahpinion Yes but that would have implied transition out of trend that survived 2008 GFC without hiccup.

— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) May 3, 2015

@Noahpinion Agreed. When they hit 99% they tend to flatline. ; - )

— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) May 3, 2015

@MichaelTCucek I think Womenomics is only one piece of the wider overhaul of the Japanese corporation.

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) May 3, 2015

@Noahpinion Yes, and as forever in the history of this blessed land, the "if" is always preceded by a sigh.

— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) May 3, 2015

@Noahpinion Agree again. However, we must still try to disambiguate demographic shifts, policy changes pre-Abe and policy changes post-Abe.

— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) May 3, 2015

@Noahpinion Which would leave for Abe and Company the credit -- and it is no mean achievement -- for at least not messing up a recovery.

— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) May 3, 2015

Womenomics Comes Up A Cropper

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has to be given credit for talking a lot about the empowerment of women in government and the workforce. He has made very visible progress in appointing women not only to cabinet and top party posts but even pushing the bureacrats into accelerating the promotion of women among the ranks.

However, where it counts -- in the fostering of future women leaders -- Abe's "Womenomics" push has come up embarrassingly short of the rhetoric. In the 41 prefectural assembly races being held on April 12, the Liberal Democratic Party is supporting 1319 candidates. Only 48 of those 1319 candidates -- a miserable 3.6% -- are women.

Nationwide, 379 of 3273 (11.6%) of the candidates for prefectural assembly seats are women.

The percentages of women candidates for the other major parties:

Komeito 8.9% *
Japan Innovation Party 10.0%
Democratic Socialist Party 16.2%
Democratic Party of Japan 16.8%

Top ranking and applause goes to (no surprise here) the Japan Communist Party, with 46.5% of its candidate list being made up of women.

In terms of the prefectures, Hyogo is tops nationwide, with 26 women (20.2%) among the 129 candidates vying for seats in its assembly. On the other side of the ledger, Saga -- an LDP bastion -- has ONE woman among the 48 candidates vying for seats in its assembly.

Sources: Asahi Shimbun, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Kobe Shimbun

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*A low number of women candidates is one of the recurring peculiarities of Komeito, both a manifestation of and in seeming contradiction to the immense power of the Married Women's Division inside the Soka Gakkai.

Very Kind Of Them #28

Last week's resignation of Minister of Economics, Trade and Industry Obuchi Yuko gave me an opportunity to vent some spleen about the overlarge representation the Diet and indeed throughout the elites of East and South Asia of a particular minority: persons who made an excellent choice of uteruses in which to gestate.

To Kirk Spitzer, writing for TIME, my venting was worth quoting, in this way:

Obuchi's portfolio includes authority over the nation's nuclear power plants and her softer image—a young mother, after all—was expected to soothe public anxiety over plans to restart the reactors. Obuchi is the daughter of former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who ran Japan from July 1998 to April 2000, and had even been touted as a possible successor to Abe somewhere down the road. But the close scrutiny that comes with a Cabinet appointment exposed her as a political lightweight and a product of the LDP machine, says Michael Cucek, a researcher and author of a respected political blog in Tokyo. "She represents someone who vaulted into prominence by the death of a sitting prime minister, taking over the family business without ever knowing much about how the whole machine works," he said.

(Link)

Obuchi's admission at her press conference that she trusted and did not check up on persons working for her whom she had known since childhood and Thursday's raid by prosecutors of the home of former Nakanojo mayor Orita Ken'ichiro and the offices of Obuchi support group (link) seemingly justified a rather testy set of exchanges I fell into on Twitter regarging Obuchi's credentials:

@hobson_c All right. Aside from the brief, unremarkable service as Vice Minister of Finance, Obuchi's other credentials were?
— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) October 21, 2014

@hobson_c Obuchi's appoinment to Aso Cabinet was pure electoral tokenism, as that Cabinet was created for a snap election.
— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) October 21, 2014

@hobson_c She is going under because of resentment against her selection based upon birth and gender, and a dearth of meritocratic criteria.
— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) October 21, 2014

@sonicviz @hobson_c No, but life is unfair like that sometimes.
— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) October 21, 2014

@sonicviz @hobson_c After the ordeal she still has wealth, inherited status and a supportive family -- and all that was by chance too.
— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) October 21, 2014

Read/watch list for 2014-10-23

Some items of interest:

- According to the Nikkei Shimbun, BOJ expansion of its balance sheet have made the market for national debt so barren the Ministry of Finance has offered its first short-term debt with a negative interest rate (Link - J). The appropriate comment at this point is, "Yikes!"

- Tobias Harris does a turn on television offering a sober view of the current turmoil in the Diet(Link - J). His view that Abe Shinzo faces a very different political environment in 2014 than he did in 2007. Abe is the quite happy accidental beneficiary of the collapse of a 30-year national program to oust the Liberal Democratic Party. Tossing the LDP bums out, and installing a Democratic Party of Japan-led government in 2009 did not deliver the paradise of responsive and responsible government the Japanese public had hoped for, however. Now the LDP is rivaled in public opinion polls only by the "I don't support anybody/I don't care/I don't like making decisions so please leave me alone" party -- meaning that even if the Second Abe Cabinet enters the traditional death slide of a year of steadily declining cabinet support ratings to 20%, followed by Abe's announcement of his resignation, the only person who can replace Abe will be a member of the LDP (the current likeliest candidates being Ishiba Shigeru, Ishiba Shigeru and possibly Ishiba Shigeru).

- Dr. Adam Posen delivers a very upbeat assessment of Abenomics starting at the 39:50 mark of this PIIE video of its Global Economic Prospects session of 2 October 2014 (Link - video)For the record, 710,000 more women were in the labor force as of August 2014 (the most recent month for which the government has data) than were in the labor force in January 2013, Abe's first full month in office. During that span 230,300 men also entered the labor force -- though that number only returns the number of men in the labor force to the point where it was in February 2013.

- Professor Eugene Gholz, whom I met in Tokyo earlier this year, has produced an easy-to-read paper for the Council on Foreign Relations explaining why Japanese policy makers should continue to remain alert to but should stop making paranoid noises about global rare earth/rare metals supplies. (Link)

- Kasai Yoshiyuki, a Shisaku favorite and the purported maestro of the Second Coming of Abe Shinzo last week saw his grand boondoggle receive the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (Link). Yesterday, he made his pitch to extend his levitating empire overseas (Link) -- not surprising since the CEO of JR Central has admitted that the Tokyo-Nagoya maglev line will never turn a profit. (Link


Later - Jonathan Soble, formerly the Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, starts out with a bang in his new posting as business reporter for The New York Times with the long list of former American politicians Mr. Kasai has acquired for the new North American Wing of his collection. An absolutely precious photo accompanies the story. (Link)

Hope all you shareholders of JR Central are happy with the way the chairman emeritus Kasai is spending your money.

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)

Live Blogging The Shiomura Press Conference At The FCCJ

16:00 Q and A is being extended but I have to go. Too bad.

15:56 Angela Kubo asks a three-part uestion: how did you feel when Suzuki came before you to apologize, have you forgiven him, and do you think Suzuki is sincere or do you believe he was forced to come forward? Shiomura was shocked at the apology, has no arranged her thoughts and has not forgiven. She recognizes that coming forward to bravery. As for his sincerity, she does not know.

15:55 Q: What do you think about changing laws to increase an assembly member's ability to identify a person who is speaking slanderously? Shiomura [wisely] says changes to the laws and regulations are a last resort.

15:50 Question about Abe's statement today about creating a society where women shine. Shoimura says it is a nice sentiment but that in Tokyo Assembly, this has not yet taken place.

15:40 French journalist questioner offers his sumpathies as French man. Asks her whether she has plans to run for a Diet seat.

15:36 Shiomura notes that yes, Prime Minister Abe has put women's empowerment at the center of his program. He most likely had thoughts about this incident. She wished she could learn what his thoughts are.

15:31 Questioner Friedrich is surprised that a young (for Friedrich, 51 years of age is young) man was the confessed heckler.

15:25 First question is not a question but a diatribe by newsletter writer.

15:24 Shiomura says she will not let the matter rest on Suzuki's apology. He was the not the only one heckling. end of Shiomura statement.

15:20 According to Shiomura, the [LDP]'s caucus in the Tokyo Assembly would not take action to help in the reprimanding of one of its members. Instead the caucus said to her that she had 3 days to provide the name of the perpertrator -- after that the matter would be no longer actionable.

15:15 Shiomura tries "the heckling was not about me personally, this is about the women who are suffering" gambit. [We will have to see how the cynical press goes for that statement]

15:10 She was surprised particularly at everyone laughing and smiling at the loud comments. She had to keep going because she only had 11 minutes.

15:05 Shiomura explains that had been heckled before in committee session but she did not expect such medieval (koten) heckling. She was talking about three subjects: passive smoking, care of dogs and help for women's pregnancy and childbirth issues. She was heckled only during her speaking on the last subject.

15:03 "Thank you for coming here on a busy day"? Stock phrase. Problem: she is talking to a room full of folks for whom coming to hear her speak is them doing their jobs.

15:00 The room is full to bursting, 17 cameras along the back wall. Photographers mob the lectern.

I Guess Imperial Men Like A Certain Kind Of Woman

I never noticed until now, but the announcement of the engagement of Princess Noriko to the heir to the chief priest at Izumo Taisha has highlighted a borderline manic sameness in the personal names of the women of the Imperial House, three of whom are commoners and whose naming was thus not bound by any rule overt or covert of the Imperial Household Agency:

Princess Yuriko (90)
Her Majesty Empress Michiko (79)
Princess Hanako (73)
Princess Hisako (60)
Princess Nobuko (59)
Crown Princess Masako (50)
Princes Kiko (47)
Princess Akiko (32)
Princess Yoko (30)
Princess Tsuguko (28)
Princess Noriko (25)
Princess Ayako (23)
Princess Mako (22)
Princess Kako (19)
Princess Aiko (12)

This seems to indicate that if you are a woman of a certain young age and your name does not end in ko (子 - "child")） -- which, given the naming preferences for girls nowadays, is virtually everyone (Link - J) -- relax, you are probably off the hook as a potential future bride for third-in-line-for-the-throne Prince Hisahito (7).*

As regards the wedding, with the Senge capturing a Yamato lineage female, liberating her of her noble rank and, if all goes as planned, producing future celebrants of the rites to Okuninushi no mikoto bearing the Senge surname, the persons much better to email than me would be Kenneth Ruoff (Link) as regards matters pertaining to the Imperial Household and Sarah Thal (Link) as regards the Senge and their efforts to boost their side's version of Japan's originating myths to symbolic equality with those of Ise Shrine and the Yamato Line.

By the way, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has been spending a lot of time talking about Womenomics and increasing opportunities for women in government and the workplace. Has anyone asked him his feelings these days about eliminating the sexism in the imperial succession rules, making it possible for women to reign as emperors?

----------------------
* Then again, who am I am to point out the name obsessions of others? The eldest male child in my maternal grandfather's line had been named "John" for as far back as church records go until my mother, named "Joan" in an hopeful attempt keep the tradition alive despite a first born's inexplicable decision to be female -- emphatically ended centuries of practice by naming me Michael.

An LDP Trying To Take Sexual Images Seriously

With more and more devices being equipped with camera lenses, astonishing data capacity of even tiny items and the transnational space of the Internet, the question of the legal status of uploaded still and motion imagery of one's private sexual behavior is not trivial, particularly in this blessed land where a reputation is still a highly valued if schizophrenically protected asset.

Nevertheless, the shoulders bunch up at Liberal Democratic Party Policy Research Council announcing the establishment of a Special Committee on Revenge Porno (Ribenji poruno tokumei iinkai) studying what the government can do, if anything, about the uploading of private sexual content to the Internet (Link - J). It might be because of the gratuitous use of loan words in the name of the committee -- gratuitous in that if the effort were sincere there would be a recognizable kanji-based description of the subject being tackled. Perhaps it is because LDP Policy Research Chair Takaichi Sanae's discussing almost any subject tenses the shoulders (NHK had her and the other party policy chiefs on Nichiyo Toron yesterday -- and her every pose and utterance telegraphed her contempt and boredom at the proceedings).

Most likely, however, it is the announcement that the chairman of the special committee on "revenge porno" will be Hirasawa Katsuei.

While there are likely defensible expertise and organizational reasons why Hirasawa might be qualified to lead the committee, it would seem reasonable, given the delicate nature of the assumed offense, to choose a standard bearer who could conceivably be a victim -- or at least would not lead the lay person to titter at the absurdity the thought of the standard bearer ever being a victim. Sadly, of all the members of the LDP, Hirasawa has to be least plausible potential victim of the uploading of his/her private sexual content -- the only "revenge" being what the imagery would be doing to the viewer's retinas and brain. To be fair, the party has named Mihara Junko, a far more plausible potential victim to be Hirasawa's lieutenant. (Link - J)

The announcement of the formation of this committee reeks of insincerity, trendiness and desperation. It is is too small an issue -- at least as packaged -- for Takaichi or even Hirasawa to be handling. That Takaichi feels it necessary to show she has a grip on this problem indicates either she has no sense of proportion or that much of the heavy lifting of policy making has been taken away from the LDP policy research council.

The latter possibility, where a defanged LDP PARC has ceded to the Cabinet and the Prime Minister's myriad advisory committees the role of policy incubator undercuts LDP President Abe Shinzo's favorite talking point on his commitment to women's empowerment. He never stops reminding audiences of his having appointed Takaichi and Noda Seiko, the chair of the General Council, to high party posts. That these posts have nowhere near their former importance (the General Council seeimng to be a body in search of a purpose, given the demise of the factions) would be a most inconvenient truth for the PM to face.

Ignore What I Said. Please!

This morning the news organizations reported what is probably a non-story. Asking the rhetorical question, "Is he making light of the electorate?" the nation news providers pointed an accusative finger at Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General for the House of Councillors Waki Masashi, who told a gathering held in honor of the LDP's women legislators:

「今の制度は政党の段階で候補者の選び方が未熟だ。まず政党が本当に正しい意味で国会議員を選べるか。これさえしっかりしていれば、あまり大きな声では言えないが、選ぶ人がアホでも、選ばれる人は立派なんです。」

"The current mean of selecting party candidates, by the steps established by the parties, is immature. First, can the parties really select members of the Diet correctly? If we can deal decisively with this one thing, although one cannot say it in too loud a voice, even if morons are making the selections, the selected persons are impressive."

Given the audience at the reception, which included Prime Minister and LDP President Abe Shinzo (Link - J video), it is difficult to state with any certainty who it is Waki thinks deserves the label "moron" (aho). Nor can one easily discern who precisely the chosen persons (erabareru hito) are. Nor is it clear how "moron" selectors can chose "impressive" (rippa) persons.

Waki is a Tokyo University grad (Engineering) and a former national government bureaucrat -- albeit of the now demoted Construction Ministry. So despite being a card-carrying member of the LDP's Road Tribe, the Mos Eisley Spaceport of Diet groups, he cannot be assumed to be complete out of his senses.

So while it is difficult to ascertain what Waki thought he was saying -- and to whom -- an assumption that he was calling the voters "morons" is not plausible.

Two points:

One, this is the second major flareup over peculiar remarks about elected government by an LDP bigwig since the July 21 House of Councillors. The first was the brouhaha over Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro's suggestion to a Japan Institute of National Fundamentals-provided audience that those wishing to revise the 1947 Constitution should learn from the Nazi party's overturning of the Weimar Constitution. In that instance, initial transcripts left open the possibility that Aso was being sarcastic or ironic.  Recently, sound recordings featuring the audience reaction to Aso's remarks indicate that whatever his intent, the audience clearly thought a Nazi-like takeover of the present Japanese state hilarious (Link J - audio) -- showing that major news outlets were not being unfair in their framing of Aso's weird ramblings.

Two, chasing-after-gaffes journalism -- merited in Aso's case, unmerited in Waki's -- is back from the grave. We are in a time of turmoil, where serious issues and ideas are being debated. Nevertheless journalists are wasting their time and ours on revealing politicians to be idiots -- which is a lot like reporting breathlessly about zebras having stripes.

The second point is bad news for persons looking for a Japan with the wherewithal to lift itself out of its doldrums. Attention spans are limited, and if the people's eyes and ears are clogged with trivialities, the voters will not be the guides for the politicians that they will need to be, this blessed land having nothing resembling an opposition in the Diet. Grim and frightening it is to watch august news institutions like national broadcaster NHK roll over and become mere PR outlets for the government and select businesses (Last night's 7 pm broadcast actually began with the announcer chirping, "Tonight there is wonderful news (ureshii nyusu): the sites of the stations of the proposed high speed linear motor line have been chosen!"). If what little time that is left for critical commentary is wasted on parsing the semantics of the perspective challenged -- then we are all in the pot, ready to be roasted.

Later - Many thanks to commenter "TheStrawMan" for noticing my skipping over the phrase marked in red above.

Still left unanswered is how the party composed of mere humans can conjure up and approve a system of selecting candidates which is idiot-proof.

Duck And Cover, HPV Edition

Yesterday, a government advisory panel to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare recommended that doctors stop encouraging patients to be vaccinated against the HPV virus. Following a spate of reports of lingering pain from the shots and the organization of a parents support group of purported victims, the panel concluded that the ministry that should ask doctors to suspend the practice of telling patients and their parents that receiving the shots is a good idea. (Link - J)

An oddity in this story is the lack of agreement on how many cases of mysterious pains have been reported. NHK is reporting 33 cases, with 8 patients still suffering from unresolved pain. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun is reporting 38 cases out of the 3.28 million patients who have received the shots since November of 2010 (Link - J). The Asahi Shimbun is reporting 43 cases over the same timespan (Link). The Mainichi Shimbun is also reporting 43 cases, with 11 of them with still unresolved pain. (Link- J)

Ostensibly, all these news organizations had their representatives at yesterday's meeting, or received the reports of the advisory panel's recommendatoin. How can the numbers coming out of the meeting be all over the map?

Since the panel has not recommended a halt in the vaccinations, it is difficult to assess what it is recommending the MHLW ask doctors to do. The incidence of mysterious pains is around 1 in 100,000, with the instances of lasting pains less than 1 in 300,000. At the same time, known adverse reactions to the vaccine (such as anaphalactic shock) numbered over 10,000. That and the fact that cervical cancer kills 2,700 Japanese women every year seems to argue that panic in the face of pressure is...inadvisable?

Women's health advocates fought a long and costly battle to push the health industry and the government into including the HPV vaccine in the regimen of standard vaccines provided free for minors. It is both saddening and entirely in character that the advisory panel has chosen to delegitimize the program at the first sign of trouble, on the entirely political and utterly unscientific excuse of "Well, we do not know what is going on, but to cover our behinds let us retreat to the position of being neither for nor against the vaccinations."

Regarding The Ambassadorial Appointment Stories

A reader writes asking whether or not I will be posting on the rumored imminent nomination of Caroline Kennedy as the new United States Ambassador in Tokyo. (Link)

In early in March I said that I look favorably upon the appointment, with Robert Dujarric offering a wise suggestion in comments.

My position has not changed in the interim.

As for the "Joseph Nye is seen as a better" crowd, I have only one question; why is your list of alternatives "Joseph Nye" and nobody else?

While we are on the subject of U.S. Ambassadors to Tokyo, CSIS has provided a transcript of former Ambassador Thomas Schieffer's keynote address at the annual conference of Japan-U.S. alliance managers (Link). The Texas Democrat's take on the status of the alliance reads rather well. Given what I know of Schieffer's timbre and timing, it probably sounded 10 times better.

Schieffer does not figure highly in the pantheon of former ambassadors for reasons that escape me. He did make the mistake of not calling upon Ozawa Ichiro and the Democratic Party of Japan during the first 15 months following Ozawa's taking over the helm of the Democratic Party of Japan, setting the stage for an incredibly embarrassing first meeting with Ozawa after the Abe Shinzo-led Liberal Democratic Party's defeat in the 2007 House of Councillors election. Other than this howling error, Schieffer was an assiduous, conscientious and level-headed advocate for the United States.

The last of which may have been the problem.

That Schieffer possesses a sharp mind as well as a sharp wit is not in doubt. Proof: he was able to go into a business with George W. Bush, giving Bush a management position in that business, and end the arrangement happily, netting tens of millions of dollars.

Let the improbability of that outcome sink in for a second.

Despite his smarts, he looked down upon no one. The one time I met him, at a reception at the Embassy of Luxembourg, he walked up to the receiving line, alone. When Luxembourg staffers tried to lead him past the receiving line to greet the Luxembourg Ambassador right away, Schieffer waved them off with a gentle, "If you don't mind, I would prefer to stand in line and wait my turn just like everybody else" -- which he then proceeded to do.

I suppose his handlers never knew quite what to make of him.

Ya Gotta Wish 'Em Good Luck

The Abe Government is purportedly going to have a go at solving one the most vexing problems of the last 40 years: how to entice Japanese men and women to marry at younger ages and reproduce more frequently.

Govt to step up aid to lift low birthrate / Will help more people marry, have children

The Yomiuri Shimbun

In a bid to boost the nation's chronically low birthrate, the government will provide more support to encourage people to get married and have children, it was learned Tuesday.

The support will include assistance in finding marriage partners and homes, and in having and raising children.

The government will establish an expert task force next Wednesday that will work out concrete measures by May. These steps will be included in the government's basic policy on economic and fiscal reforms, which it plans to compile in June.

Among them, the government will implement measures that are urgently needed, starting in fiscal 2014, a government source said.

The task force will be chaired by Masako Mori, state minister for measures for the declining birthrate, and will comprise about 20 experts, including scholars, doctors, heads of local governments and corporate managers.

Three bills designed to support childbirth and child-rearing were passed into law last August. The bills center on improving child care services and preschool education.

However, the low birthrate is also the result of many people remaining single or delaying marriage, as well as their anxiety about having and raising children. The task force will discuss how such concerns can be dispelled...

(Link)

The article reveals a number of interesting proposals. It also reveals some silly-sounding ones, such as increasing subsidies to local government programs helping residents find spouses -- programs that have had little measurable impact on marriage numbers so far.

The national government, however, is sailing against a global tide (Link). It could go full force pro-natalist, promulgating such measures as the ban on abortions Liberal Democratic Party General Council chair Noda Seiko (whose own desire to give birth led her to make icy bioethical decisions) seems to have proposed last month (Noda has made statements in support of such a ban in the past - Link - J). Without suppressing civil liberties or blowing out the budget (income tax holidays for child bearing, for example), the final package of government measures, none of which is likely to be tested for effectiveness prior to promulgation, will likely be more than just a lot of fumbling around in the dark.

Madame Ambassador?

Over at Foreign Policy Coco Masters take a look at the possible impact of the muted mooted appointment of Caroline Kennedy as Ambassador to Japan (Link). While there are few sentences in the article that will likely send the Japan Keyboard Defense Corps swinging into action, Masters takes the intellectual step few journalists writing in English on Japan take: acknowledging that improving the social position of Japanese women is not merely a matter of increasing access to economic opportunity:

Public attitudes in Japan are arguably going backward, however. A poll conducted by the Japanese government last December shows that 51 percent of respondents think women should be stay-at-home mothers. That figure is up 10 percent since 2009 -- with the increase most notable among people in their 20s. Kathy Matsui, chief Japan equity strategist at Goldman Sachs and longtime proponent of "womenomics," has said that encouraging the participation of women in the workforce should be a national priority. "It should be up there with solving the fiscal deficit. It should be up there with how to improve Japan's national competitiveness.… It's staring you in the face -- it's half the population."

While the appointment of Kennedy would send an unfortunate message in terms of the acceptability of dynastic rule of democratic states, having a woman in the top spot in Tokyo's diplomatic corps would be a definite plus. I try to imagine a meeting between the new ambassador and Finance Minister Aso Taro -- and see in my mind's eye his struggling over which of his personae to put on display -- the faux-serious policy man, the swinging dandy, the arch grandee -- and I smile.

Though it sounds trite -- and potentially insulting to the women of the country -- having a Madame U.S. ambassador could indeed have a positive effect on expectations and attitudes. The United States government and Ms. Kennedy would have to be willing to jaw-jaw about their ambassador's book publishing, her astute marshalling of her political influence and her having had to shoulder the huge responsibility of managing the legacies her parents left her.

On a more human note, the appointment of a child of the most glittering of all the White Houses to the position of ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary for the world's most powerful nation would mean Crown Princess Masako would finally have someone in Tokyo of sufficient rank and status to talk to as a friend.

Nonsense In The New York Times

The Japanese daycare in crisis story rears its ugly head again, this time in an article by Hiroko Tabuchi.

They turned instead to the government-subsidized child care centers, where their collective needs led to a nationwide waiting list that is now more than 25,000 places long. The government estimates the waiting lists for all types of day care would be tens of thousands of names longer, but that many families have given up.

Increasingly, families try private unsubsidized day care centers, which can be twice as expensive despite sometimes offering lower standards of care. But in Japan's cities, even private centers are hopelessly oversubscribed.

Some families are so anxious to get into public day care that they upend their lives, moving to districts known to have the shortest waiting lists.

(Link)

I do not know where Ms. Tabuchi is getting her numbers. It is clearly not from the authorities. Had she taken the time to look at the relevant government publication (Link - J) she would probably have noted somewhere that insufficient public daycare slots are a Tokyo Metropolitan District problem. Yes there are some 25,000 (maybe) children on waiting lists nationwide. About a third of that national number, however, will be on waiting lists inside the TMD.

Now that the lack of spots exists inside the TMD is relevant for managers of non-Japanese companies who intend to employ Japanese women, as most of these foreign representative offices and subsidiaries are located in Tokyo.

To talk about the TMD's problem as Japan's is a misrepresentation.

Second, Tabuchi fails to nail down the reason why competition for spaces in public daycare facilities has increased in Tokyo. Rather than rely on statistical evidence, she relies on the anecdotal evidence from one parent whom, when one reads the article, one realizes to be a bit...extreme in her attempt to secure a spot for her daughter -- and the testimony of advocacy groups, which, while better than nothing, still tend to be in support of particular narratives.

Birth statistics for the TMD seem to indicate, furthermore that the narrative of women being forced into the workforce by the decline in the economic security of their spouses and partners is probably a false one.

Here is the graph of births in the Tokyo Metropolitan District, by age cohort, from 1960 onward.



(Source -- click on the image to enlarge)

Look at the upward swoop in the births for women in the 20-24 and 25-29 cohorts until the mid-1960s (I have marked the two curves with a red circle and a green triangle, for clarity), and the incredible collapse of the numbers since the late 1960s.

By contrast, look at the number of children being born to women in between the ages of 30 and 34 (the dotted line): basically unchanged since 1980 (Showa 55).

Meanwhile the number of children born to women in the 35-39 cohort has risen rapidly, while at the bottom, the number of babies being born to women in the 40-44 years of age cohort now exceeds the number of babies being born to Tokyoites in the 20-24 cohort!

What is going on then? There is a decline in the number of women under 30 years of age, meaning there are fewer women in the youngest cohorts. However, the decline of the number of young women in Tokyo is in no way commensurate with the collapse in the number of births among Tokyoites under 30 years of age.

Most likely we are seeing a strong correlation of childbearing not with population, work or wealth but with marriage and fertility. The stigma against out-of-wedlock births and the crushing of potential earnings such births normally provoke are strong incentives toward delaying initial births until after marriage -- which for Tokyoites means sometime after one is 30 years of age.

What happens when women are in the work force for a decade before they have their first child? Those women will have careers -- which means that these women will be in jobs they want to keep. It also means women must squeeze a lifetime's worth of births into not just a shorter span of time, but a span of time when their fertility is falling.

So demand for daycare has risen rapidly, even as the total number of births have stayed steady and total number of births per woman have been declining.

Where Tabuchi's article really fails the reader is in giving a sense of how hard national and local governments have been working to expand public daycare over the last two decades. The buildout since the bottom in 2001 (Link-J) should be a source of national and local pride. That the number of centers, workers and spaces available has increased, shrinking the waiting lists even as the number of children seeking places increases 3% per year and the demands for services from senior citizens -- the folks who turn out at the voting places on election day -- are increasing even faster, is simply astonishing.

A crisis? A problem? Actually, daycare in Japan is an example of the system working, despite enormous odds.

Of course, a more accurate account would not fit into global master narratives of the sexism of Japanese institutions, Japan's inability to change, Japan's unresponsive and flailing government...

On Fanaticism

A few weeks back University of Melbourne professor Richard Tanter wrote a Nautilus report on his attempt to shake the resolve of Koike Yuriko, the water carrier in Abe Shinzo's and the Liberal Democratic Party's efforts to promote women and women's issues.

Tanter's posting is deeply personal, which makes it a very hard read. (Link)

The hook is Koike's final brush off and the light her throwaway departing line shines upon fanaticism.

It seems that a fanatic, when confronted with an incovenient truth, finds solace and stability in confusing cause with effect.

Many Thanks

Many thanks this morning to commenter "Troy." He has increased the value of my hastily-set down, half-formed opinions with links, supportive statements and counterarguments.

Though I value all of his comments--and hope my readers do likewise--I would like to highlight two of his most recent contributions.

The first is the link to the Ministry of Finance's English-language brief Japan's Fiscal Condition. While an update is due, the paper nevertheless provides an invaluable review, in just a few pages of graphs, of the background to the decisions being made regarding the country's finances. If you ever want, as I do, to rid yourself of the "It is my understanding that..." disease, going over this paper is a great first step.

The second contribution is a graph of the size of Japan's 25-45 years-of-age cohort (Link). While I for selfish reasons despair at the narrowness of the window described, Troy's graph does show the fundamental macroeconomic problem: the swiftly falling numbers of persons in the top consumption years. Reductions in Japan's productive capacity can be made up with increased participation of women in the workforce, delayed retirement and increased productivity. However, the loss of domestic consumption is an issue the government and business either fail to grasp or want to face.

One big victim of the shrinkage in the domestic market will have to be keiretsu tribalism. That Japan's markets are not free -- that purchases by either corporate consumers or individuals are guided as much by keiretsu loyalties as price or quality -- can be accepted and acceptable as long as the domestic market is growing or stable. The reality of a shrinking market -- that in order to keep sales on the same level, one must make inroads into a competitor's customer base -- is not something Japan's established businesses want to think about.

However, do not make any investments based upon the above. No matter how inevitable the collapse of a large institutional structure, it will survive longer than reason dictates or suggests.

For The Love Of Fukushima

On the 7th, representatives of the Tokyo Olympics committee submitted the Tokyo Metropolitan District's bid for the 2020 Olympics. (Link)

One of the claims made in the bid is that the games will be a celebration of and a contribution to the recovery of the Tohoku from the effects of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns. Considering that the Tokyo Olympics 2.0 would be held eight years from now and almost entirely within a small area inside the TMD, the association with the recovery effort seems a stretch. The proposal has two or perhaps three of the preliminary soccer matches played in Sendai, but otherwise the link between the Olympics and the Tohoku disasters will be tenuous to the point of stimulating nervous laughter.

I had a chance to hear Inose Naoki, now officially the governor of the TMD, offer some more concrete examples of how the TMD was contributing to the Tohoku recovery effort. The TMD has dispatch hundreds of TMD bureaucrats on short stays to help administer the recovering areas (many prefectures are doing this, most prominently Aichi Prefecture) and is training and housing applicants for school teaching positions in the Tohoku.

One of the programs Inose described sounded trivial but was in fact important. The TMD has issued coupons offering discounts on day trips or overnight stays in the Aizu-Wakamatsu area of Fukushima Prefecture. Whilst several towns the coast region of Fukushima are uninhabitable due to the Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear power station disaster, and vast areas of coastal and central Fukushima are contaminated with nuclear fallout, the interior area around the city of Aizu-Wakamatsu is relatively contamination-free. However, as the region is inside Fukushima Prefecture, the largest of Japan's prefectures, it has seen its tourist visits fall through the floor. Since Aizu-Wakamatsu area was dependent on tourism, the false association with Fukushima Dai'ichi has sledgehammered the local economy.

In the wake of the TMD's efforts to promote a return to the area (for a of slideshow from my one visit to Aizu-Wakamatsu, in 2009, click Here) the national broadcast network NHK has a new Taiga Dorama series, Yae no Sakura, set in Aizu-Wakamatsu. Like most Taiga dramas, the current series, airing every Sunday night for the rest of this year, is strongly tied to local, prefectural and NHK-led national efforts to promote tourism to the locales in which the story takes place.

Learning the lesson brought home by last year's calamitous series on Taira no Kiyomori (one senryu of autumn last year had Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko musing, "No matter how bad my popularity ratings are, they are still better than those for that Taiga Drama series on Taira no Kiyomori...") the main character, like the protagonists of the recent smash hits Atsuhime and Gon...Himetachi no Sengoku is a plucky young female historical figure.

For some reason watching young women fight disdain, prejudice and adversity is more fun than watching middle-aged men sitting around shouting at one another.

Of course, Yae no Sakura takes "plucky" to a whole new level, as the heroine is Yamamoto Yae, the bakumatsu badass with a Spencer rifle carbine who served as a commander in the defense of Aizu-Wakamatsu's castle against the forces of the Meiji government (Link), fighting alongside her estranged first husband. She survives the war, moves to Kyoto and marries Iijima Jo (Joseph Hardy Neesima), the founder of Doshisha University. (Link)

In the NHK depiction, the decidedly nonconformist Yae mutters the Aizu-Wakamatsu motto naranu koto wa naranu mono desu ("that which must not be shall not be") with contemptuous irony.

Not so salutory was private broadcast network TBS' attempt at a costume drama contribution to Aizu-Wakamatsu tourism, Byakkotai. If Yamamoto Yae's story is one to remember, the story of the Byakkotai (White Tiger Company) is a story one wishes everyone would forget. The teenagers of the White Tiger Company managed to make nothing of their brief lives, winning fame only for committing suicide upon the belief, mistaken as it turned, that Aizu-Wakamatsu's castle had fallen to the armies of the Meiji Emperor.

Just to make the already horrid (visiting the reconstructed Aizu-Wakamatsu castle and seeing the large portraits each of the young men under moody lighting makes one ill) story more wretched, TBS made no attempts to hide selfish goal of producing yet another does-the-country-with-its-high-suicide-rate-really-need-yet-another-glorification-of-suicide-as-beautiful-and-brave drama: the promotion of the latest generation of precious jimusho boys and boy band wannabees.　(Link)

For the love of Fukushima, give me the girl with the gun!