Color Me Cynical - Islamic Terrorist Threat Edition

The Japanese government is supposedly at a heightened state of alert in the aftermath of the killing of hostage Goto Kenji and the threat made to Japan by ISIL.

But only overseas it seems. (Link)

Apparently here in this blessed land (and never, ever has my catchphrase been more apt) the Most Important Man In The Government and possibly The Most Powerful Man In The World's Third Largest Economy can be met walking, accompanied only by a distinctly unarmed and unmuscular young male aide, toward his office in the Prime Minister's Residence using the underground corridor of Tameike Sanno Station at 7:20 in the morning, his identity and person protected by a down jacket (You want to know the color? That's classified) and a surgical mask.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga, if you want me to believe that your government is taking the threats of terrorists seriously, you might want to consider pretending you take terrorist threats seriously.

Like having at least ONE security officer walking with you, when you venture out in public.

Or at perhaps wearing a hat.

But thank you for proving to me, quite inadvertently and sweetly, that all the talk of Japan becoming a normal nation is just bombastic performance -- that you, of all persons, would find it expedient, during this time of heightened alert, to walk amongst us, like a modern day Mito Komon -- but a million times better than Mito Komon because you are the central government and you have no team of quasi-Ninja martial arts masters or a magical tobacco container to protect you.

Just a cotton mask.

Paper Shrines Of Japan

I was meandering without significant aim through the canyons of books in Maruzen's massive Tama Center store (if there are not 30,000 titles on the shelves I would be surprised) when I chanced upon a quiet, unostentatious display in the "NON-FICTION: WAR" section of the Young Readers area.

Only it was not actually not a display. Someone had set books in an unusual way, face outward, with uneven spacing, almost in disarray.

The titles, furthermore, did not all seem appropriate. Documenting War (Senso o shuzai suru) and Prayers for Rwanda (Ruwanda no inori) fit under the rubric "non-fiction: war" but Born in an Aids Village (Eizu no mura ni umarete) about a teen mother in Romania did not.

Then my heart fell to the floor.

Of course the books belonged together: they were all by Goto Kenji.

Whether intentional or not, the non-display display of Goto's books was right above the shelf of books by and about Malala Yousafzai.

Ms. Yousafzai survived her peace-seeking confrontation with fanatics (who despite their vanity and poses are not servants of the Prophet. Indeed, they are only the scrapings-off of geopolitics).

Goto did not.

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If you are looking, in this year of the 70th anniversary, for a book explaining the postwar struggle over memories of World War II -- and how this struggle affects contemporary Japanese politics, pick up a copy of Dr. Franziska Seraphim's War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005. The cover, which I reproduce below, is of that little remembered and today unimaginable September day when the Japan Communist Party took over the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine.

My First Hate Tweet

Over the weekend, non-Japanese media sites published a number of articles and opinion pieces on the proliferation and dissemination over Japan's Internet of hundreds of altered images of the Islamic State hostage video. The authors of the pieces found the images "hilarious" or even thrilling, exhibiting sense of nonchalant defiance of the IS attempt to terrorize the Japanese people.

If only.

Anyone with even a smidgeon of knowledge of Japan, seeing only a handful of the images being rebroadcast and interpreted by these authors (the images are horrible -- I will not provide a link to them but this Japan Times article does) would know in an instant what these things are.

They are not humor.

They are not admirable defiance.

They are the products of the diseased, restless minds of Japan's worst racists.

We have seen all this poorly executed garbage before. Where the black-clad figure of the knife-wielding militant now stands, we have seen a multitude of modified images of South Korean president Park Geun-hye (and Lee Myungbak and Roo Moo-hyuun before her) and of Chinese president Xi Jinping (and Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin before him). The nation's league of sick hatemongers have just taken a slight detour into territories in which underinformed non-Japanese find their bretheren in prejudice and ignorance.

Consider the alternative explanation: Japan's heretofore non-hate spewing, non-image altering masses have suddenly taken on the habits of the habitual hatemongers for just this one hostage crisis.

Right.

Ticked off at the misapprehension of Japanese society I tweeted an irritated conjecture:

I wonder if media types would be so fawning http://t.co/0KZM7XQqzs if they found out JPN creators honed skills in anti-China/Korea imagery
— Michael Thomas Cucek (@MichaelTCucek) January 25, 2015

I should not have been surprised -- but nevertheless was -- that within the hour, a Twitter user posted a hate tweet in response, one that creatively alludes to the decapitation of Yukawa Haruna, the Korean consumption of dog meat and the supposed fates of folks like me who look under the rocks of this blessed land to see what is lurking beneath:



Really attractive, no?

I do not enjoy being right in my guesses about how low the human spirit can sink. I must, however, admit a certain intellectual satisfaction at having guessed the origins of the current grotesquery.

As for anyone seeking to follow up on this morning's entertainment via a malicious email, don't bother. Some soul sent me wonderful malware last year hoping to set my computer to melting or burning. To him or her, be it know that my laptop was a Toshiba. So it ran fine. Incredibly HOT but fine -- right through a Tokyo summer.

To anyone who might wish to emulate that charitable contribution to my computer's software, I no longer open my mail on an any device I would feel sad to lose.

So thanks again "jjjj" for confirming this morning that I may not be entirely wrong in being cautious.

On The Algerian Gas Plant Incident

Most of my posts are about idiocy and venal failure. However, sometimes it is worthwhile to close the jaundiced eye and offer praise where it is deserved.

The deaths of so many hostages in the firefight between Algerian military forces and insurgents in the third week of this month was a debacle of the first order. The Algerian government carried out a rescue operation on its own terms, with tragic consequences.

Despite having almost no solid information, no guidance from the Japanese government and the likelihood of a catastrophe on their hards, the executives of JGC Corporation comported themselves with dignity and strength. The performance of investor relations head Endo Takeshi, the company's face and voice during the early days of the crisis, was simply masterful. Watching his press availabilities and the later appearances in public by JGC president Kawana Ko'ichi -- and realizing that no one in Japanese corporate life has had to handle the loss of 16 of workers, 10 of whom were Japanese nationals, in a terrorist incident or military confrontation -- one could only wonder, "Where did they get these guys and can we get more of them? (Link)

No crying jags, no whining about how little the government could tell them about the situation in Algeria, no checking into the hospital for stress, no idiotic standing up and bowing to take responsibility for things they had no control over...

The stoic yet caring conduct of JGC Corp.'s executives almost makes me forget Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's ludicrous reference to the dead workers as "corporate war dead" (kigyo senshi - Link - J)　and the news media's attempts to make an issue out of one of those killed's having been a dispatched worker from a personnel firm -- as if we all bought in to the concept that the killing of a full-time employee was somehow less sad.

Send in the Clown

"Isn't it rich?" asks the song.

The former head of the Asia Division of the CIA's Clandestine Service--the black arm of the world's most sprawling and powerful intelligence service -- cries now to the unblinking heavens that the Administration's removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror hangs the Japanese government out to dry.

Not only will our taking North Korea off the state-sponsored terrorist list strengthen the regime and reward those minimal responses, it is a direct blow to our strongest ally in the region, Japan, which believes it had at least 13 (and possibly dozens more) citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and '80s.

Resolving this abductee issue goes to the fundamental integrity of the Japanese government. If the situation were reversed, and Americans were grabbed off a dark Florida beach by a Cuban patrol boat, we would go to war to bring them home.

But America has pledged to protect Japan in return for the Japanese forgoing offensive arms. Taking the Japanese abductees off the negotiating table while leaving North Korea with its existing weapons may cause Tokyo to question the utility of that pledge. North Korea’s missiles can’t hit us, but Japan is well within the kill zone.

No one should imply that North Korea is an easy nut to crack. Smart folks on both sides of the domestic political aisle have struggled with this challenge. North Korea has shown no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons, and we are unfortunately not in a position to either force or entice it to do so. Despite all the spin out of the talks among the six concerned parties — China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the United States — there is no reason to honestly assume North Korea will ever give up its nuclear capability.

But things are not made any better by pretending that we are making progress, as Washington seems to have decided to do, or by ignoring the real concerns of our allies. Our approach to North Korea calls for a lot more honesty and, in the eyes of those with more at risk, a greater dose of sincerity. There is more at stake here than just North Korean bombs.

One would have thought that telling the Bush Administration in no uncertain terms that wrapping up North Korea inside a package called the Axis of Evil, then having the U.S. military overthrow the government of one member of the Axis, would make it impossible to stop North Korea (and Iran too) from embarking on accelerated nuclear weapons development path.

One would have thought that shutting down A. Q. Khan's clandestine sales network of uranium enrichment technology, part of which purportedly sent a series of care packages to the DPRK, before February 2004 would have been a fantastic thing to do.

Either of those two actions (oh, action...why are you so hard to do?) would have significantly contributed to an increase in Japan's current security.

But I suppose that Mr. Brown had other priorities.

"Resolving this abductee issue goes to the fundamental integrity of the Japanese government."

Give me a break, please.

Resolving the abductee issue goes to the fundamental legitimacy of a certain subdivision within the Japanese political elite, one which is strangely and quite transparently attracted to the purchase and deployment of weapons systems as a means of bringing order and security to East Asia solving Japan's security dilemmas.

Excuse me, Mr. Brown...but what were U.S. taxpayers paying you to do during the 25 years you spent inside the CIA? Oh, I am sure Mr. Brown did his duty.

But since he was one of the principals in the development and implementation of a totally failed set of policies, why can he not maintain a decent silence as his successors try to salvage something from the havoc wreaked?

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Hattip to NP for pointing out this New York Times op-ed to me.

Do You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' ?

And they say there is a dearth of innovation in this country.

Japan sees wave of suicides using detergent-produced gas
Associated Press

By MARI YAMAGUCHI – TOKYO — At least four people killed themselves Friday by inhaling fumes from a detergent mixed with other chemicals amid a wave of similar suicides that has reportedly claimed about 50 lives this month in Japan.

Authorities are alarmed by the sudden rise in such incidents — an average of two a day were reported in April — because the chemicals are easy to get and the fumes could spread to affect bystanders or rescuers.

A 47-year-old man killed himself Friday in a Tokyo luxury hotel, said Fire Department official Toshiyuki Miyake.

Officials said emergency workers also found a 29-year-old man dead in his Tokyo apartment; a man in his 50s at a public gymnasium in northern Tokyo; and a man in his 30s in an apartment in nearby Yokohama. All died after inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas, produced by mixing detergent and a bath lotion...

It is such a good thing that religious zealots, individuals with grudges, the mentally ill--or some combination thereof--are all illiterate.

For the good of my own conscience, I am not going to go into my thinking in any more detail than that.