Suggested Exhibition #2

If you find yourself in the vicinity of Ogikubo Station on the Chuo Line and have a few minutes to spare, you might want to walk up to the Suginami Historical Museum's Amanuma Branch Museum (Suginami kuritsu kyodo hakubutsukan bunkan) for a tiny exhibit of mass-produced toys and toy making in the period prior to, during and immediately after the Occupation.

The impact of the march to war upon the toys children play with is not something that often comes to mind when one considers the social history of the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa periods. Big changes came not just the permissible and suggested themes of play but in the materials as well, with metal disappearing from toy making very early during Japan's adventure on the continent, the tin and iron sucked up into industrial production for the war. By the very end, toy makers were reduced to making toys out of celluloid and thin strips of bamboo.

Particularly fascinating are the pair of Occupation era propaganda films on the postwar birth of a workshop toy making industry. Waste (empty tin cans) from the U.S. military's canteens and clubs became the raw material for an almost entirely hand-powered process producing toy cars for export.

A whole world of asides ("And into tin toys beat our trash/nations shall learn war no more"; "Japanese were exporting cars only a few years after the surrender, only these were made of tin"; "Yeah, and that must have been the last time an American bigshot could be smiling at a display of Japanese cars ready for export"...) come to mind as one watches the films, which are showing in a continuous loop on the video monitor next to the staircase.

Lovers of historical irony will probably like the jellied alcohol-fueled model nuclear power station in the later postwar section of the exhibit, as well as toys of the 1930s proclaiming Japan's military might.

The exhibit runs through December 1. There are special programs on the 20th of this month and on November 3.

Information on the bunkan (Japanese only) can be found here.

Signs Of The Apocalypse #6

My being able to read through an entire William Pesek opinion piece. (Link) 

Normally, just the essay title and Mr. Pesek's name under it are enough to send me to rushing to click the "Back" button on my browser. Today, however, I managed to stick around all the way to the end.

I cannot agree with Pesek's determination that Abe Shinzo's speeches in New York represent a transportation to an illusory plane of personal grandeur. Authorship would argue against such an explanation. Since Abe did not himself write the speeches, the particular language cannot be a reflection of his thinking.

The overall structure -- well ok, the lack thereof -- the disconnectness, the random recitation of anecdotes and the shallow grazing from the pop culture trough in the New York speeches -- that, by contrast, is the Abe we all know and love.

Rather than hubris, Abe's speeches to the New York Stock Exchange and the Hudson Institute seem to have represented more desperate pleas to be liked, to be considered one of the cool kids.

Regardless, that I managed to read Pesek's take on Japanese events without consequent health difficulties or a speedy departure is a bad sign for the future of life on this small blue planet.

Very Kind Of Them #16 (Special Edition)

Entrepreneur Yoshito Hori and his Globis University were the most terrific of hosts last month, allowing me to attend their Globis 1 Summit. They also allowed me to participate in a panel discussion (bravery defined) on the outlook for policy and politics in the aftermath of the July 2013 House of Councillors election.

My fellow discussants were Your Party Secretary-General Asao Ken'ichiro and Liberal Democratic Party maverick Kono Taro. Jonathan Soble of the Financial Times was our talented and forgiving moderator. In the debate Asao-sensei defended the honor of the opposition while Kono-sensei worried about the momentum of his party being frittered away by special interests.

I displayed my usual gallery of mannerisms and tics.

The pace was leisurely, allowing each of the panelists time to make his points. The discussion was in English.

(Video)

For those wishing to hear the views of incredibly smart folks like Robert Feldman, MAFF Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa, Shawn Baldwin and Matsumoto Oki and, yes, the always entertaining Jesper Koll, the videos of their sessions are on the Globis television website.

Image courtesy: Globis TV

We Few, We Happy Few

Today, October 1, Abenomics really hits the road.

In a few hours' time Prime Minister Abe Shinzo will announce his decision, actually made weeks ago, to green light the raising of the consumption tax from 5% to 8% in April next year. He is also expected to announce a package of fiscal measures designed to lessen the contractionary impact of the imposition of the tax rise. The spending package is projected to be two-thirds the size of the expected extra annual revenue collected by the new tax.

Yes, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is also politics at its roughest, with the nation's legislators admitting they lack the courage to reconsider their vote on raising the tax in two big jumps.

Yuka Hayashi gets it all down here.

Abe should thank the Democratic Party of Japan today for this opportunity to (pretend to*) demonstrate the courage of his convictions.

He should but he will not.

A lot of folks still remember that it was in order to bring recalcitrant DPJ legislators on board that the Noda government agreed to include language requiring the prime minister to certify the economy is strong enough to withstand a rise in the consumption tax. The view of the then opposition Liberal Democratic Party was "raise the consumption tax rise now, raise the consumption tax forever and a collapse in consumption be damned" -- a bit of showy, pseudo-manliness that the LDP cannot recall now that it is once again the party in power.

The DPJ, as we now know, paid a huge price for following what is without a doubt the stupidest political advice ever (Link). As Hamlet would have it, the DPJ went to it over what was an LDP-drafted solution to an LDP-created debt and deficit problem.

The final hurdle for the April tax rise, according to Prime Minister Abe, would be a positive reading in the Ministry of Finances Tankan Survey. This the survey delivered, sort of, this morning, with large enterprises clocking in with a strong Tankan reading of +12, exceeding expectations. (Link)

That the scores for medium and small businesses fell below expectations (0 and -9, when the predictions were for +2 and -5, respectively) is not getting much attention. Since the decision on the tax rise was never really contingent up on the Tankan results, today's poor SME numbers will not be not entering into the government decision making progress. (Link)

Aside for the institutionalized over-reliance on the attitudes of managers of big business as guides to the economic outlook for Japan, a consistent problem made worse by the Abe administration's policies fluffing up the financial results of the country's biggest companies, the Tankan and its readings may increasingly also be fraught with the errors of group think of an ever more insular and isolated managerial class.

The Tankan is subjective. It is a measure of the feelings company executives have about the prospects for their businesses under the prevailing economic climate (the set of questions asked can be found here). Since company executives are the folks who make the big decisions regarding investment and spending, and if they are confident and happy, the more likely they are to invest and spend in a big way, making everyone else happy in a big way, it makes sense to ask them how they are feeling.

What happens, though, when no one else is happy in the way corporate executives are happy?

Come with me on a short journey down a side road.

The online commentariat went gaga a few days ago over a Nihon Keizai Shimbun report on women's attitudes toward work after marriage. The cause for the ruckus was on a giggle-and-"I told you so”" result in a government-commissioned study on the attitudes of persons under 40 years of age. Unmarried women and unmarried men in the survey sample were asked whether once they married they, if they were female, wanted to become housewives, or whether they, if they were male, wanted their future spouses to become housewives.

According to the Nikkei report, 34% of young unmarried women wanted to become full-time housewives after they married -- a seemingly irrationally high number creating headwinds for those arguing Japan's economic salvation lies in creating more opportunities for women to stay in the workforce. (Link)

The Nikkei's take on the survey was unfortunate.

First, because it misrepresented the actual answers to the questions, making it seem as though young women were their own worst enemies in terms of both marriage and economic advancement. It also created the impression of an unbridgeable gulf separating the expectations of young women and young men. **

Second, the Nikkei's report deflected attention away from the rest of the survey (Link - J) which turns out to be a treasure trove of attitude data, allowing one to burrow deep -- at least as deeply as an internet-based survey allows -- into the psyche of Japan's andafo ("under 40 years of age") generations.

For example,

- Personal sense of comfort:

Workers that have the highest level of overall personal satisfaction as regards their present lives? Civil servants, followed by college students, company managers and housewives. (Graph 2, page 5)

- Personal relationships:

Persons believing most strongly that deep personal relationships are burdens? The unemployed, followed by company executives.

Persons feeling that deep personal relationship are not a burden? Student and company employees.

Notwithstanding the above, the social group with the highest percentage of person with intense feelings that deep personal relations are not a burden? Company executives. (Graph vi , 2), page 41)

- Enthusiasm about work:

Age cohort and sex with the highest percentage of individuals wanting to keep on working, moving up the corporate ladder? Women in their teens.

Age cohort and sex with the highest percentage of individuals who do not want to work at all? Men in their mid- and late-twenties. (Graph xxxii, 1), page 76)


Then there is Graph 7, on page 8.

Despite high levels of personal satisfaction with their present lives, housewives are the least likely to agree with the statement "the future of Japan is bright" -- a vanishingly small 0.2% of housewives being in full agreement with that assertion.

Conversely -- and why I feel one needs to be careful on about relying on the results of the Tankan attitude survey as gauges of national economic performance -- those agreeing most enthusiastically with the statement "the future of Japan is bright" are: company executives.

I reproduce the report's graph of the results of the "the future of Japan is bright" question, in all its default Excel colors glory, below:


(Click on the graph to open up image in a larger format)

Line two in the graph has the responses of the company executives, showing both the highest levels of full agreement (15.4%) and agreeing somewhat (23.1%) with the statement, "The future of Japan is bright."

Accepting the caveats that the company executives in this survey are younger folks than the ones surveyed by the Tankan, and that as persons with their hands on the tillers of the economy company managers are more likely to be attuned to changes in economic winds, company managers seem to be real outliers when gauging public attitudes about Japan’s prospects. They are inordinately (Graph 6 on page 7 shows the average scores) confident about the future of the country, indicating that they are over-optimistic.

[By contrast, the survey finds housewives are inordinately pessimistic and afraid, making surveys of their attitudes equally fraught.]

Such optimism may of course be trans-national, with the managerial classes in each nation having similarly optimistic assessments of the national future. Wealth, security and a sense of control would tend to make a person feel more optimistic.

Nevertheless I am concerned at the seeming huge disconnect existing in between what managers sense will happen and what the average citizens sense will happen. In the online survey company managers made up a scant 0.4% of those surveyed, making their confidence truly a privilege of the very, very few.

I of course believe in leverage when it comes to business -- that the decisions of a tiny number or even one person can make a huge difference.

However, when the number of folks feeling a strong sense of hope are so tiny, the weight of general pessimism needs addressing -- and I am failing to see the ostensibly proactive and aggressive Abe II administration doing what it takes to generate a countervailing optimism in any but the most privileged in society.


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

* I have to wonder about Mr. Abe and his convictions. They seems less convictions than persistent notions.

* The results to the question were messy, indicating a lot of internal calculation are being undertaken with understandable confusion as to what members of the opposite sex expect from a spouse:

Unmarried women - "After you get married, do you want to be a full-time housewife?"

Yes 8.2%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say yes 26.0%
I can’t say either yes or no 27.2%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say no 25.1%
No 13.4%

Unmarried men - "Would you want your wife to be a full-time housewife?"

Yes 3.9%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say yes 15.4%
I can’t say either yes or no 50.5%
If I had to say yes or no, I would say no 20.2%
No 10.0%

The 34% of young women who responded either strongly or weakly in favor of becoming housewives were asked the reasons of their choice. Contrary to popular prejudice, laziness or fear of social pressures were relatively unimportant reasons driving a decision to become a housewife:

Because I think we can get by on just my spouse's salary 12.1%
Because women should just quit work after marriage 6.3%
Because either my parents, my in-laws or my employers would expect it 0.9%
Because for women, taking care of the house and the children are more important than work 41.5%
Because I hate work 14.0%
A wife's role is to support her husband's being a good worker 19.8%
Other 5.4%

[N.B. - Respondents in this group were asked to give two reasons for their earlier positive response. The above percentages are thus composed of a mix of #1 and #2 favorite explanations.]

Cut And Pastiche

According to the conventional wisdom, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has been blessed with a new set of more adept and aware English-language speechwriters, making Abe II a much easier international sell than Abe I was.

For those who have had the pleasure (?) of reading his book, though, in either of its versions, New Abe retains many of the defects of Old Abe. He is still offering the regurgitation of rote memorized bullet points, without bridges in between the points themselves. What is new about New Abe is the presentation of a broader topic list -- the offering of a greater variety of monochomatic sketches of potentially attractive subjects. New Abe also delivers his points and anecdotes with vim and vigor, rather than the hangdog look of haughty contempt of six years ago.

An honest desire to appear interested in what listeners might be interested in, however, cannot compete with the Prime Minister's unwillingness or inability to satisfy the human need for a defensible architecture of thought. Further crippling is the lack, even at this late date, of Mr. Abe having a sense of the kind of country he intends to craft via the Third Arrow of Abenomics.

The result, as can be judged from the text of his speech to the New York Stock Exchange (Link) is earnest, trivial, bewildering, winding and embarrassing rhetorical chaos. The smart money will applaud (because it is the smart money) but will note in the aide-mémoire only "Structural reform/YES, TPP/YES, More women/YES. Substance? NOTHING -- jury still out."


Later - The Mainichi Shimbun checks in with a report that a cool reception awaits the PM from within the Liberal Democratic Party in response his eager beaver rhetorical flourishes in New York. (Link)

Later still - Over at The Diplomat, Jonathan DeHart derides the speech as "a barrage of pop cultural references" and highlights the blowback from at least one of the PM's metaphors. (Link)

Some Math Required

Thanks to a blog at a major media institution (whose employees I respect) we have been reminded over the last few months that:

1) The Constitution of Japan, in an extremely liberal reform for 1947, inadvertently banned gay marriage:

Article 24 - Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.

With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.

2) In Japan, adults can adopt other adults. Indeed, adults adopting other adults is the rule. (Link)

Given that an individual can establish his or her own sui generis family registry (koseki), I leave it to the readers to work out what could/should/must happen next.

I confess: like much of the rest of the world, I guffawed at the speculations of actor Jeremy Irons as regards changing the definition of marriage (Link). In retrospect, the problem is not that Irons' hypothetical is too far out there: it is that it is upside-down.

So sociologists, time to get out there and start counting.

An Augustinian Timetable?

Having appointed Komatsu Ichiro to the position of head of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has set the stage for a significant expansion of Japan's capacity to participate in security actions on the behalf of the government personnel of other nations, even unto full-throated collective security.

However, when asked by journalists in New York about Japan's timetable for participation in collective security arrangements, Mr. Abe demurred:

一方、首相は行使容認に向けた憲法解釈変更について「時期を設定するつもりは今はない。国民的に理解が進むよう努力する」との考えを示した。

On the one hand, as regards a reinterpretation of the constitution looking toward participation in security actions, the prime minister said, "I am not here to set up timetables. I will work hard on pushing forward a popular understanding [of the changes]."

(Link - J)

According to other news reports, the PM's plan is to not even start a public debate on reinterpretation of the constitution until the new year. (Link - J)

Hmmmm. I hope he did not say this to his friends at the Hudson Institute.

For a guy supposedly chomping at the bit, eager to have Japan bust out and become a major military player, obsessed with getting the country over a hump it has been sizing up for thirty years now (debating the rightness or wrongness of collective security to death in the process), Abe-san sure seems to be reticent about pressing the government to get its arse in gear.

It is just like Augustine of Hippo said, "Lord, make us a first rate military power -- but not yet."

Across The Board

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, whose economics is beloved of liberal economists Joseph Stiglitz (Link) and Paul Krugman (Link), is about become the first non-American to receive the hardline conservative Hudson Institute's Herman Kahn Award. (Link).

Dig it.


Responses to the question "Which party do you support?"
NHK News poll of September 8-9, 2013

In just a year since Abe's election as president of the LDP, he and his Liberal Democratic Party have become the unexpected colossus, spanning the ideological spectrum. Only the thin ultra-liberal, anti-business left end of the political stick is left open for the Communists to hang onto. Otherwise, the LDP and its coalition partner the New Komeito are everywhere.

Public opinion polls find a majority of voters supporting the idea a vigorous alternative to the LDP. However refreshing such a faith in politics-as-renewed-by-the-possibility-of-electoral-defeat, after Abe and his party move into the room, there is precious little oxygen left to breathe.

And the struggle for breath has become oh, so ironic in the case of the party whose campaign slogan for the July election was "We will be the power to protect livelihoods" (Kurashi o mamoru chikara ni naru) -- a.k.a., the Democratic Party of Japan. The DPJ now finds itself in dire straits if it cannot somehow find a way to lay off a big chunk of its own workforce. (Link)

Oops-a-daisy! (Hey former prime minister Noda, how's that manly sudden dissolution offer working out for ya?)

As for the Japan Restoration Party, with all the crud that Ishihara Shintaro has been saying the past few months about his co-leader Hashimoto Toru and Hashimoto's core program of converting Osaka from a prefecture to a metropolitan district, is it correct to even label that mad vessel a party?

The members of LDP certainly could still blow this sweet deal they have right now. They could get greedy and start pocketing some of the money they have tossed into economy through fiscal irresponsibility and monetary slaternliness. They could start fighting ordinary citizens to push through mega-projects making little economic or environmental sense (completing the capital ring roads, digging the Linear Motor Car Line from Shinagawa to Nagoya, restarting nuclear power plants in of questionable geomorphology). They could mess up the march of economy policy out of an inability to sacrifice some of their supporters.

Right now, however, they are on a roll -- right over every other party except the JCP.

Just One Of Those Things Making Life A Little Less Simple

Just for the record, Dr. Campbell (Link), the Nippon Professional Baseball league's record for most home runs in a season has been held by a foreigner since 1964* -- O Sadaharu being a citizen of the Republic of China.

O's retentions of the citizenship of a lost state -- his father hails not from Taiwan but from Zhejiang -- was the reason he could not play at the Kokutai (the national sports festival takes its once-in-a-half-century's turn in Tokyo starting on September 28 - Link - J) despite being a hero at Koshien.

The sublimation of O's citizenship -- what, the first person awarded a Kokumin Eiyosho is not a kokumin? -- and later players' dutiful protection of the record makes for an interesting study of the notion of ethnicity, loyalty and gradations within insider/outsider divisions.

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* Why has no one seen it fit an interview Nomura Katsuya, the Japanese player O took the record from? If there is anyone in this blessed land with an otherwise unspeakable opinion and willingness to express it, it's Nomura.

It Takes My Breath Away: Fairbank and Reischauer on East Asia (1967)

Forty six years ago...(Link - video)

Yes, it does belong in the "holy cow" file.


Later - For some sense of the incredible vision of Fairbank in particular, listen to what he says about the United States use of aerial bombing in 1967 and compare it to comedian/commentator's Bill Maher's rant of 13 September 2013.