The TV news has been full of this today – a bag snatching, two high school boys and a 29 year old policeman.
Yes, an old lady of 75 had her handbag snatched by the policeman, who was followed and caught by two high school boys.
Really – would I lie to you?
There are millions of blogs out there on the Wonderful World Wide Web; every day a few thousand of them presumably just quietly fade away so you couldn’t be blamed for thinking the same thing had happened to this one. Not so much laziness, or lack of things I wanted to mention, but the fact that every time I switched on the computer there seemed to be something else I wanted to do first, and in a flash it was time to switch off and do some work in the so-called Real World. Anyway, what’s happened in the two months since the last posting?
Well, a bit of a catchup. The next post will be sooner – promise!
Of course North Korea is just over the water, and Japan has a lot of unfinished business there: the abductees issue drags on, and the DPKR still bring up WW2. Even so I’m getting a bit tired of hearing about this is-it-a-satellite-or-is-it-a-missile that’s been occupying the top news spot for the past week or so. “Don’t panic!”, “just carry on as normal” everyone shouts at us and today, when it looks as if the thing might well be launched, it comes up on NHK TV every five minutes or so. Just after 12:00 there was even a false alarm!
Of course it will just fly overhead (that’s the point when they decide if it’s a satellite or a missile), bits will fall into the sea, and nothing will drop on us, but just in case it does the Self Defence Force have got their new Star Wars toys out ready to shoot it down. That whole thing was a ripoff for the American arms industry to sell billions of dollars worth of equipment to their “allies” anyway, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Americans had been stirring things up between Japan and North Korea to improve their sales prospects…
It will probably all be over today anyway. Heads down.
I’m usually two or three weeks behind in reading my Guardian Weekly – this doesn’t bother me all that month as I reckon that if it was worth reading three weeks ago, it’s still worth reading now (and the reverse of course). It was Autumn by the time I came across Andrew Simms’ article about the “100 months” movement so by then of course we were down to 98 months or so. That’s the time by which the game will be up unless our politicians start taking the dangers of climate change seriously. The first line of the report, which you can download from the 100 months website, says:
We calculate that 100 months from 1 August 2008, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will begin to exceed a point whereby it is no longer likely we will be able to avert potentially irreversible climate change.
That’s One Hundred Months, not years. About 8 years from now the process will get out of control, and the planet will cook, whatever we do. Unless, that is, all the countries of the world really get to work on this and drastically cut our CO2 output. Not sometime in 2050, but right now. The possible, or likely, horrific consequences of letting this slip have been well described elsewhere, but we can look forward to things like destructive storms, flooded cities, plagues of tropical diseases, destruction of productive cropland, millions of hungry refugees, wars over water, mass starvation, a drastic reduction in the human population the world is able to support, the end of civilization as we know it, or even our extinction…
I don’t know about you, but I find this all somewhat depressing. Some world leaders seem to have started to get the picture, but what chance is there of getting the whole world on board in time? It’s hard to be optimistic. Of course the current economic depression might turn out to have a silver lining if it has the same effects that the collapse of the Soviet Union did on Russia’s emissions in the 90’s. Meanwhile here in Japan wind power has hardly taken off at all because this relatively small country doesn’t have a proper national grid system for distributing electricity from where it’s produced to where it’s consumed. Among the government’s pitiful collection of economic stimuli so far was making the highway tolls a (cheap) 1000 yen to drive anywhere in the country at weekends. Starting last weekend, we got an increase in traffic of 30~40%. Great stuff. (The opposition would like to go even further and make the highways free! )
They just don’t get it.
I hardly heard of it in Britain, but Baseball’s pretty popular here in Japan, going back to 1872. The BBC hardly mention it of course: following “Sport” to “Other Sport” to “Baseball” you eventually end up with a link to the World Baseball Classic home page, where right now you’ll find that the final is in progress with Japan vs. Korea. These are old rivals – amazingly enough, under the complicated “double elimination” rules of the WBC, this makes the fifth game between them! They’ve had to knock out some pretty powerful other countries on the way – Cuba, Venezuela… not to mention America, but now we’ve got two great teams facing each other, and a great game.
Baseball’s not a bad sport to watch, although football’s up there too, and here we’ve got a worthy final – equal scores at the 9th innings and now into extra time! Japan have just put in two more runs so now it’s down to the young pitching star Darvish (his dad’s Iranian) to hold down the Koreans, who are just as determined to win of course…
DONE IT! Japan have won the World Baseball Classic for the second time in a row.
Now for the High School baseball, which will be on the radio for the Spring, then Summer, tournaments. I get tired of it after a month or so, to be honest, but T. loves it.
Hmm… a couple of days ago bird flu was found on yet another quail “farm” in Toyohashi, and another hundred thousand or more birds will be gassed and buried. This started just over a week ago when 260,000 birds were killed when the same virus was found, followed soon after with a second case. The Toyohashi area is the Quail egg centre of Japan, supplying some 70% of those little eggs that appear in bentos, so the farmers are getting a bit fed up seeing all their birds destroyed like this, but seeing the TV shots of these poor creatures shut up in those long, long lines of tiny cages it’s hard not to feel sorry for them. (the quails, that is)
Of course it’s the same for ordinary chickens too, and cows, pigs or sheep don’t really have a much better time of it. I’ve no intention of becoming a vegetarian any time in the near future; I’ll just feel more guilty about eating meat for a while. Actually we don’t really eat huge quantities – a few grams in a stir-fry or something – but that’s still quite different from zero. It would be nice to have that feeling of moral superiority, but to tell you the truth some vegetarians seem to me to be indulging a certain pickyness over what they eat that they can afford because they live in a rich country. (Eventually of course the carbon-dioxide implications will force all of us to eat a lot more tofu and lentils anyway.)
Meanwhile no-one seems to know where the flu came from; those factory farms are pretty well sealed off from wild birds and mice, but it got in somehow. I’m afraid the day will come when all the wild birds will be killed off because of their potential health risk…
That was supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse – “may you live in interesting times” – and you could probably have said for a long time after I got here that Japanese politics were not all that interesting. The Liberal Democratic Party returned election after election, one anonymous prime minister after another, the Diet just a talking shop while the real decisions about the course of Japan Inc. were taken elsewhere… There were a couple of distractions here and there: the Lockheed and Recruit scandals, a brief Socialist government soon given the kiss of death from the LDP, who offered “eyebrows” Murayama a coalition and completely destroyed his party’s electoral appeal, the Japan New Party of Hosokawa, but on the whole as long as the economy went on improving people didn’t really care all that much if the LDP had a boring monopoly on power.
Things started to get more interesting when Koizumi became prime minister. Along with that nasty “cuddles” Takenaka he started trashing “old Japan” and bringing in a sort of Thatcherization. The pernicious results – ever widening gulf between rich and poor, loss of job security, erosion of social solidarity – are only now coming out, but at the time Koizumi looked like some kind of modernizing hero and at the next general election the LDP got a landslide majority. Dozens of new “Koizumi children” filled the Diet benches. The torch passed to his protege Abe and things started to fall apart. Scandals, a minister’s suicide, general ineptness and an upper house election catastrophe in which the opposition parties got a majority – Abe resigned, followed as PM by Fukuda, who seemed OK but soon resigned too, fed up with trying to get legislation through the hostile upper house.
Now we’ve got the appropriately named Aso, who seems the worst of the lot and has approval ratings of around 15%! There’s been no general election since Koizumi’s landslide; Abe, Fukuda and Aso were chosen by internal processes of the LDP, who know that if they held an election now all those Koizumi children would be out on the street again. Still, by law they’ve got to call an election by Autumn this year so they’re sort of stuck…
At just this moment, miraculously (for the LDP), the public prosecutor finds something fishy with the political donations received by Ozawa, the leader of the biggest opposition Democratic Party. Ah.. just a minute, according to today’s news it seems to be spreading to the LDP too…
(Last week the Far Eastern Economic Review had this to say about the situation here in Japan.)
Quite interesting I’m sorry to say.
Maybe somewhere in the back of the Magic Castle there’s a secret doorway through to another, happier, dimension… Anyway escapism is obviously making money these days as Tokyo Disneyland reports record profits. It’s also high up on the list of popular employers for university graduates, can you believe?
Another company making incredible money these days is MacDonalds. Ugh! Apparently their new 100 yen (about a dollar – bit more these days) menu has been really successful. Our waitress says some of her friends often go there when money is low. I hate MacDonalds, but if they had 100 yen MacBeers…
Anyone remember the Edgar Broughton Band? Back at university it seemed like they’d be there at any festival, event or concert with those Beefheart vocals and wild distorted guitar. I hated them at the time, them and another bad penny, the Third Ear Band who went in for interminable atonal wailings. (Subsequently changed my mind completely about them, and probably would have liked the Broughtons too if I’d heard them a couple of years later.)
Anyway every year I get reminded of Edgar Broughton’s anthem “Out Demons Out”; today is Setsubun, the coldest time of the year which, as everything contains the seed of its opposite, means the beginning of Spring. You’re supposed to throw beans around the house shouting “Demons out, luck in” or something. (Demons, or oni represent evil influences, generally, and have horns just like the Western variety.) I wonder how many people actually do it now – maybe another generation and most of these customs will have died out…
You can check out Edgar Broughton’s rendering of “Out Demons Out” here – real 60s stuff! I keep meaning to have a go with Daihachi Ryodan but it will have to wait till we have a gig at the beginning of February some year. (Probably noone would enjoy it but me anyway.)
An Indian guy, now based in the US, comes into Raffles’ sometimes (he likes Malaysian food), and the other day when he was here I put on some old Bollywood music, thinking he might enjoy the nostalgia. “EEH – didn’t expect to be hearing this sh*t here in Japan!!” was the sort of reaction I got.
Hmm… I guess that music has quite different resonances for us. For me, apart from enjoying the technical level and imaginative arrangements, those sounds are redolent of the India I visited some 30 years ago before coming to Japan. Even earlier, some of you might remember the head shops of the 60s/70s with their burning incense, Indian god posters and Indian music in the background. India was cool in those days – and still is, for me at least.
For my customer, though, it was the stuff that was on the radio all the time when he was a kid – nerdy, worn-out, definitely uncool. As if someone had been enthusing to me about Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Perry Como; sure that stuff’s OK, but…
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asazuke 