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Cluster bombs of the Secret War

Last week I made my first visit to the beautiful and neglected country of Laos to learn about these vicious objects:

. . . unexploded cluster bombs. My story appeared here in Saturday's Times. I attach a longer version below.

Thanks to the many people who helped to organise the trip. Those interested in learning more about the issue can look at their various websites.

I was invited by the International Committee of the Red Cross which is campaigning for an outright ban on all cluster munitions. Our host were the Lao government's National Regulatory Authority UXO and Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme which struggles on bravely in the face of an impossible task. The United Nations Development Programme also supports demining in the country.

A fascinating part of the story, which I had too little space to dwell on in my piece, is the effort by the Lao government and UNESCO to aquire World Heritage Status for the  Plain of Jars, a beautiful and mysterious archaeological site which, in my view, was plainly constructed by extraterrestrials.

I encountered two NGOs doing valuable work in Laos - the Mines Advisory Group (which tries to defuse the cluster bombs before they go off), and COPE Laos (which helps the victims after they do). In this picture, Joe Pereira of COPE displays some of the prosthetic limbs which the organisation makes for injured Laos.

All these photographs were shot for the ICRC by the excellent Vientiane-based photographer, Jim Holmes.

Continue reading for my story . . .

This blog is not dead . . .

. . . just resting. It will awake, refreshed after its long winter sleep, sometime in the spring.

Streaming Yasuo

Smashing to see Japan's prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, following the example of The Queen and getting hip to the kids' jive by promoting himself on YouTube. Also to hear him gamely speaking in English for 5' 33" - not effortlessly (though who am I to talk?), but gamely nonetheless. Anyone who makes his debut on the Interweb with a quotation from the early 20th century novelist, Natsume Soseki, also demands respect. "It seems as if everything is being destroyed, and - at the same time - as if everything is being built anew."

The LDP YouTube channel seems to be the work of the extremely likeable MP, Taro Kono, beloved of foreign journalists for his beautiful English and general friendliness and approachability. "I hope you tune in when you have nothing else to do," he says in his own Japanese language video contribution - which is modest, if realistic.

Ladies and gentelemen, please welcome . . . Yasuo Fukuda.

Days of The Rat: Predictions for 2008

[Tokyo, late December, the blackest hour of the night. At the door of my apartment, a feeble, scratching knock. Outside stands a man so ancient that it is impossible even to guess his age. His dark skin is papery and wrinkled, his eyes are brown pools, and his earlobes hang loose from the weight of the polished rhinoceros horns which pierce them. He presses an object into my hand, picks up his blow pipe, and melts into the night.

It is a twist of parchment containing three or four lumps of a dried out, woody substance. My sniffs of gratification turn into cackles of triumph. My wishes have been granted. My dreams have come true. The future is mine!

Every year this blog solicits predictions for the year ahead from Asia’s most renowned prophets and soothsayers. The results have been lamentable. The Sage of Singapore, whom I consulted for 2006, was a bit of a disappointment. Madam Sosostris, last year’s featured soothsayer, was a disgrace! What was the fatuous old trout on about?

This year I decided to take matters into my own hands. Through contacts among the Dayak people of Borneo, I acquired certain . . . substances, harvested from the rain forest by the timanggong, or animist wizards. When inhaled, in combination with the correct incantations, they open invisible doors which allow glimpses of the future. Men of weak spirit would be driven mad by such visions, but this is a risk which I am prepared to take for you, my readers.

I drop the woody lumps, as instructed, into a cauldron of snake blood, and heat it slowly, breathing in the fumes and muttering the eldritch syllables inked on the parchment. Within moments, I am transported to the jungle. Faces painted with blood and clay flash before my eyes. My ears are filled with the sounds of insects and the screams of animals and humans. The Great Lord of the Forest taps me on the shoulder and whispers in my ear . . . Here is what I see in 2008, Heisei 20, the Year of the Rat . . . ]

Burning Bright

Four of us were driving on Sunday from Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra, to the town of Calang on Aceh’s western coast. It was a seven hour drive; we were five hours in. The road ran along the coast past wide empty beaches of pale sand, and then over high cliffs where gibbons dangled from the trees. It had been almost three years since I was last in Aceh, in the weeks immediately after the tsunami. At that time the destruction of the towns and villages here was complete; even now, there were stretches of the coast which looked as if a disaster had just struck them, with the tall skinny stumps of palm trees jutting up out of inundated marshy swamp.

One hundred and seventy thousand people – the number is no exaggeration – died along this coast in the space of a few minutes on Boxing Day morning. It was the largest single tragedy any human being alive has ever seen. Emotionally, it’s an experience that I hardly began to digest.

But three years later, what had been destroyed was being restored. Houses had been rebuilt, and rice fields had been cleansed and replanted. It was stirring and touching to see it all around. I met a woman whom I had last seen in a refugee camp, stunned with grief after the loss of her three children; now she had a new home and new 16 month old daughter. I saw the mosque which had been the only thing left standing in her village. The community had left a corner of it broken and unrestored, in case people should ever forget about the tsunami.

It had been a long, exhausting journey and the four of us in the jeep were quiet as the sun set and darkness came down. But I was filled with thoughts of how lucky I was to be here, how thrilling it was to be driving along this bumpy road through the bush – here, now, alive, with friends, surrounded by the timeless sea and trees. The road turned away from the coast and up through the forest, with a steep cliff above to the right and a thicketed plunge below to the left. The lamps of the jeep cast a wide oval on the road ahead. I was daydreaming (I really was) about travellers of long ago, who spent days and weeks rather than mere hours making journeys like this, and of the dangers and monsters which threatened their imaginations.

To the right of the road, a dim shape became suddenly visible. At first I took it to be a dog – but it was much too big to be a dog. Quickly it moved across the road and its shape and colour flared up in the illumination of the headlamps. At the same moment, everyone in the car exclaimed.

Dreams in Bali

[Hello again. Here's a post I wrote for another Times blog, 'Across the Pond', about US poltiics and the presidential elections.]

On the face of it, Asia is an unlikely place from which to pontificate on the US presidential election, and I am an unlikely pontificator. Drastic barriers of culture and language, the world’s largest ocean, and hours of time difference and separate Tokyo, Beijing and Bangkok from Washington, New York and LA. Compared to Europe, the US, for better or worse, has few historical, colonial associations with Asia. Personally, I have set foot in America three times in my life, and never for more than a few days.

But the lives of people in Asia have been profoundly affected by political decisions made in the United States. To a greater extent than Europeans, American actions over the past sixty years have been a marked blight, as well as a blessing. Twice in living memory, in Vietnam and in Korea, American troops have fought disastrous wars on Asian soil. Large concentrations of US troops remain in South Korea and Japan, arousing mixed feelings, at best. Of course, the brightest Asian students still compete to win places at US universities, American ideals of self-betterment and democracy inspire Asian politicians, and people of all backgrounds are avid consumers of American popular culture. In Europe, sentiments towards the US tend to veer between extremes of admiration and contempt; in Asia, the polarisation is less extreme, but there is an general and often unstated ambivalence about the vastness of American US power, and a scepticism about how much the American public and American their politicians understand or even care about the world’s largest continent.

The interaction between US politicians and Asia has been one of the most interesting things about a frequently boring and frustrating event – the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, where I write this. Here representatives of the negative American stereotype – arrogant, indifferent and patronising – have intersected with other Americans making an effort to putting over a very different image of responsiveness and responsibility.

I touched on some of this in my piece in this morning’s newspaper. To oversimplify: 190 governments have gathered in Bali to plan the next stage in the struggle against global warming. The European Union favours the kind of approach to the reduction of greenhouse gases on which the European Union has been created – rules and targets and commitments, agreed in detail, and legally binding on everyone. The US, at least the Bush administration, prefers a situation in which countries come up with their own targets, if any – if there are to be binding goals, it certainly doesn’t want any of them agreed this week.

The final document is being negotiated as I write. I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the two arguments (although the alert among you may be able to work out where my sympathies lie). The Bali International Convention Centre is full of environmentalists heaping contumely on the US; it is important to filter most of this out. But, honestly, in its press conferences at least, the US delegation has failed to impress.

It is led by Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs at the State Department. The expansive vagueness of this job description leads me to suspect that she is valued for her PR and presentational skills – and Ms D does have a certain auntyish charm. Attending one of her press conference is like standing as a five year old in front of your primary schoolteacher as she tells you it doesn’t matter that you have wet your knickers, but that you should try to make sure that it never happens again.

The real star is a bloke called James Connaughton, who opens new universes of meaning in the world oily.

Temporary hiatus

Further apologies for the resounding silence in this blog over the past few weeks. I've been on holiday, and will be away from Asia until early December - when a ferociously intense and productive period of blogging will resume, the like of which you have never seen before.

Until then posting will be light, although I'll continue to put up comments.

Happy Late November to everyone.

Inside Than Shwe's jungle fortress

[Our correspondent inside Burma recently visited Naypyidaw, the military dictatorship's bizarre new capital. A shorter version of this article appears in today's newspaper.]

Kenneth Denby
Naypyidaw, Burma

Even before you have arrived in the remarkable city of Naypyidaw, it is obvious that this is a place like no other in Burma. It’s not just the isolation, in a reclaimed jungle 200 miles from the sea; it’s not the ban on foreigners, which is circumvented easily enough. The most extraordinary thing about the world’s newest capital is the road leading into it.

Ten lanes wide, cut flat and straight through hills and forests, it is the grandest and fastest stretch of road in a country where potholed tracks qualify as major highways. Occasionally, a cement lorry rumbles by on its way to one of the city’s many building sites. From time to time, a rickety open-backed minibus drives past. But otherwise, the traffic on this mighty autobahn consists of sputtering motorbikes, horse-drawn carts, and lines of women carrying heavily laden baskets on their heads

This is Naypyidaw, the “Place of the Kings”, the most mysterious and bizarre capital city in the world. Its broad roads, grandiose public buildings and shopping centres are meant as a model of the advanced Asian city – but many of them stand empty and unused. Unknown millions have been lavished on its construction, in a country where most people live on less than a dollar a day.

Its inaccessible location is intended to protect the hated military junta of Senior General Than Shwe – but many believe that the government’s increased isolation is hastening its downfall. Naypyidaw is the Burmese dictatorship in microcosm, a monument to the generals’ ambition, xenophobia, paranoia, and simple barmy incompetence. Earlier this month, I became the first western journalist to visit the capital since the junta’s bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy protests last month.

Patchy service

Apologies for the infrequency of posts over the past couple of weeks. As they say on Facebook, "it's complicated".

When time allows I will put up some of the news pieces and other contributions from The Times correspondent inside Burma. In the meantime, you can read his newspaper stories in the Asia section of Times Online; or enter "Kenneth Denby" into the search engine.

Back soon . . .

The Ogre

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi exerting efforts for Confrontation, Utter Devastation, and Imposing All Kinds of Sanctions including Economic Sanctions against Myanmar - If she declares to give them up, the Senior General will personally meet her.

Headline in The New Light of Myanmar, the government-controlled newspaper, 5th October 2007.

The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man.

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The Ogre cannot master speech:

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

W.H Auden, August 1968

The Saffron Revolution?

"It is a fascinating moment, fraught with promise, when this spirit of the times, dozing pitifully and apathetically, like a huge wet bird on a branch, suddenly and without a clear reason ... takes off in bold and joyful flight. We all hear the shush of this flight. It stirs our imagination and gives us energy: we begin to act."

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Read: 'Nuns join Saffron Revolution'

Man of the moment

Below I attach my piece about Homer "Yasuo Fukuda" Simpson from this morning's paper. It's written in the assumption that he will defeat Julie "Taro Aso" Walters in Sunday's LDP presidential election, and such assumptions can be very dangerous, of course. But the only thing that could stop Mr Fukuda now would be a full-scale three-in-a-bed, coke'n'tarts sex scandal. I think we can agree that he is not the type. (Aso, on the other hand . . .)

My first assumption was that Fukuda's reluctance was just a pose, a conventional piece of pseudo-humility. Now, though, I'm persuaded by it. I think that he genuinely didn't particularly want to be prime minister. Whether that is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.

[Thanks to Camera Otoko, Fi-Wi and Sarah for Homer and Julie.]

Doh! Politics update

Were we wrong all along about the secret identity of Yasuo Fukuda? Leo and I concluded that he is Eric Morecambe. Jun Okumura, mighty among Japan political bloggers, observed his resemblance to John Major. But has the truth eluded us all along?

Can anyone seriously deny that this man:

is really this man:

Ministry of Mixed Metaphors

From a British newspaper this morning:

The mantra that Japan is moving towards a two-party system may be a chimera.

Mmm . . . which amounts to saying  that this (click here to listen to the mantra)

may be this

How's that then?

The Killers in the Killing Fields

I have never seen the sites of the Nazi Holocaust, but S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, is one of the most impressive and disturbing memorials to a historical event that I've ever visited. I thought of it again yesterday after the arrest of Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, and the man held by some historians as most responsible for 200,000 executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

As a place of commemoration, it derives its power from its modesty: the banal location in the quiet Tuol Sleng suburb; the shabbiness of the concrete cells and the crudeness of the clumsily forged bars and shackles; and above all, the hundreds of black and white photographs (of 6000 which survive) of the doomed prisoners simply displayed on the walls.

Immediately after my own visit I read Voices from S-1: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David Chandler, which is remarkable for combining scholarship with compellingly personal reflection on the broadest significance of the cruelty which was practised there. "As a historian and a student of literature I have tried over the years to control the data I deal with and to comprehend the writings that I read," he records. "When I have immersed myself in the S-21 archive, the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning."

Give Him Sunshine

I am cursing myself for missing it, but I cannot tell a lie: my talented colleague Leo Lewis spotted it first here. After a year under the leadership of the actor Tom Conti, the next prime minister of Japan looks most likely to be another icon of the British showbiz scene. You thought he'd died in 1984, but yesterday he was back, launching his campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party under the unconvincing alias "Yasuo Fukuda". Isn't it obvious that this man:

is in fact -

- Eric Morecambe!

Apologies for the quality of the image. To increase the resolution, just screw up your eyes and squint a bit.

But what about his opponent? Who is this "Taro Aso" character, and what is his true identity?

After a certain amount of timewasting, er, brainstorming, Leo and I have come up with the following possibilities:

Fukuda/Aso, Aso/Fukuda

One of these days I must post on something other than politics, but the situation in Nagatacho (Tokyo's equivalent of Westminster) is so fast moving and unpredictable that it is difficult to think about much else.

In essence, this is the situation this afternoon:

Yasuo Fukuda, licensed to thrill

Richard Lloyd Parry
Tokyo

Japan’s nationalist right-wing is under assault after Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party emerged as a challenger to the conservative favourite, Taro Aso, for the job of prime minister.

Mr Fukuda (pictured left, in his earlier job as a ninja), who favours greater engagement with Japan’s Asian neighbours and opposes visits to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine, will announce his candidacy for the leadership of the LDP today, according to Japanese television, a job that guarantees election to the post of prime minister.

Yesterday the outgoing prime minister, Shinzo Abe, whose sudden resignation on Wednesday brought about the political crisis, was admitted to hospital suffering from inflamed bowels, extreme weakness and stress. Although he technically remains in charge until a successor is chosen, his sudden abandonment of his post has provoked dismay and anger, and left Japan effectively leaderless at a time of intense political conflict.

Japan’s finance minister, Fukushiro Nukaga, became the first member of the LDP formally to announce his candidacy for the leadership election which will be held on 23 September. Sadakazu Tanigaki, another moderate and former finance minister, may also step forward when nominations are filed today. But it is the prospect of a battle between Mr Fukuda and Mr Aso, in opposite ideological corners of the ruling party, that will be the focus of excitement over the next week.

On a drip

UPDATE BELOW!

Shinzo Abe - who technically remains prime minister until the election of his successor - has gone to hospital "because he feels unwell", according to the chief cabinet secretary, Kaoru Yosano. At this point, we are told, there is no question of his duties being taken over by a deputy (this would be Yosano himself), as they were, for example, after ex-PM Keizo Obuchi's fatal stroke in 2000.

The most striking lines in the brief report on Kyodo News are:

According to sources close to the prime minister, Abe has recently been suffering from a weak stomach, and porridge has been a source of nourishment.

During his visit to India and other Asian countries in August, he specially asked for food that was easy to digest, and not the spicy local cuisine, the sources said.

After he returned from his Asian tour, he sometimes received intravenous fluids at the prime minister's official residence, they said.

It would be easy to read too much into this. Japanese doctors whip out the saline drip at the slightest excuse (stubbed toes, chilblains, tennis elbow etc). And going into hospital - usually in a wheelchair with one of those old biddy rugs folded across the knee - is one of the standard, sympathy-buying responses of politicians and businessmen to imminent criminal investigations and scandals, such as the one allgedly bearing down on Shinzo. (for more on all of this see my news story in today's paper).

But could this be more serious?

The long sayonara

My hunch about Shinzo Abe (a.k.a. Tom Conti, a.k.a.Scarecrow) proved to be right. His death (politically speaking) on the night of the Upper House election in July was being covered up the Soviet Communist/Liberal Democratic Party hierarchs in order to maintain the peace and stability of the Motherland/Beautiful Country. In the weeks since the disastrous reshuffle, however, the best efforts of the LDP embalmers have not been able to prevent putrefaction, and Taro Aso (LDP Secretary-General) and Kaoru Yosano (Chief Cabinet Secretary) have decided to give him a decent burial.

Shinzo Abe has resigned - or rather announced his intention of resigning as soon as someone is appointed to take his place.

Rather embarassingly, I was in Seoul when all this happened. I write this in Gimpo airport waiting for the afternoon flight back to Tokyo. So here are my - necessarily, not fully informed - thoughts.

1) This was inevitable. Looking back it is bizarre that Abe held on for this long after such a historic trouncing in the Upper House elections. It must be taken as a sign of discombobulation and panic within the LDP, that the Abe fiasco has been allowed to drag on like this. In the old days, the LDP as a party was always bigger and more powerful than individual prime ministers. If one of them became a liability, the vigorous imune system of the party organism would excret them and place someone better suited to the moment in their place. Junichiro Koizumi's great achievement as prime minister was to increase the power of the prime minister's office, and show the LDP who was boss - and people loved it. But the new balance of power depends on having someone with the sharp wits and commanding personality of Junichiro Koizumi. During Abe's turn in office, both party and leader are enfeebled.

2) Taro Aso will probably be the next prime minister, but it is not a certainty. He is a good communicator, deft and confident (if a bit lordly and arrogant), and has something of the henjin (eccentric. weirdo) quality which distinguished Koizumi and which Japanese have come rather to like in their leaders. But, as Tobias Harris points out at Observing Japan, the chaos which this sudden announcement will create presents opportunities for an outsider to swoop in, much as Koizumi did in the mess of the Mori government.

3) The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) under Ichiro Ozawa are stronger than ever. This is their resignation, the biggest political victory they have had in years, just what Ozawa needs to rally the troops and overcome the gaping divisions among their factions. With Abe's entrails smeared on their sweaty faces, his head impaled on a war spear, they will go into battle in the Diet more berserk and blood crazed than ever . . .

They're calling my flight . . .

Peace in our time

Last year, in an essay on the writer, Donald Richie, I remarked on an interesting aspect of intellectual life in Japan: the absence of an lasting work of ex-patriate literature, of a gaijin to match Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway or Paul Bowles. It's too early to be sure, but I think I may have found one. He's 40 years old, he comes from Ossett in West Yorkshire, and his name is David Peace.

Mr Peace has lived in Tokyo for 13 years. Steadily and quietly, he has built a reputation with six uncompromising and distinctive works of fiction: the Red Riding Quarter, four novels about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, GB84, about the Miners' Strike and The Damned United about Brian Clough and Leeds United. I haven't read his earlier books (except for an extract in Granta - David Peace was one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in their last reckoning of that list four years ago). I will now. His latest novel, Tokyo Year Zero, is the best novel in English about Japan that I have seen.

I wish that I had time to write a full, formal review because there is much to say. It needs to be pointed out at the start that this kind of writing is not everyone's bag of senbei. On the face of it, it is a historical crime novel, based on the true story of Yoshio Kodaira, a prodigious sex murderer of US-occupied Tokyo (whose tale is also told, briefly, but rather effectively, in Mark Schreiber's Shocking Crimes of Post-War Japan), and the Tokyo detectives who investigated his crimes. There is a developing plot, much suspense, and a denouement in which things are revealed to have been not what they seemed. But crime fiction in itself has never interested me all that much, and the brilliance of this book lies not in its plotting, but in its language, and the atmosphere which it conveys - the clotted, choking, migraine world of Tokyo in August 1946, a product not only of the intense physical heat, but of the neurotic, guilt-stricken atmosphere of fear and lies in the year after the end of the war.

What has become of Comrade Abe?

In the good old days of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was sagging to its doom, the country was led by a series of men about whom it could charitably be said that they might as well have been dead.

For months at a time, they would be invisible except as signatures at the bottom of official communiques, or distant figures saluting stiffly from balconies and reviewing platforms. Later, it would emerge that the men in charge of one of the world's biggest nuclear arsenals had been ill and incapable for years.

And yet the absence of a paramount leader did not create a crisis. The USSR lumbered on, sustained by the sheer mass and weight of its bureacracy, a beast that lived and breathed even without a head. And so it is now in Japan, 25 years later, where the successor to Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, clings on to power on a political life support machine -

- Shinzo Abe.

Uankaa yourself

People in politics are the objects of a lot of sneering and scepticism, and overall this is a healthy and necessary thing. But often, I suspect, even we sneerers have a touching and naive faith in those who lead us. We complain about them, of course, but they are doing a job that few of us could handle. Underneath it all, even if they're not particularly nice people, they are at least discriminating and perceptive and able, they know what they are doing, we are in safe hands . . . aren't we?

Then you come across someone like Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's long time spokesman and chief bully boy. And you realise how wrong all those cosy assumptions can be.

I was fuming over this in a bookshop in London the other week, so I am grateful to Kyodo News for their story today, which saves me from having to enrich Alastair Campbell. In July, the eminent flack published The Blair Years, extracts from the "diary" of his years at Tony's right hand (although doubts have been expressed about how much they may have been touched up for publication).

Flicking through the book in Waterstone's, I naturally looked up the references to Japan in the index. I wasn't expecting that any of this would raise my opinion of AC; I anticpated superficiality, glibness, and self-justification. What I hadn't expected was that both Campbell and Blair would come across as so pitifully low powered.

The lost of Ikebukuro

My piece in yesterday's paper was about internet cafe "refugees"; a few days earlier I had the melancholy experience of visiting one of the places they gather, the Manga Hiroba (which I translate as 'Comic Plaza') at the north exit of Ikebukuro Station (I was accompanied by the excellent Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert who took these photographs).

Ikebukuro is one of the quarters of central Tokyo that I know least well; the contrast with the sleekness of west Tokyo and the areas around the moat is very striking. The overpasses of the Yamanote Line and the Expressways are sooty and brittle-looking; there are illuminated signs in primary colours for burgers and noodles and pachinko; and the people lack the sheen of central Tokyo people, that look of having stepped out of a department store in clothes fresh out of the wrapper. "Ikebukuro," wrote the French critic Roland Barthes of Ikebukuro in the 1960s. "Workers and farmers, harsh and friendly as a big mongrel dog."

Spoiled goods?

I was away from Tokyo during the Upper House elections, so I speak now from instinct rather than inside information. But I can't help feeling that, six months from now, yesterday's cabinet reshuffle will be a forgotten irrelevance, that will do nothing to save Shinzo Abe from his inevitable doom.

Commentators more deeply immersed in Japanese politics than I (MTC at the excellent Shisaku and the sage Jun Okumura at GlobalTalk) have warm things to say about some of his new ministers (particularly the new Chief Cabinet Secretary, Kaoru Yosano). They may well be right that some of them are sound fellows and good eggs. But it won't make the least difference. The spin which Abe's people are putting on last month's unprecedentedly bad election defeat is that he was let down by idiots in his cabinet (the Defence Minister who thought Hiroshima and Nagasaki "couldn't be helped", the scandal-stricken Agriculture Minister who topped himself etc). They have to say that, of course, because they cannot afford to own up to the obvious fact that the biggest problem lies not with the monkeys, but with the organ grinder himself.

Shinzo hasn't just been a disappointment - he's been a disaster, for his party and his coalition partner, and a disappointment and source of concern to his allies, his regional neighbours, even his unpleasant right wing supporters. You can be as sophisticated as you like in your microanalysis of his new cabinet, but it becomes largely irrelevant in the face of these fundamental facts. Abe's had his chance; he's consistently blown it; and if Japan is to return to the very interesting path of transition on to which it was guided by Junichiro Koizumi, he's got to go.

Oink! Oink!

The flap over Princess Masako, Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne, a book about the Japanese Imperial family by the Australian journalist, Ben Hills, seemed to have come and gone rather quickly. It was last February.that Mr Hill's Japanese publisher, Kodansha, dropped its plans to publish a translation of the book, after the Imperial Household Agency threw a wobbly over its sneering portrayal of life inside the Palace. (see my post on the subject here). But six months later, the book has found a new Japanese publisher, and stirred predictable outrage among the sound truck-driving, Yasukuni Shrine-loving, Nanking Massacre-denying classes.

As the Kyodo news agency reports:

'Princess Masako' author, publisher threatened ahead of translation

SYDNEY, Aug. 21  KYODO   
     The Australian journalist who wrote a controversial biography of Japan's Crown Princess Masako has received death threats ahead of the release of the Japanese translation of his book.
     The Tokyo-based publisher of the translation, Daisan-Shokan, has also reported being targeted in protests by right-wing nationalist groups.
     The translation of ''Princess Masako, Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne'' by Ben Hills is due to be published in early September.
     Hills told Kyodo News he has received several e-mail death threats, via his website, in the lead-up to the Japanese publication.
     ''I have had death threats. They were saying things like, 'Die white pork!' They were quite racist,'' Hills said.

None of that is particularly surprising except for one thing.

WHITE PORK?

What is going on with Die white pork?

Hot News

It's very hot in Japan, in fact it has literally never been hotter. Today in the otherwise obscure municipality of Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture, a temperature of 40.9 degrees centigrade was measured, higher than the Japan Meteorological Agency's previous record of 40.8 C (Yamagata, 1933).

Steeping outside into the sun you feel as if you have been boffed on the head by a large, sweaty, sand-filled sock. It's not just the heat and humidity so much as the thought of the solar radiation beating down around and into you. You can almost feel it cooking your insides, like a plastic container of curry rice in a convenience store microwave.

No wonder, then, that so many people are seeking relief in swimming pools like the one at Tokyo Summerland, pictured above.

Yes, underneath the rubber rings, trunks and congealing Ambre Solaire, that's a swimming pool.

The funniest thing of all is when they switch on the wave machine. Click here to see what happens.

(Clip by CScout Japan, via Plastic Bamboo.)

Man City boss: is he evil?

Until a few weeks ago months ago, when I wrote stories about Thaksin Shinawatra, I identified him with the simple formula "deposed prime minister of Thailand" and filed them to the Foreign Editor. Since then he has risen to become something much more important than a foreign head of government - the owner of a Premiership football team. These days in The Times, he is "Man City boss", first and foremost; my story in today's paper ran in the Sports pages.

Since Thaksin's footie acquisition, there's been a lot written about him in the British papers, a lot more than when he was merely one of the richest and most powerful men in south-east Asia. But no consensus has really emerged on what to make of him. Reduced to its essentials the question seems to be: is this man evil? or, put with a little more sophistication, is he fit for the honour of running one of our venerable Association Football clubs? Is he a classic Asian despot who has fled to our shores after being driven out by his brave people, and who is now sinking his blood-soaked talons into one a prized sporting institution? Or a brilliant businessman and visionary leader who has been shamefully tumbled from power by a clique of unelected generals?

It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. But here is my stab at Thaksin-in-a-nutshell.

Blaming the victim?

A friend of Lindsay Hawker, the young British teacher murdered in Chiba in March, has posted a comment on one of my posts on the subject. She is enraged by some of the observations by earlier commenters. Her remarks speak for themselves and I think that they are worth drawing attention to in a new post.

Read on for the email which the Hawker family are urging well wishers to circulate in hopes of finding Tatsuya Ichihashi, the only suspect in the case, in whose apartment Lindsay's body was found. (He is pictured above in CCTV images from the lift in his  building.)

The comment is signed "an old friend".

To be honest after reading all of these comments it suprises me that someone who actually know's lindsay hasn't been able to bite their lip and posted a comment yet.

I have sat and read all of them and i could not contain myself.

I have known lindsay since she was 8 years old, i went all through school with her as a close friend and our dads also grew up together and still remain good friends, after speaking to bill since this awful tragedy and seeing how this has affected him and his family it would horrify me to think he would read some of these.

By the looks of it, not 1 single person knew lindsay and yet most of you seem so keen to discuss her simple error of judgement as if she was stupid and she should of known that this monster was out to do the eventual things that he did! Anybody who knew lindsay knows that all she ever wanted to do was help people and at the end of the day thats what she thought she was doing over there, she was there for that reason and that reason only. Lindsay was a human being and a lovely one at that and she, like any other person deserves to be left to rest.

If there is anyone who you should all be talking about it is "Ichihashi", about him and what a vile creature he is, not how Lindsay made an error in judgement, when it comes down to it everybody lets their guard down, she was never to know it was her time to keep it up.

Sally Brown, DO YOU GET IT??

miss you lindsay, always in our memories.. class of '95' xxxx   

If he only had a brain

Sorry for the long silence. I have been on temporary leave from The Times for a few weeks, working on a project of my own. I thought that I'd be able to keep posting here too, but it hasn't worked out so well. But Asia Exile is sleeping, not dead, and shall return in mid-August, newly invigorated and filled with a keen hunger.

Until then my doughty colleague, Leo Lewis, will be filing in my place. Below I attach an instant analysis of Sunday's Upper House election results from yesterday's paper. Am I too harsh on Shinzo Abe?

Leo posted a recent blog on the curious election poster of Abe which was widely disseminated during the election campaign (I saw it - above - in Kyoto a few weeks ago). However, in an unchracteristic lapse of judgement, Leo mistakenly compares the image of Shin-chan to that of Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The poster is, in fact, the dead spit of another icon of cinematic popular culture -

Who but Scarecrow, from The Wizard of Oz?

Explosion in Shibuya

3.25pm Tokyo

I'm working today in a 4th floor office facing Shibuya, which is half a mile away. For the past half hour there have been increasing numbers of helicopters (six of them now, hired by TV companies, I assume) circling Shibuya at low altitude, and sirens audible. A friend, who is on the ground there, says it's like Apocalypse Now, and describes columns of police cars moving up Dogenzaka hill. The TV news speaks of an explosion in a women's spa in Shoto, which is adjacent to Shibuya.

Nothing on the news agencies yet, and NHK just has some old duffers in the Diet.

I'll update when there's more ...

How do you spell Jap?

Be sure to read this characteristically intelligent piece in the Japan Times by David McNeill about the lurking racism in British and American media coverage of the Lindsay Hawker murder. A few extracts:

This story brimmed over with the best front-page ingredients: a violent crime with a hint of salacious color, a beautiful victim and a poisonous, clever villain who got away. It also had one other, more troubling component: race.

. . . To prove that underneath the stiff salaryman suit of everyman Japan lurks a slavering fantasist, several foreign journalists were dispatched to interview white hostesses in Roppongi, Tokyo's "social hub," as it was described in a British newspaper. After explaining that Hawker had been "repeatedly beaten over several hours" in a flat owned by Tatsuya Ishihashi (sic), The Daily Mail said that many of the hostesses were also worried about "weird" Japanese men.

"While some British women described the attitude of the men they encounter here as strange, uncomfortable and unpredictable, others talked of the awe and mystique Western women hold for the Japanese male," the reporter wrote.

The "taller" and "more liberated" British women have to "constantly put up with unwanted male attention — such as the endemic groping on trains."

"They want you to belong to them, but there is a frustration there because they know they can't have you," said one hostess. "The Japanese are so very different to us that I wonder if we will ever really understand them," said another.

Step carefully through the minefield of racial cliches. The devious, inscrutable Japanese man too cowardly to come out and ask for what he really wants: to have sex with an Englishwoman. And ask the obvious questions: Why visit a club district to investigate the life of a language teacher; why should a place designed to exploit and magnify sexual fantasies for money yield honest insights into racial relations; and what did the men think? We don't know because the reporter never bothered to interview a single Japanese person.

. . . A group of agitated Japanese bloggers dubbed this "Japan bashing." A less kind description might be racism.

Who are you again?

Like serious minded newspapers around the world, the Schweriner Volkszeitung of northern Germany gave a good deal of coverage to the Group of Eight Summit in Heiligendamm. Apart from news reports on the deliberations of the heads of government, and weighty analysis of the issues at stake, the paper ran brief profiles of the leaders accompanied by a mugshot of each. There was George, Tony, Angela, Vlad, Sarko, Prodi, the EU bloke (Barroso) the Canadian prime minister (I know it, don't tell me . . . Harper! Stephen Harper) and - making his debut at the G8 ball - Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

Sure enough, the face in the photograph was that of a middle aged Japanese-speaking Asian man with black hair, brown eyes, and a hesitant smile. He looked like a Japanese prime minister. He sounded like a Japanese prime minister. If one were to go as far as to remove pieces of his flesh and broil them in teppanyaki sauce, he would probably taste like a Japanese prime minister, too. But unfortunately, he was not Shinzo Abe.

He was Norihiko Akagi, recently appointed Japan's new agriculture minister, after the suicide of Toshikatsu Matsuoka who hanged himself a fortnight ago. An embarrassing balls-up by the picture desk of the Schweriner VZ - but does it also suggest something about Mr Abe and his leadership of the world's second largest economy?

Blogxclusive: The Prince and the Gangster

Tokyo University Hospital is one of the most advanced, reputable and best equipped medical institutions in Japan,so it is no surprise that it is the first choice for poorly Top People. Only yesterday, none less than Crown Prince Naruhito checked in for a routine but uncomfortable sounding operation - the removal of a polyp from his botto- ... er, his duodenum.

The polyp is benign, the operation went well and the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu-no-Omikami, should be back home in a week genki as a fiddle. Meanwhile, though, his hospitalisation is causing more than usual anxiety because of a delicate security problem.

The difficulty arises because of the presence in the hospital of another eminent patient, a 64-year old man named Tadamasa Goto. Mr Goto is suffering from liver cancer, and like the Prince wants the best medical treatment that his considerable wealth can buy. He has acquired his fortune, however, in an unconventional way - as the head of the Goto-gumi, a syndicate of the Yamugichi-gumi, Japan's largest gangster organisation.

Yup, Japan's next Emperor is sharing a hospital with one of its biggest and scariest yakuza. [The photograph depicts a generic yak, by the way, not Goto-san himself.]

A pink oasis in the rush hour

I rarely have to leave home early enough to travel during Tokyo’s notorious rush hour, and for this blessing I thank the Shinto gods. We’ve all heard the ghastly stories: about the station staff whose job it is literally to squeeze commuters onto the trains; about carriages so packed that they would choke a sardine; and about the notorious chikan, or gropers, whose filthy fingers inflict misery on female passengers. So it was with trepidation that I rose early the other morning for the 7.30 Tube journey to work.

The train was on the platform as I bounded down the escalator, and the doors were closing as I slipped between them. I gripped the overhead strap and buried my nose in my newspaper. And quickly I became aware of something that surprised me – that travelling on the Tokyo subway in the rush hour isn’t half bad.

There were none of the discomforts I had anticipated, and in several ways the journey was positively pleasant. Instead of a fetor of armpits and bad breath, the carriage was infused with a light haze of perfume. It was certainly full, but there were no arms poking my ribcage – in fact, my fellow passengers seemed to be going to some trouble to make space for me. A few them, it’s true, looked a bit unfriendly – but at least they weren’t shedding dandruff over my jacket or exhaling last night’s saké into my face. It was only when the guard arrived and firmly escorted me off the train that I understood the explanation for all this – they were all women.

Back on the Bike

Writing a weblog is a bit like being a member of a gym. When you do it regularly, you feel superb - flab melting away, muscle swelling, posture improved, sexy endorphins surging around your body. But when you stop, even for a few days, you start to feel uneasy. After a couple of weeks, you feel guilty. After a month or more, you are assailed with feelings of shame and self-loathing.

For the past six weeks I have been a very bad blogger. But that is all behind me now. I stand before you, in my scraggy shorts and trainers, metaphorical man boobs sagging, and I remount the dialectical exercise bike that is Asia Exile. The first few sessions may be tough (be at hand, paramedics). But bear with me and watch a digital Adonis emerge from this pulpy virtual exterior.

I haven't been completely idle for six weeks.

In that time, I have: