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After the earth moves

Yogyakarta, Tuesday, 12.45pm

It's late, and I'm a bit knackered, but here are some sketchy observations on the Javanese earthquake.

Lessons learned the hard way

Compared to the aftermath of the tsunami in Aceh, the whole aid effort - Indonesian and foreign - is very much more controlled and impressive. Of course, the tsunami was exponentially worse, in so many ways - the death toll (170,000 vs 5,000), the area affected (the coast of Aceh, rather than just a 15 mile strip south of Yogya), the isolation of the disaster zone, the wretched communications, and above all the deadly combination of earthquake and wave. Even so, the workers on the ground today have a confidence and authority which is impressive this early on in the aid effort. I suppose that's no surprise - no one has better, recent experience of dealing with large scale destruction and loss of life than Indonesians.

Pride in the Swastika

The Awa Odori dancers are one of the better known exports of Tokushima, an otherwise obscure prefecture on the Japanese island of Shikoku. Every year, dressed in straw hats and colourfully printed cotton costumes, they perform in their annual festival, across Japan and sometimes abroad. The folk dances involve intricate hand movements; they are accompanied by traditional music on drums, gongs and the stringed shamisen. The dancers have become ambassadors for a region that few people outside Japan have even heard of.

This year a troupe of the dancers will perform in Germany, to support their national team in the World Cup and promote a new Japanese film. There is one problem - the image seen in red in the bottom right of this photograph (by Kyodo) of an Awa Odori dancer.

The Awa Odori dancers flaunt the swastika, the hated emblem of Nazism and a symbol of evil to people all over the world.

Success so huge and wholly farcical

For the past year or so, a plot in Aoyama in central Tokyo, a hundred yards from the groovy Omotesando boulevard, has been sheathed in plastic awnings while cranes and drills rumble behind it. Nothing surprising about that - the proliferation of new construction is the most obvious sign of Japan's (or at least the capital's) cautious economic recovery. Then the other week, the drapes were removed to reveal this:

It's St Grace "Cathedral", Japan's newest medieval art treasure.

Smorgasbord of the Vanities

From this morning's newspaper ... (A far more serious and reverent account of the Tapas Molecular Bar can be read here.)

The whiff of truffle on tissue paper: a sure sign that the glory days are back

TOKYO NOTEBOOK by Richard Lloyd Parry

FOR THOSE of us who were just too young to experience them as adults, the boom years of the late 1980s have a glittering, almost mystical, allure. That was the era of Wall Street and the yuppie, of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Martin Amis’s Money. To work in London or Manhattan, if the myths are to be believed, was like living in a 24-hour Duran Duran music video, complete with champagne, yachts and an excess of hair gel. And nowhere was the consumption more gross and conspicuous than in Japan.

Old timers sigh wistfully about the delicious excesses of Bubble-era Tokyo even now — the night clubs staffed by beauties from across the planet, with gold-leaf sprinkled on the cocktails and mink covers on the lavatory seats. Back then, they say, the sushi was not considered edible unless it was eaten off the naked body of a young beauty queen. But then the Bubble burst, and those of us who arrived here late found ourselves in a pallid and uneasy city, struggling with the funk of recession and unemployment. Finally, though, I have incontrovertible evidence that the glory days are back.

Maid in Japan

In any other country in the world, the following news story might seem a bit bizarre.

Woman dressed in maid outfit sprays chemical on Nagoya subway train

NAGOYA -- A woman dressed in a maid outfit sprayed a chemical on a subway train here Monday afternoon, sickening five elementary school children, police said.

Police are treating the case as inflicting bodily injury, and are searching for the woman who appeared to be aged about 30 and was 160 to 170 centimeters tall. She was wearing a pink maid outfit.

Spamming for Borneo

Last week, with my London-based colleague Devika Bhat, I wrote a story about a remarkable letter sent to the British building supplies company Jewson. Its signatories were seventeen headmen of the Penan, a small and dwindling Dayak tribe, who live in the deep interior of Borneo and include among their number some of the last true nomads in the world. The letter - signed with thumb prints, because most of its signatories are illiterate - begged Jewson to stop buying plywood from a Malaysian company named Samling. Jewson sells the plywood to builders for hoardings and construction sites, but the hardwoods which go into its manufacture are ripped from the virgin rain forest where the remaining Penan scrape an increasingly difficult living. “Without our forest, we, the Penan, cannot survive,” the chiefs wrote to Peter Hindle, Jewson’s managing director.

We depend on the clean water from our rivers, the wild boar we hunt in the forest and the fruits and the jungle produce we collect from the old trees, the sago palms and the rattan vines . . . By purchasing Samling timber, you and your company are making yourselves part of the crimes committed against us . . . The Samling group is extracting timber from our forests against our declared will and without our consent . . . Despite our repeated protests, Samling does not respect our boundaries, continues to encroach on our traditional land and disregards our native customary rights.

Now it seems that the story has had curious consequences.

Is Japan Lurching Right?

The British journalist Christopher Reed, who recently returned to Japan after a thirty year absence, has written an interesting piece about Japan's foreign minister, Taro Aso, and the slave labour employed by his family company, the Aso Group, at its coal mines in Kyushu during the war. Thousands of Koreans and hundreds of allied POWs worked there in appalling conditions. Many of them died, or suffered illness and injuries; none have been adequately compensated or even paid a fair wage for the work they were forced to do. Mr Aso himself was five years old when the war ended, but as head of the family firm from 1973 to 1979 he had the opportunity to do something to right these historical wrongs if he had wished.

Mr Reed presents the research of three Japanese amateur historians in Kyushu, who have dug up details about the numbers of prisoners and the hardships which they suffered. He sets out the history of the Aso company, and goes over the foreign minister's own life story, with particular emphasis on controversial remarks, like the "one nation, one civilisation, one language, one culture and one race" anthem, which he articulated at the opening of the Kyushu National Museum.

The article appeared in the Japan Times; earlier versions were published online at CounterPunch and at length in Japan Focus. But Mr Reed is indignant that no "mainstream", international publication has published his work.

Rejection or silence greeted my attempts at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail in Canada, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age of Melbourne, the Australian, the Bulletin news magazine of Australia, and the Observer and the New Statesman in UK (almost all of which know of my work). Rejections in Japan came from the Shukan Kinyobi, Shukan Post, Shukan Sekai, and Shinchosa. The only taker was Sisa Journal in South Korea. My rewritten CounterPunch article was then printed in the April issue of Number 1 Shimbun, the monthly news publication of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, where I am a member. This is read by bureau chiefs of every major newspaper and television channel represented in Japan, as well as by many Japanese journalists. Yet I continued to hear nothing …

This account of editorial rejection is not the grumblings of a slighted correspondent (I have been and continue to be published and broadcast elsewhere), but an important insight into media attitudes in these times. Some editors brushed off my "pitch" with the remark that it was old news. This was untrue. Although such media as the BBC and agencies had made passing references to the Aso slave-labor involvement, these were in the form of allegations made in South Korea, and took up no more space than a paragraph. Such dismissals were in fact a belated rationale for a reluctance to delve into the embarrassment of a major (conservative) political figure in Asia.

The entire episode has reinforced the impression formed soon after my return to Japan last year after an absence of 30 years. It has not become more "westernized" and liberal, as so many commentators, particularly on the business side, like to claim. On the contrary, its underlying rightist nationalism with the attendant suppression of unsuitable news is emerging once more.

The question is one of the most important facing East Asia. Is Japan moving to the right?

Apologies ...

... for the extended silence. Normal noise levels will soon be restored.

Shame of the Chihuahua (and more cyberstalker news)

From this morning's newspaper. See kitaryunosuke's response here. Photograph courtesy of Aiful.

How much is that chihuahua in the window? The one with the 29% sting?

TOKYO NOTEBOOK  by Richard Lloyd Parry

Neurotically pampered dogs are a daily sight in Tokyo these days, and of all the breeds none is more popular, or more horrid, than the Chihuahua. They are bad enough in their natural state, mincing along behind their owners with that infuriating jiggly walk. Dress them up, as many Tokyo pet lovers do, in dog coats, dog hats and dog sunglasses and they become even more loathsome. So it is satisfying to report the shame that has been heaped upon the Chihuahua, which has gone from being an icon of simpering cuteness to a symbol of thuggishness and usury.

The story begins with a series of commercials which became one of the most popular in Japan’s television history. In episodic, Nescafe Gold Blend-style, they tell the story of a middle-aged man whose life is transformed by his love for a white Chihuahua. The creature is named Qoo-chan, after “Kuu”, the Japanese word for the noise which Chihuahuas make. In the course of the ads, he purchases the hound, outfits him in a morning suit, and adopts his mate and litter of pups. All of these expenses are made possible by the company behind the ads, a “consumer loans” firm called Aiful.

Qoo-chan triggered a wave of Chihuahua-buying and a spike in business for Aiful who plastered their mascot on posters and credit cards. Until last month, when it became clear that the company is less of a Chihuahua, than a growling, slavering Rottweiler.