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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

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:

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.

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.

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.

Flying Seoul-o

Writing about foreign stereotypes last week, I made sceptical reference to the popular notion of Japan as a land awash in bizarre pornography, where every other salarymen spends his lunch break hunched over rape manga, downloading bukkake videos, and purchasing schoolgirls' underwear from his office vending machine. Japanese smut is certainly distinctive, I acknowledged, but if it really is more widely consumed than in the rest of the world - show us the evidence.

Committed Asia Exile reader Joseh Miller has taken up the challenge by sending me a link to this fascinating page on the website Internet Filter Review. It goes some way towards answering a profound question: who are the world's biggest wankers?

The answers will amaze and appal you.

'So why am I leaving?'

An old friend of mine, Laura Holland, recently left Japan after fifteen years as a student, journalist, editor, publisher, and promoter of Sailor Moon, the cartoon schoolgirl with the disturbingly shapely hips. At her sayonara party, instead of the conventional speech of valediction she handed out a written statement. It will ring true with anyone who has ever asked themselves the crucial question, 'Have I been in Japan too long?' With Laura's permission I reproduce it here, lightly bowdlerised and glossed for readers unfamiliar with Japan, Japanese and the world of the gaijin (foreigner in Japan).

So why am I leaving?

Imagine a nice comfy armchair. You know you should go jogging, but it's cold and wet outside. The armchair is Japan. The cold wet jog is England.

You know which one is better for you long term but it's hard to leave the present comfort of the armchair.

• I was feeling lazy and uninspired
• I missed unconditional, lifelong relationships with old friends and family
• I wanted more work responsibility and respect than I was getting here
• I didn’t want to end up a bitter old gaijin trout moaning down the pub about not getting laid.

Foreign Service

One of the few sources of light relief during foreign disasters is the opportunity they provide for sniping, sniggering and sneering at British diplomats. Bomb, earthquake or revolution - almost inevitably stories will emerge of Brits on the ground let down by the flakiness and arrogance of their local embassy. Ah, how we journalists love to smirk at those complacent envoys, with their diplomatic bags and wine cellars and their general chinless air of inheriting the earth!

So it is with pain and reluctance that I report an oustanding case of diplomatic assiduousness.

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.

Bright Young Things

I have always suspected that Tatler, the house journal of the Sloane Ranger movement, is in fact a cunning spoof perpetrated by a contemporary Jonathan Swift or perhaps by the publishers of Viz magazine. As a self-parody it is too perfectly pitched and subtle. It’s not the more obvious fictional absurdities, such as feature writer “Ticky Hedley-Dent” (I know, I know – I’m not in a position to sneer at people with double-barrelled names). It’s the subtler, marginal satire - fashion assistant “Emily Thin”, for example, and film critic “Patrick Neate”? Plainly such people cannot really exist outside the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

Then there’s the rampaging political incorrectness (“Skilled designers are using fur this winter”), the lengthy profiles of cosmetic surgeons, and the pages and pages of party photographs, featuring radiant strumpets cavorting with hideous, gurning 45-year old “bachelors”. But in the January issue I have my final proof.

It's just a title

Every other year or so, usually from diplomats at the British Embassy in Tokyo, I hear that Japan has received a visit from Prince Andrew, Duke of York. His Royal Highness comes in his capacity as the United Kingdom’s "Special Representative for International Trade and Investment". His job is to jolly up British firms operating abroad, impart to them some of his royal prestige and glamour, and thereby encourage foreign governments and companies to buy British, rather than French, German or American.

PR, in other words. So it has always puzzled me that I only ever hear about these visits after the Grand Old Duke has gone home. Why are the earnest diplomats not trumpeting his valuable presence and encouraging journalists, Japanese and British, to report on his important work? I learned the answer the other day, from a recent piece in the Financial Times magazine: Prince Andrew, it becomes clear, is an international embarrassment, a blazer-clad, hand shaking, 24-carat plonker.

The Whale of London

Saturday morning. Thirty-six hours after flying in from Tokyo, I woke up in London at 5.30 in the morning, jet-lagged and ill-tempered. I turned on the TV; later, I walked out for an early morning coffee and a read of the papers. The breakfast news and front pages were dominated by the same story, about the Northern Bottlenose Whale which had strayed far from its ocean home and swum up the Thames where, increasingly ill and exhausted, it was struggling to swim back out to sea.

Police and animal welfare officers in reflective jackets tracked its spout from motor launches. People gathered on the bank to watch with their children. The ticker at the bottom of the TV screen carried lines such as ‘Whale almost beached twice’ and ‘Whale swam past Houses of Parliament’.

Viewers were invited to phone in with suggestions. Why not use recordings of whale songs to lure it back out to sea? Why not zap it with sonar and drive it towards the estuary? How ridiculous, I thought: all the suffering and corruption and uncertainty in the world, and the entire country finds itself fixated on a lost fish (sorry, mammal). I formulated a sarcastic viewer suggestion of my own: why not place on stand-by a team of Japanese sushi chefs so that, if the rescue efforts should sadly fail, at least the deceased cetacean will not go to waste?