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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:

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?

You don't want to think about it

The front pages of yesterday's British and Japanese newspapers carried a common story - the hanging of Saddam Hussein's lieutenants, Awad al-Bandar and Barzan al-Tikriti. But virtually all the Japanese versions made a remarkable omission. They made no mention whatsoever of the most remarkable fact about the execution - that the head of al-Tikriti, Iraq's former intelligence chief, was severed from his body by the executioner's noose.

In the Sankei - nothing. In the Mainichi - nothing, and nothing in the Yomiuri. The English-language Daily Yomiuri ran a story from the Associated Press, which certainly did mention the decapitation. But the DY's sub-editors had carefully removed this paragraph in the version they ran, along with all subsequent references to the decapitation. While newspapers across the world were reporting on the international condemnation of the execution, and its botching, the Japanese media had - nothing. Only the liberal Asahi mentioned this most extraordinary thing - that, accidentally or not, a democratically elected government, set up with the military support of Japan, ripped a man's head off his shoulders at the end of a rope.

Why should conscientious newspapers of record omit such a fact?

Days of the Boar: Predictions for 2007

[Madame Sosostris, the renowned clairvoyant, is very bunged up when I call on her, but even dosed up on Sudafed and Flu Strength Lemsip she remains one of the most brilliantly gifted ladies in the expanded Europe Union, and her Tarot pack is (for want of a better word) wicked.

Her parlour is in a narrow gritty street in Shoreditch, a quarter of minicab offices and kebab shops, unencroached upon by rising rents and yuppification. A mute man in his sixties (said to be Madame S's son by a famous matinee idol) answers my ring and leads me into the dim room where she sits, an ancient figure wreathed in scarves, her black eyes sparkling in a mask of powder and mascara. She croaks a greeting, and directs me to the leather armchair at her side. A cup of bitter tea is offered in a brittle China cup. I hand over the agreed amount which she counts with supple fingers.

"So, my dear," she wheezes. "What's it to be? To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits? To report the behaviour of the sea monster? Describe the horoscope? Haruspicate or scry?"

"I seek, Madame, to know what will transpire in the Orient in the twelvemonth ahead."

"In the Orient, eh?" she says, shuffling the Tarot deck. Cards flash and are covered, some of them familiar to me. The drowned Phoenician Sailor; Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks; the man with three staves; the one-eyed merchant. "I do not find The Hanged Man," she says in a tone of puzzlement. "Curious, in the circumstances."

Here, then, are Madame Sosostris's predictions for 2007, the Year of the Boar.]

Sorry about the Sage

Three hundred and sixty four days ago, the Sage of Singapore, most potent and eldritch of the Wise Men of Asia, vouchsafed to me his prophecies for 2006 - and as he predicted, so it happened.

In January, there was indeed a rift within the Japanese Imperial Family about proposed changes to the succession law - as the Sage prophesied. In February, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, went AWOL, provoking anxious speculation about his whereabouts - and you read it here first. In March, mysterious man apes were seen in villages in Malaysia - the Sage of Singapore had seen it all BEFORE IT HAPPENED!

Sadly, after playing a blinder early on, he completely fell to pieces for the rest of in the Year of the Dog,

Palace leaks and petrol bombs

The offices of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), Japan's equivalent of the Financial Times, are just a few yards from The Times Tokyo bureau. So you can imagine the icy hand of dread which gripped my bowels when I read the following headline:

Man throws Molotov cocktail at Nikkei building

It's all to do with a very good scoop which the Nikkei scored yesterday - an 18-year old memo, by the late Grand Steward of the Imperial Household Agency, describing the annoyance of  the late Emperor Hirohito over the induction into Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine of the souls of the executed Class A war criminals. So angry was Hirohito about the enshrinement of General Tojo and his comrades that he never visited the Shrine again.

This is a great blow, and source of confusion to Japan's ultra-right, whose dogma includes two fundamentals: unconditional reverence for the Emperor; and unflagging respect for the hanged wartime leadership honoured in Yasukuni. To discover that these two articles of faith contradict one another must be very irritating and it's not surprising, given their touchy character, that one of the uyoku decided to take fiery venegance on the publishers of the story.

But as so often in Japan, there's less to it than meets the eye. Here's Kyodo news agency's report.

A man threw a Molotov cocktail at the Nihon Keizai Shimbun's headquarters building in Tokyo early Friday morning, the police said.
     No one was hurt and there was no major damage, they said.

Even more anticlimactic, the "Molotov cocktail" didn't ignite. In fact, it doesn't seem to have been much of a Molotov cocktail in the first place - merely a wine bottle, containing a "liquid believed to be gasoline". (Could this be another case of the frightening salad dressing weapons which I discussed here?)

Mask of the Blasphemer

I can't stop thinking about the fury over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet. The craven position of the British and US governments, and the print and broadcast media in both countries, mark this as a moment of shame in the history of the defence of free speech. And the arguments whirling around my head came into focus as I read a fascinating and very apposite letter in this morning's Japan Times.

These are not adjectives that can be applied very often to the JT's letters page, which generally serves as a forum for the frustrations of ex-pats who should have packed up and gone home long ago. But this morning's lead letter, from NAME WITHHELD of Nagoya, presents what, in my reading on the subject, is a unique perspective on the cartoons affair. The anonymous correspondent is a Sri Lankan, and a devout Buddhist. At the moment he (or she) is a very angry Buddhist, because of an incident at the Turin Winter Olympics.

"Probably this televised piece was not noticed by viewers," he writes. "It was shown for only a few seconds." But for NAME WITHHELD, it was an offence comparable with the publication of the infamous cartoons.

Greenpeace and the full story

[READ THE GREENPEACE RESPONSE BELOW.]

The Greenpeace ships Arctic Sunrise and Esperanza continue to obstruct the Japanese Antarctic whaling fleet, and to make much of the alleged "ramming" of the Sunrise by the Japanese factory vessel, Nisshin Maru.

'Rammed! Whaling Fleet Ship Collides With The Arctic Sunrise,' reads the headline on the Greenpeace International website. A new posting on the gripping daily weblog by activists on the two ships convincingly rebuts the Japanese claim that it was the captain of the Sunrise who caused the collision. However, there is more to this incident than I realised when I wrote yesterday's post . . .

Blood in the ocean

In the far reaches of the Southern Ocean, a gripping and dangerous duel is being conducted between Japan's Antarctic whaling fleet and two ships manned by the environmental campaigners of Greenpeace. On board one of the ships are two friends, Yuko Hirono, and the photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, who regularly works for The Times in Tokyo. The Greenpeace blog of their expedition, and Jeremy's photographs, are compelling.

Days of the Dog: Prophecies for 2006

(Singapore, New Year's Day 2006. I stand in a narrow street in Chinatown, peering uncertainly at the almost illegible address scrawled on a scrap of crumpled paper. Suddenly a boy appears; before I have said a word. he beckons me to follow him, through a labyrinth of dim alleys and overhanging eaves. Ducking low, I enter a windowless room filled with the smell of incense. The boy leads me past flickering candles and through curtains of beads. Finally, in an innermost room, I meet the man I have been looking for.

He wears a tunic of black silk, and his face is hidden beneath shadows and smoke and a straggling white beard. On the carved table before him are dice, animal bones, mah jong tiles, playing cards, and scraps of parchment bearing the fragments of ancient Chinese texts. He speaks fast and faintly, in an ancient croak. Straining to understand his thick accent, and his frequent lapses into Hokkien, I open my notebook and write.

His name is known to only a few, but he is a figure of legendary wisdom, the most powerful oracle in Asia. Here, exclusive to readers of this blog, are his predictions for Asia in 2006, the Year of the Dog.

See if they're not right.)