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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 . . . ]

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?

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.)

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   

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.

Joji Obara: Not Guilty of Lucie Blackman Killing

Richard Lloyd Parry
Tokyo

The Japanese property owner Joji Obara was acquitted of raping and killing the British bar hostess Lucie Blackman this morning in a devastating blow for her family and a grave embarrassment for Tokyo police and prosecutors.

Mr Obara received a life sentence in prison, nonetheless, after guilty verdicts on eight other charges of rape and one of raping and killing another Australian hostess. His legal team immediately said that he would appeal.

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.

The safety trap

[I want to move on to subjects other than the Lindsay Hawker murder (although as long as it remains unsolved, I'll no doubt return to it from time to time). But here, anyway, is a piece I wrote for yesterday's paper.

The longer I live in Japan, the more irritated I become by generalisations about the place, and the less inclined I am to generalise myself. But this commission, from the features pags of Times 2, was an invitation to do exactly that. It took a lot of concentration. I'm not sure I managed to articulate all of my feelings about this case, but I got some of the way there.

Comments and criticisms are invited . . .]

The safety trap

Some murders are shocking in their strangeness, others fit a sickeningly familiar pattern, but the cases which intrigue us the most are those which combine elements of the known and the unknown, which seem to confirm  in us something we hadn’t realised that we already knew. The death of Lindsay Hawker, the British English teacher strangled in Japan ten days ago, is one of these cases.

For her family and friends, it is a crushing tragedy, but for the wider world, viewing the unfolding events through the lens of the media, it has a compelling ghastliness. There is the victim herself – young, popular, beautiful, and profusely photographed, out with friends, alongside her devoted boyfriend, sipping a drink by a swimming pool. There is the suspected murderer, 28-year old Tatsuya Ichihashi – lean, “a loner”, and only ever pictured in a single image, a glazed face staring out of a police mug shot. And then there is the third character, both a participant in and the setting for the drama – the country of Japan itself.

Japanese police struggle to find Lindsay's killer

Richard Lloyd Parry
Ichikawa

Four days after the murder of Lindsay Hawker, the British teacher found strangled in a Tokyo suburb, Japanese police raided a suburban sex motel yesterday in a vain search for the Japanese man suspected of killing her.

A team of twenty officers took up positions around the Hotel Chateau, a “love hotel” in Nishi-Funabashi, east of Tokyo, where rooms are rented to couples by the hour. They were following up a reported sighting of Tatsuya Ichihashi, a 28-year old doctor’s son in whose home Lindsay’s body was found buried in an earth-filled bath. After a 45 minutes search of the premises, broadcast on Japanese television, they emerged frustrated, seemingly no closer to finding their quarry than when he escaped from under their noses on Monday night.

The Hunt for Mr Ichihashi

Richard Lloyd Parry and Kyoko Onoki
Ichikawa, Tokyo

Japanese police were engaged on a murder manhunt last night after the naked corpse of a young British woman was found in a Tokyo flat buried in an sand-filled bathtub.

The severely beaten body of Lindsay Hawker, a 22-year old English conversation teacher from Coventry, West Midlands, will undergo an autopsy today after being found late on Monday night in Chiba prefecture in the suburbs of Tokyo. Police are hunting for the occupant of the apartment, a 28-year old Japanese man named Tatsuya Ichihashi, who fled barefoot from the scene when police called in search of the missing woman.

(If you have infromation about the case, ring The Times Tokyo Bureau on 03-3270-3480/1 or email richardlloydparry@compuserve.com. Information treated in confidence.)

Lindsay Hawker and Tatsuya Ichihashi

This is Lindsay Hawker, a 22-year old English conversation teacher from Coventry, whose body was found buried in a bathtub of earth in an aprtment in Chiba prefecture on Monday.

This is Tatsuya Ichihashi, who ran away from the apartment when the police called and who is sought by police in connection with her death.

More about this in The Times in a few hours (and on this blog). In the meantime, if anyone has any information about the case, or either of the people above, please contact me.

03-3270-3481

from outside Japan: +81-3-3270-3481

or by email:

richardlloydparry@compuserve.com

Murdered British woman: appeal for information

From Kyodo News this morning. If anyone has more informatioin about the circumstances of this case, or the victim, please contact us on Tokyo 03-3270-3480 (from outside Japan +81-3-3270-3480) or richardlloydparry@compuserve.com.

All information will be treated in confidence.

Body believed to be English woman's found in Chiba apartment 

CHIBA, Japan, March 27  KYODO 

     A body of a young woman was found Monday night in a bathtub placed on the balcony of an apartment in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, the police said.
     The police believe the woman has been murdered and that the body is that of a 22-year-old woman from Britain who worked at a language school.
     The apartment belongs to a Japanese man in his 20s, whom she knew. The bathtub contained a large amount of sand, covering all parts of the body except for part of a hand.
     The man, who has been missing, is being sought by the police.
     The case came to light as another English woman, who lived with the victim, contacted the police Monday afternoon, saying she had not come home and that she could not contact her by mobile phone.
==Kyodo

March 27, 2007　03:45:18 

Nakasone: Board Games, not Rape

[Here's a piece that got bumped from Saturday's piece, about Nakasone and his wartime relationship, or lack ofn one. with the "Comfort Women'. There's a lot more to say on this subject, and I hope I'll be able to add to this soon.]

Saturday 26th March 2007

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo

Japan’s most respected elder statesmen was forced yesterday [Friday] to contradict an autobiographical account suggesting that as a young officer during the second world war he forced women to serve as military sex slaves.

Yasuhiro Nakasone, one of Japan’s most distinguished former prime ministers, is the latest politician to be drawn into a bitter controversy about the so-called “comfort women”, which boiled over this month after years of simmering resentment.

At a press conference in Tokyo yesterday [Friday], he admitted that Japanese forces did force women to serve on “comfort stations”, the euphemism for military brothels where many Koreans and Chinese claim to have been enslaved and raped. But he denied allegations, based on an account he himself wrote 29 years ago, that he organised brothels as a military logistics officer in the Imperial Navy in the island of Borneo.

“They were civilian engineers, not military people, and they just wanted a place for rest or entertainment,” he told a press conference in Tokyo. “They wanted entertainment such as [the board game] go or Japanese chess. We simply established facilities where such [diversions] could be offered.”

But this account of innocent games centres seems to contradict a written memoir by Mr Nakasone published in 1978, before the existence of the “comfort women” had become controversial.

Leo guests on Horie

[For the first time, Asia Exile is entrusted to the hands of a guest blogger - my worthy colleague, Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent, who returns to The Times this week, amid scenes of near hysterical rejoicing, after a few weeks getting something out of his system (working for the Financial Times). He writes on Takafumi Horie, the former CEO of Livedoor, who faces a verdict this Friday is his trial on charges of market manipulation and false accounting.

Take it away, Leo.]

Abraham Zapruder, Deep Throat, that Area 51 alien dissection footage and now…me.

Nestled in a top secret location somewhere in Tokyo (and under 24-hour guard by vicious attack pot-plants) is my Olympus Voice Trek 50 digital recorder – an excellent model that will record around 40 hours of interviews at pin-drop high quality.

And the Japanese want it from me.

Oh how they want it from me.

They want it so badly they will pay anything to get it. They are talking offer prices that are corpulent with zeroes. One chap called eight times yesterday and on the eighth refusal got his friend to call me a further five. The final husky-voiced “give me the tape” call came in at 2:30am (because they thought I was in the UK).

And what lies behind this joke-and-dagger farce?

Blubber on their faces

Greenpeace is too shrewd and media-conscious an organisation to display any outward sign of satisfaction at the news today that the Japanese feet is abandoning its whaling hunt after a disastrous fire – their statement a few hours ago was dignified and measured, rightly containing expressions of condolence for the loss of the Japanese sailor who died in the accident. But behind closed doors the environmentalists must giving thanks to the Green Gods.

The fire and the abandonment of the hunt is an unqualified disaster for the Japanese side, coming as it does during an aggressive push to force a lifting of the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. When the accident happened the whalers were looking rather good, after their encounter with the self-styled environmental “pirates” of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Sea Shepherd’s militant, confrontational tactics make Greenpeace look like a bunch of old ladies, but this time they backfired. After squirting the Japanese decks with acid “stink bombs”, two of the activists got lost for seven hours in icy seas and were only found after a search in which the whalers, in gracious and seamanlike spirit, also took part. Sea Shepherd backed off soon after, having run out of fuel, and the Greenpeace boat Esperanza chugged into the picture. Then, on 15th February, came the devastating fire.

The Institute of Cetacean Research, the Japanese government’s whaling propaganda arm, has given few details about the accident – and so feeble and compliant is the Japanese media on such matters that they have not been pressed for any. But it was clearly a bad fire. One man died (apparently of asphyxiation, rather than burns). And the Nisshin Maru, the factory ship and hub of the whole operation, was crippled.

This was a gift for Greenpeace. They no longer had to ask the whalers to stop killing whales, since such activity was now out of the question. They were able to offer their own help in towing the stricken vessel away – while repeatedly pointing out the danger which a damaged and oil-laden ship posed to the purity of the Antarctic landscape and a nearby colony of nervous penguins. In this, they were backed up by the prime minister of New Zealand, Helen Clarke, who helpfully demanded that the Japanese leave pronto.

For a fortnight, the whalers frantically fiddled and tinkered with their maimed ship, but it was no good. The Japanese government’s irrational insistence on pushing the whaling cause (in a country whose people aren’t actually interested in eating whales) makes them look bad enough. Now, apart from being (unfairly) characterized as bloodthirsty killers of blubbery cuties, they look, in addition, careless, incompetent and environmentally reckless.

The image above is Turner's Ship on Fire.

Elegy for the Snow Country

Japanese people have a much-remarked upon habit of explaining to foreigners that in their country there are four seasons, as if this was a unique accomplishment and a source of justified pride. It used to irritate me until I realised how powerfully distinct the seasons (five, if you include the tsuyu, or summer 'rainy season') really are here, in their temperatures, their sounds, their colours, and the sensation they impart to the skin. The droolingly humid, relentlessly hot green summer with its wingeing cicadas; the crisp, mild autumn of reddening trees and intermittent typhoons; cold, bright, sparkling winter, so dry that it seems to suck the moisture out of your face; and pale pink, windy, showery spring. The sludgy, drizzly, glomy north European autumn/winter/spring is blurred and unconvincing by comparison.

The seasons! I feel
a 17 syllable
poem coming on.

Last week, for the first time this year, the sun over Tokyo had some warmth in it. But spring won't arrive with much of a bang this year, because there has been no winter. Literally, there has not been a winter.