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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?

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?

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?

You're not big, you're not clever

I'll keep this brief because the tale is recounted in detail on other blogs - but there is an illuminating flap in progress over a magazine which appeared a few days ago in Japanese convenience stores. It is entitled Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu ('Foreigners Underground Crime File'). I don't yet have a copy myself, but a number of pages are scanned in at the pages indicated below. From these it is clear that it is a work of scabrous racism of a kind which, in the west, you would not find outside the publications of the dedicated ultra-right. But this magazine was on sale in Family Mart, a chain convenience store with branches every few hundred years across Japan.

The magazine (or mook - Japanese for a hybrid of a magazine and a book) gives explicit expression to a notion which peeps between the lines of a lot of crime reporting - that crime in Japan is simply and straighforwardly the fault of foreigners. Not Caucasians or Europeans/North Americans (one and the same in this kind of thinking), but Africans, South Americans, South Asians and people of the Middle East.

There is an article about the state of Tokyo entitled:

City of violent, degenerate foreigners!

Another piece is headlined:

Catch the Iranian!

But the giveaway is a series of photographs, sneakily shot with a telephoto lens, of Japanese women canoodling with gaijin men (reminiscent of those old Ku Klux Klan publications showing pictures of mixed race couples guilty of "miscegenation".)

Profanity and racist invective follow.

North Korea: leave it to the psychics

What is going on in North Korea? Perhaps nothing - but there are people out there who want you to believe that something astonishing is about to happen. Last week, journalists in Britain and Japan (and probably elsewhere) were contacted by "senior South Korean sources" with thrilling rumours - that Kim Jong Il had been detained in an apparent coup.

One version of the story suggested that he had been seized by a rebel unit of the Korean People's Army in the east coast city of Wonsan. The Japanese news agency, Jiji, had it that he was under house arrest at his villa in Wonsan, possibly in poor health, while a fierce battle for power took place among his senior lieutenants. A Jiji source in Tokyo told the agency that an unspecified relative of Mr Kim had been purged and arrested last September. The South Korean government denied it - but then they would, wouldn't they? By implication, the source of these leaks were People Who Know - deep, spooky, well-connected and, inevitably, right-wing conservatives.

But, this time at least, none of it was true, and within a couple of days the "sources" were acknowledging as much. Someone was lying - but who?

A Life in the Day

[Here's a piece that I contributed to the October issue of Number 1 Shimbun, the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.]

My mobile phone, which is also my alarm clock, buzzes under my pillow, and I twitchily turn it off. The vibrating “manner” function is supposed to be less jarring than the bell, but first thing in the morning it is like waking to find a fat and angry wasp in your bed. It does its job anyway. I scan overnight emails, then take a shower with the BBC World Service coming through over the Internet. If it’s early enough I might read or write in my diary for half an hour or so. This is the peaceful part of the day.

What happens after that depends on where I am.

More from Timmy the Tank

Oh dear, I think I was a little hard on the old Nation the other day. Just trying to do their job in difficult circumstances and all that (although I do think that over the past few months their understandable dislike of Thaksin has compromised their sense of balance). Stiil, I can see now that the phrase "pusillanimous, gun-licking, uniform-worshipping drivel" was a little over-excited. In my own attempt at balance, I draw your attention to this piece by the passionate and always interesting Kavi Chingkittavorn, 'Yellow ribbon coup' was a very high price to pay'.

Not to be outdone, the Banghkok Post has its own tank story on this morning's front page.

TWO KINDS OF POWER

runs the headline, followed by the standfirst:

Armoured tanks can both destroy buildings and enchant children

Crass, Insensitive Thai Coup Headline Of The Day

From this morning's Nation:

'Tanks' a million, say fascinated fans

It should have been a day of fear and tension, but many people in Bangkok found the military hardware parked at city intersections yesterday a cause for enjoyment. They stopped, looked over the tanks and troops, chatted with the soldiers, even brought their kids for photographs in front of the machines of war on the day after the coup.

It was a rare chance for many city folk to get up-close and friendly with a tank, as the armed forces are deployed in Bangkok after taking over the country.

Read the rest of the pusillanimous, gun-licking, uniform-worshipping drivel on your own here ...

News in briefs

Reading the Japanese papers can be - yawn! - hard work. Scanning the headlines this evening, I see screaming from the pages of the Asahi:

Once-unpopular made-in-Hokkaido rice gaining popularity

For sheer sensation, however, this is trumped by the Yomiuri:

Health ministry to give specific advice on how to prevent metabolic syndrome after health checkups

The Nikkei emblazons its front page with:

Gov't to help private-sector efforts to preserve culturally valuable music content

Not exactly 'Freddie Star Ate My Hamster', is it?

But just as you are beginning to despair, a sub-editing genius comes out with something like this (actually from Yomuri):

Beagles sniff out sausage smugglers

Now, I have heard of 'budgie smugglers', and even 'smuggling footballs' - but sausage smuggling is a new one. Read about it here. And keep those beagles away from my charcuterie.