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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.

The Prince and the massacre

I don't share the view that Japan is undergoing an irreversible lurch to the right but the time and the place when this is easiest to believe is the 15th August, at Yasukuni Shrine. For the Japanese right, shusen kinenbi, or 'End of the War Commemoration Day' (what else are they going to call it - Victory Over Us Day?), is Christmas, birthday and Easter all rolled into one, when they get out all their toys and converge on the shrine in a day-long celebration of nationalism, historical revisionism and shouting.

It is a thrilling, amusing and occasionally appalling spectacle. On Tuesday there will be dignified old veterans, sinister yakuza types with bad suits and rolling walks, and lots and lots of unpleasant black trucks with flags and loudspeakers mounted on the top. Last year, I saw the worst violence I have ever witnessed in Japan, when a couple of lefty students, under the eyes of the police, had their mouths stomped in after unveiling pacifist banners. This year the sense of nationalist triumphalism will be all the greater if, as everyone seems to expect, Junichiro Koizumi makes his last prime ministerial visit to the shrine.

But this will disguise the fact that it has been an uncomfortable couple of weeks for the Japanese right, which recently suffered several nasty kicks in the crotch.

Screams from the threshold of womanhood

This has been around for a while, but it's new to me, and it is hilarious - at least as good as the all-singing, all-dancing members of the Martitime Self Defence Forces.

First, a little background. Morning Musume, as anyone who lives outside Japan has no good reason to know, are one of the country's most successful, and most unashamedly talentless, pop bands. They are the creation of a musical Svengali named Tsunku who found the original line up on a TV teenage talent show in 1997. Since then the band (musume means 'daughter' or 'girl') has been staffed by a changing roster of about a dozen all-singing, all-dancing, maximally irritating teenyboppers.

They can't dance. They can't sing. They can barely speak, communicating principally through squeaks. They are the embodiment of the Japanese concept of 'cuteness' and they frequently give the impression of being on every Japanese TV program, on every channel, all the time. Horrid American journalese words like 'toothsome' and 'sassy' were invented for chicks like these. They are unspeakable.

The second thing you need to know is that Ringu is a rather effective, definitely scary Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata in 1998 from a novel by Koji Suzuki. (It was remade in Hollywood in 2002, starring Naomi Watts.)

Someone had the idea of forcing Morning Musume to watch the scariest moments from Ringu.

That's it.

Here is the result.

A burning ring of vinaigrette

Among the reasons I hold Japanese journalists in such high regard are their exquisitely honed sense of irony and their perfect comic timing. Time and again, in the newspapers or on the TV news, a seemingly straightforward story will be transformed into a masterpiece of Beckettian absurdity by a single deadpan detail.

Take this story from Kyodo news agency (published in the print version of today's Yomiuri).

Police have arrested and sent to prosecutors a 49-year-old doctor on suspicion of attempting to set a hospital on fire in western Tokyo, police officials said Wednesday.

An insurance fraud? A sad case of mental breakdown by an overworked medical professional? It sounds routine enough, anyway, one of those unfortunate things that simply happens from time to time.

The kicker is in the second paragraph:    

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?

Read The Village Where Nothing Happened

[Read the next post first - Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened. What follows is the version which I dictated to the copy taker by phone, rather than the edited version eventually printed in the newspaper. There may be small differences.]

Printed in The Independent on 4th December 2001, under the headline, 'A village is destroyed ... and America says nothing happened'

By Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Eastern Afghanistan

The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village, so obscure that no one can agree on whether it is called Kama Ado or Mado, has ceased to exist.

Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened

The single newspaper story of which I am most proud was published in The Independent on 4th December 2001. It was a month after the fall of the Taleban, and I was in the Afghan city of Jalalabad close to the border with Pakistan. Anti-Taleban mujahideen, friends of the Americans, were fighting a ragged battle against a remnant of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Tora Bora caves in the Spin Ghar mountains to the south. There were a few commandos of the American and British special forces on the ground, but allied support was largely limited to massive air raids on the mountains by B-52 bombers.

I was staying with a group of foreign reporters in a hotel in Jalalabad. Every few hours, the ground shook with the explosion of the massive bombs, 40 miles away. At night the horizon was illuminated with orange fire. We all wanted to go to the mountains to see the battle for ourselves. But the mujahideen, who more or less tolerated us as a necessary and amusing nuisance, said that it was too dangerous.

Then one morning, we were summoned to the Jalalabad residence of one of the mujahideen commanders. I remember arriving there by taxi to see a pick up truck pulled up in the drive. It was full of dead, dusty bodies - young mujahideen fighters in their thin pyjama-like robes and sandals. It was explained that they had been staying in a house, close to Tora Bora which, out of the blue, had been struck by a bomb from one of the B-52s. I remember the face of Haji Zaman, the mujahideen commander as he told us this. He was a hard, sarcastic, unlikeable and wholly untrustworthy man, but as he spoke he seemed to be close to tears.

The same thing happened the next day. Then at the beginning of December, we were told that an entire village had been destroyed by the Americans. From the safety, and relative comfort of our hotel, we reported these claims. They were flatly denied by the Pentagon, in the least ambiguous terms: "it just didn't happen".

We asked once again if we could go down and see for ourselves. Haji Zaman agreed.

Three others went, apart from me: Chris Tomlinson of AP, the photographer Yola Monakhov, and a CNN correspondent whom, for reasons which will become clear, I will not name.

To publish or not

'If they are "just cartoons",' asks reader and fellow blogger Mark Devlin, in response to my last post, 'why don't you publish them here on your blog?'

I believe that the cartoons should be propagated as widely as possible so that each of us can form an independent view about the rights and wrongs of the case, as I've made clear. But The Times, along with every other British newspaper, has made the considered decision not to publish. They have a reasonable argument (you can read it here and here). I may disagree with this position, but I certainly respect it. And this is The Times's blog after all, published under The Times's masthead. If this was www.richardlp.com (don't bother clicking - it doesn't exist yet), I could post what I liked; as their employee I must respect its editorial policies.

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.

Welcome, Leo

A hearty welcome to the Blogoverse for my Tokyo colleague and great friend, Leo Lewis, who will be posting on business, technology, the financial markets and lift music in his weblog, Asia's Century.

Leo and I share an office in the offices of the Yomiuri newspaper in Tokyo. He is a devotee of the music and television of the early 1980s and, until recently, he owned a deerstalker.

Observant visitors will notice that among the photographs displayed on The Times Weblog page, Leo has the largest head of any of the contributors, larger even than Gerard Baker. My head is larger than David Aaronovitch's, and much larger than that of Sir Peter Stothard, who can only be described as a pinhead. Have you noticed, too, how little hair there is on the heads of The Times's male bloggers? (I speak as one who is himself thinning on top.) Gerry, Chris Ayres, Michael Smith - slapheads. It's hard to tell with the picture of Charles Bremner, but he's certainly no Ruth Gledhill, trichologically speaking.

No Buts in Denmark

Transit Lounge, Copenhagen Airport

In the matter of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet, I am a fundamentalist. The publication of the cartoons must be defended by anyone who claims to believe in free speech. The cartoons should be reproduced by any editor who regards as newsworthy the controversy surrounding them.

Much of the commentary on the affair is beside the point. It doesn't matter whether the cartoons are unfunny, obscure, provocative, misjudged, ambiguous, repellent, or badly drawn. All that matters is that they are legal, peaceful, non-obscene manifestations of the right to free expression.

If an unfunny, obscure, provocative, misjudged, ambiguous, repellent and badly drawn cartoon about, say, Shinto or Buddhism had stirred up a fuss in Japan, I would write a story about it. The Times would reproduce the artwork - how else would readers form their own opinions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute?

There is only one reason for not doing so in this case:

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.