Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

This blog is not dead . . .

. . . just resting. It will awake, refreshed after its long winter sleep, sometime in the spring.

Temporary hiatus

Further apologies for the resounding silence in this blog over the past few weeks. I've been on holiday, and will be away from Asia until early December - when a ferociously intense and productive period of blogging will resume, the like of which you have never seen before.

Until then posting will be light, although I'll continue to put up comments.

Happy Late November to everyone.

Patchy service

Apologies for the infrequency of posts over the past couple of weeks. As they say on Facebook, "it's complicated".

When time allows I will put up some of the news pieces and other contributions from The Times correspondent inside Burma. In the meantime, you can read his newspaper stories in the Asia section of Times Online; or enter "Kenneth Denby" into the search engine.

Back soon . . .

Back on the Bike

Writing a weblog is a bit like being a member of a gym. When you do it regularly, you feel superb - flab melting away, muscle swelling, posture improved, sexy endorphins surging around your body. But when you stop, even for a few days, you start to feel uneasy. After a couple of weeks, you feel guilty. After a month or more, you are assailed with feelings of shame and self-loathing.

For the past six weeks I have been a very bad blogger. But that is all behind me now. I stand before you, in my scraggy shorts and trainers, metaphorical man boobs sagging, and I remount the dialectical exercise bike that is Asia Exile. The first few sessions may be tough (be at hand, paramedics). But bear with me and watch a digital Adonis emerge from this pulpy virtual exterior.

I haven't been completely idle for six weeks.

In that time, I have:

'The Tide is High'

Anyone interested in the plight of the Carteret Islands should look at a podcast by the estimable Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, with whom I travelled there last December. Beautiful images and an interesting commentary, including interviews with the Carteret islanders themselves.

The picture above was taken on the fishing boat which took us over to the islands. Jeremy is on the right.

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.

Full of beans?

Madame Sosostris, the congested clairvoyant, and this blog's resident supernatural oracle, has got off to a cracking start with her New Year Predictions. Her prophecy for February, of harsh weather and a new humanitarian crisis in North Korea, has come to pass already, as decribed in this grim piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph.

Natto rotted soybeans are in danger of becoming the new daikon (giant radish) of this blog, so I will try not to go on excessively about them. But I would be delinquent if I failed to provide two links.

The first is The Natto Project, a blog written by two friends who hate natto but forced themselves to eat it for breakfast every day. They began last April, and the blog abruptly breaks off without a word of explanation in late May, suggesting that the two may even have died as a result of their experiment.

The second is this thought-provoking rant by a Christian fundamentalist gentleman named Jim Rutz (oh yes!), arguing that soybeans in all their forms make you gay. "There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture," warns Jim, whose latest book is entitled The Meaning of Life. "Most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products." (Thanks to the always interesting What Japan Thinks finding this).

Ars Amoris Nipponica

Nowhere else in Tokyo do Japanese and foreigners interact so intensely as in that great cosmopolitan melting pot known as Roppongi. Lotus-eating paradise to some, to others a pathetic pick-up strip, Roppongi is the place where J-Girls and foreign Charisma Men congregate every weekend to find one another. It's an erotic jungle, as hazard-strewn as Borneo, New Guinea or the Upper Amazon. But finally, a Japanese publisher has come up with a Baedeker to guide the first timer through Roppongi's elaborate mating rituals.

It's called Roppongi English and it has been fully scanned in by the excellent Japan Probe blog. No young Japanese lady on the pull can afford not to read it, immediately.

Apologies . . .

. . . for the long absence. I've been away on my holidays, but I'm back now and will resume posting as much as I can.

Happy New Year, by the way.

I may be some time

Tomorrow I'm going to a place of very limited Internet access, so there may not be much change on the blog for a few days. More as soon as I can post it. Please keep your comments on the Charisma Man controversy coming ...although it seems to be fast transmuting into the Knicker Elastic Controversy.