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.

In the sea of stones

We need tales of Wonders - encounters with extreme experience, man-made or natural, which inspire or appal, and impart a sense of human smallness and  insignificance. A jungle forest, burning out of control. An entire town, wholly consumed and washed away by a wave. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

A yacht, sailing the Pacific, came across such a Wonder. "Early afternoon, somewhere east of the Lau Group in Fiji," wrote its captain, Fredrik Fransson. "We are sailing south of the island group to avoid having to pass through it during night. Yesterday we saw the birth of an island, most likely we were the first humans to see the new creation."

Repeats

I am on holiday this week (cheers, cries of 'For he's a jolly good fellow!'), which means that I won't be posting very much (shocked gasps, sobs, stifled howls of grief). To assuage your loneliness while I am gone, I have a topping idea which I believe may be new to blogging: repeats.

Instead of going to the trouble of writing a new post every few days, I will simply redisplay an old post from my (admittedly rather slim) ten month back list. That way you can revisit - or experience for the first time - earlier moments in the life of Asia Exile. And I get to spend more time on the beach.

The experiment commences above.

Sho-sho omachi kudasai

I apologise for the irregularity of recent posts. I'm taking a bit of leave from The Times. Normal service should be restored - with vigour - after I return to the office at the end of next week.

The King of Mt Merapi and the Queen of the Southern Seas

It's less than a fortnight since the Java earthquake, but two or three generations of news have already been and gone - the "terror" arrests in Canada, death of al-Zarqawi in Iraq, and soon the maelstrom of the World Cup. I arrived there late on the day after the Saturday quake, and left the following Thursday.For the purposes of a daily newspaper, there wasn't anything very new left to say.

Day One: describe the immediate impact of the disaster, and recount the stories of survivors. Day Two: the terrible scramble for those trapped beneath the rubble. Then on Days Three and Four you concentrate on the aid effort, inevitably rather shambolic at first, but increasing in efficiency and effectiveness. On Day Five you might write a more general story about the region. But after that competition from more rapidly changing situations in other parts of the world edges the story out of the news pages. It makes me a little sad, and causes me to wonder whether I have become cynical. At this stage after the disaster, of course, the vastly more catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami was still ain important headline. But, given its smaller scale and the relative competence of the aid effort, it's not surprising that attention should have turned elsewhere.

And now, of course, Mt Merapi, the turbulent volcano which overlooks the earthquake zone, looks as if it is brewing a major eruption.

Apologies ...

... for the extended silence. Normal noise levels will soon be restored.

Shame of the Chihuahua (and more cyberstalker news)

From this morning's newspaper. See kitaryunosuke's response here. Photograph courtesy of Aiful.

How much is that chihuahua in the window? The one with the 29% sting?

TOKYO NOTEBOOK  by Richard Lloyd Parry

Neurotically pampered dogs are a daily sight in Tokyo these days, and of all the breeds none is more popular, or more horrid, than the Chihuahua. They are bad enough in their natural state, mincing along behind their owners with that infuriating jiggly walk. Dress them up, as many Tokyo pet lovers do, in dog coats, dog hats and dog sunglasses and they become even more loathsome. So it is satisfying to report the shame that has been heaped upon the Chihuahua, which has gone from being an icon of simpering cuteness to a symbol of thuggishness and usury.

The story begins with a series of commercials which became one of the most popular in Japan’s television history. In episodic, Nescafe Gold Blend-style, they tell the story of a middle-aged man whose life is transformed by his love for a white Chihuahua. The creature is named Qoo-chan, after “Kuu”, the Japanese word for the noise which Chihuahuas make. In the course of the ads, he purchases the hound, outfits him in a morning suit, and adopts his mate and litter of pups. All of these expenses are made possible by the company behind the ads, a “consumer loans” firm called Aiful.

Qoo-chan triggered a wave of Chihuahua-buying and a spike in business for Aiful who plastered their mascot on posters and credit cards. Until last month, when it became clear that the company is less of a Chihuahua, than a growling, slavering Rottweiler.

kitaryunosuke responds

Forn a few hours, I though that Ryunosuke Kita must have overslept. It was lunchtime before he got around to translating my piece about him from this morning's paper and his response to it, which I reproduce below. Too bad that he won't meet me for a drink. But I'm touched that he refers to me twice as "dear". I don't really mind if you call me names either, chucky egg . . .

The following is copied from here. Both the English and Japanese are those of the troll. Explanations in square brackets are mine. 

"Ooooo, that's scary (･∀･)," he begins. "いやーん、こわーい(･∀･)。

"I'm gonna cry, if you write such a bunch of lies, really.
そんな嘘八百書いたら、龍之介、泣いちゃうから。

Who translated for you, dear? A pretty Japanese girl friend? A memeber [sic] of the "absolutely fabulous" FCCJ [Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, another of Kita-kun's betes noires], perhaps? nudge nudge, wink wink...
だれが翻訳してくれたのかな？可愛らしい日本人ガールフレンド？「超セレブ」FCCJのメンバーかな、もしかして？つんつん、ウィンクウィンク…

I loved the last line, by the way, you know? "Fool! You are noisy!"... oh dear, really... I could weep.
ところで、最後の一行、気に入ったね～…ほんと。『ばーか！うるせーんだよ！』…って、あんたまったく…涙出ちゃうね。

I don't really hate anyone (too busy for that), but I really despise anyone who are stuffed with biased ideas.
私は誰も憎みはしないよ（忙しいんでね）。だが、バイアスがかった考えで一杯の連中を本当に軽蔑している。

Do the research! Come on!!
リサーチしろよ！どうしたんだ！

Come out, come out, wherever you are . . .

From this morning's newspaper . . .

Where does The Times keep its private parts? Look no further . . .

Tokyo Notebook by Richard Lloyd Parry

After a few years, the strain of living in the world’s politest and least confrontational society really takes it out of a man. Which of us, from time to time, does not relish a healthy argument or a nice, tension relieving screaming match? And yet in Japan the simple pleasures of invective, sarcasm and rudeness are cruelly denied.

This is a country in which someone who is incandescent with rage will, as a very last resort, denounce his antagonist as ‘baka’ – a word no stronger than the word “fool”. While an English speaker can choose between “Put a sock in it”, “Shut your mush” or “Zip it”, Japanese is restricted to the anaemic ‘urusai’, which means nothing more than “You are noisy”. It is claustrophobic to find oneself in a country without insults – or that is what I thought until I encountered the work of Ryunosuke Kita.

Mr Kita (or “kitaryunosuke”, as he signs himself) plays a unique part in my life – he is my conscience, my nemesis and the closest thing I have had to a stalker.

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.

Asia Exile is back

Apologies for the silence - I have been in Australia at Writers' Week in the Perth International Arts Festival. Near to normal service will quickly be resumed.

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.

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 . . .