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No more Mr Nes guy

As an incurable fan of manga and a barely grown-up schoolboy at heart, Golgo13 is perhaps my greatest guilty pleasure. I have a large and much-loved collection of his comic-book adventures that stretches back over 20 years and along yards of bookshelf: when each new tome comes out, I knock children out of the way to get to the news-stand.

I say "guilty" because I know that the stories are really very nasty indeed. They appeal to precisely the same part of the brain that causes addiction to Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil and the Bourne Trilogy.

For the newcomers, Golgo13 - the working name of Duke Togo - is a professional assassin par   excellence. In over 400 stories, he has never, ever failed to hit his mark. He has travelled from the seething jungles of South America to crumbling African dictatorships to thriving Iraqi biological warfare factories (I did mention this was fictional, didn't I...) and killed someone at every stop. Usually with a head-shot. Men or women. Black or white. Young or old. Married or Single. Rich or Poor. It doesn't matter: if he takes the contract, he makes the kill.

Along the way, however, he does get into a few scrapes. Scrapes which inevitably end in tears, violent sex, plumes of blood or all three. Something, one might say, of an anti-hero, Golgo merrily rapes, stabs, batters, shoots, and slices his way through the twilight world of espionage and organised crime, inflicting his amoral code on more or less everyone he meets. (On the right is a charming frame of him punching a woman in the face).

Religious and political leaders of all creeds, culture and race are depicted as villains or buffoons. He has been both victim and inflicter of torture and a voracious user of hookers. Everyone around him screws, swears and subverts. Oh, and he's a heavy smoker, the swine.

Odd, therefore, that Golgo13, should have been selected as the new "face" of Nescafe in Japan.

A fistful of Wobarrdy-Prikkdy...

"Wobarrdy-Prikkdy"...

A lesser baronet from a Jeeves and Wooster episode? A small duchy in southern Belgium that has violently declared independence? The sort of complaint that would prompt a doctor to lower his half-moon spectacles and yell "nurse, the screens!"?

Well, perhaps not. But it is, I confidently predict, a mouthful for which we will all soon be forced to slacken our jaws and perfect our pronunciation. To some, it will be a potential panacea for a world on the brink of food-price cataclysm and inflationary madness. For others, a neologism of peace and stability for our strange and troubled political times. 

For yet others it will be a bold slogan of change - the rallying-call for a new Asian Century that owes nothing to the pinstriped pig-doggery and safari-suited colonial presumption of the West.

"Bears $#!+ in woods!" warns TCI chief...

Despite one or two misgivings (see below) I actually rather like John Ho - the increasingly desperate- sounding Asia director of the Children's Fund and star of one of Japan's most entertaining market farces in years.

Mr Ho is exceptionally bright, unerringly passionate and angry about all the right things. He is also, to his undoubted stress and misery, a man who has ended-up shouldering all the dirty-work that hundreds of other foreign funds should have done themselves. In one very compelling sense, Mr Ho is a reedy voice of sanity in a market which far too many have allowed to be far too eccentric for far, far too long.

And I mean that. There are clear flaws in Mr Ho's spiralling pleas for better governance and fatter dividends, but (numbers aside) the basic thesis is spot-on: Japanese listed companies look like listed companies, smell like listed companies, and are nominally set up to behave like listed companies - it's just that none of them think of themselves as listed companies.

Mr Ho, bless him, has probably lost a great deal of money making this discovery. His anger is righteous. His excuses for not realising all this sooner, however, are embarrassingly slim.

Take three of these with every console

In over 25 years as a gamer, I have sustained various pathetic injuries. There was the Konix Speedking joystick which nearly dislocated my finger. There was that sprained wrist from hyperactive waggling of the QuickShot II in Daley Thompson's Decathlon. There was a chipped tooth from blowing imaginary smoke from the barrel of the Sega Master System Light Gun. And, most recently, there has been a whole new range of aches and pains from Nintendo's Wii Fit ordeal.

And not once, during all that time, did the medical profession seem to give a tuppenny damn about these risible ailments.

Finally, however, a Japanese company has sat up and taken notice of the health needs of people like me. People whose addiction to video games is writing cheques their bodies can't cash. People who press pause, get up and draw the curtains as rosy-fingered dawn breaks over a 12-hour online session of Resistance: Fall of Man. People who keep a packet of salt near the console to prevent hand-cramps, and who consider toilet breaks an unreasonable chore.

Yes, from now on, I'll be taking Game Suppli health supplements, produced by a company that has spent most of its life making precisely the kind of console peripherals that have scraped, snagged and slashed me for decades. The Bluberry one is for my pasty face, sunken eyes and other atrophied motor functions. The fish oil one will supposedly help me with the sort of game that requires me to delve deep into the IQ stash.

I spoke to CyberGadget - the outfit that produces these pills - and was told that this little foray into healthcare was really all about improving the public image of gamers. Apparently (this is according to CyberGadget) Japanese society looks rather unkindly on gamers and views them as either actual felons, or criminals in the making. When they are still school age, they don't do their homework; when they are grown up they hang around Akihabara with rucksacks enjoying themselves. Deeply suspicious, I'm sure you'll agree.

So, if I've understood the company correctly, the pills serve two purposes. First, they help the gamer game better than he or she did before. Second, they give gamers the sort of lusty, ruddy-cheeked glow that elderly Japanese feel they can trust.

Official: the world's worst wind farm

There is a scene in Peter Sellers' A Shot in The Dark, which, no matter how many times I re-watch it, leaves me helpless and wheezing with laughter. For many years, I have fondly believed that nothing would ever be quite as funny as Clouseau's attempts to play billiards with the warped cue.

Until today.

A single picture [right]. Nothing special, I imagine you're thinking, but in fact weepingly funny.

You see, two years ago, I went to see this unhappy wind generator in the Japanese city of Tsukuba - the place where scientists tinker around with space rockets, robot suits, radio-controlled insects and a whole load of other brilliant gubbins. It is, supposedly, a city that represents the absolute cutting-edge of Japanese technology and innovation - and is very, very generously funded by the taxpayer to be exactly that.

Which is why it was all the more insane that the city should have become the site for the World's Worst Wind Farm. As I reported at the time, the utterly dismal urban wind farm - a collection of specially made generators dotted about the city - had an unquestionably fatal flaw. Tsukuba is a city with virtually no wind. Not a breath in summer, and strangely calm even during Japan's howling typhoon season.

The mad effect of this little oversight is that the expensive generators generated absolutely nothing. Not a single watt of output. To make matters worse, the embarrassed local government was so ashamed of the ill-researched waste of public funds that it started to run power to the sails and have the generators work in reverse - turning the sails to make it look like they were being blown by the non-existent gale.

For two years, it looked as though the Worthless Wind Farm would just sink into that bottomless pit of farce that has been filled, over the years, with pointless Japanese wastes of money. A joke yes, but ultimately on us. But suddenly, yesterday, there was a big gust of wind.

Finally! The kids rushed out of their schools, the elderly twitched their curtains in awed appreciation and the good folk of Tskuba charged into the streets to see their folly at last doing what it was supposed to. Except that, as it now turns out, the Worthless Wind Farm has a second, more ridiculous flaw: it can't withstand a light breeze. And lo, in what I believe is the funniest photograph ever, we have the twisted metal wreckage of one of the Tsukuba windmills - bent out of shape and twisted beyond repair by a gust you could barely fly a kite in.

Lovely.

A question for the 21st Century: do Miis get funerals?

Something at the back of my mind warned me that this moment would come. A misery, literally, of my own creation. What started as a bit of fun has now turned decidedly bleak. An emotional dilemma for our digital age, and, so far as I can tell from a trawl of Google, not a single daft Los Angeles-based support group in sight.

Now, it is really not like Urban Dirt to get maudlin about things, but I recently lost a dearly beloved  grandfather, whose rather fine obituary can be found on The Times website here. He lived to a ripe age, led a full professorial life, was merrily writing his memoirs until the very end and died suddenly without pain. All very comforting. I returned to the UK and joined family, friends and his many admirers from the world of academia for a thoroughly fitting send-off: tea, cucumber sandwiches...I should probably not be, but have been down in the dumps ever since.

So much so, in fact, that since my return to Tokyo it has been some weeks since I switched on my Wii - and it's a dark old state if even Mario in a bumble bee suit can't shed a little cheer. But life moves on, I badly needed a Nintendo fix, so last night on it went...

My heart stopped, because there he was. My grandfather - the late Professor Geoffrey Lewis - wandering across the screen in Mii form. A smiling, blinking, stretching - dammit, living - incarnation of the old man. A faithful avatar thriving innocently in a cartoon world, with no idea its flesh-and-blood master was dead.

Could I steal a stone earlobe from Easter Island? In a second...

Just under a year ago, Urban Dirt was cruising past a smallish structure outside the drowsy metropolis of Hanga Roa. The tiny fortress, which looked not totally unlike the spartan “honeymoon suite”  of our hotel, turned out to be the central penitentiary of Easter Island.
Now, given that the entire population of Easter Island is only 4,000, and everybody seems to know everybody else (or indeed, is related to them), the status of inmate at this diddy prison is really pretty special. The longest-serving (lone) lag, our guide informed us, is a multiple rapist. A bad man, she declared gravely...

But there is now a chance this unsavoury character will have some company in his little prison. A Finnish chap, called Marko Kulju, who might be joining the local sex-criminal for a seven-year stretch. His attempted crime – described by visibly panicking Finnish diplomats as “crazy and impulsive” - could very well rate as the crudest bit of plastic surgery since the invention of the guillotine.

I am Spartacus! I could be the BoJ Guv'nor....

So with the possible exception of that daft old chestnut about used knickers in vending machines, it is extremely hard to remember a time when Japan has looked more internationally ridiculous.

Not, I hasten to add, that you would know it from the lunchtime news. Item#1 (on all the channels) was  some psychotic woman in Akita getting a life sentence for killing her daughter a couple of years ago. Item#2 was that The Central Bank of the World's second biggest economy HAS NO GOVERNOR. Item#3 was Mitsukoshi Department store's purchase of a wooden sculpture at a New York auction. Right. Right...

Sorry, what was that second item again?

Oh yes. In the middle of what is shaping-up as the mightiest financial crisis since the Second World War, the central bank of a country that gave the world the yen carry trade, billions in Samurai bond issuance, and whose INDIVIDUAL investors hold $1 trillion in overseas assets does not have anyone on the bridge. The government of Yasuo Fukuda could fall over this one - at the very least there will be righteous calls for old dunderhead's  immediate resignation. All that is perfectly in order, but there is the somewhat more pressing matter of who should be in charge of the Bank of Japan while the world goes to hell in a hand-cart.

With so many valid candidates to choose from, I am genuinely surprised that the government has nominated such an obvious collection of incompetents. Here is the Urban Dirt selection, with their odds of hitting the big time in Nihonbashi...

The next time somebody asks you for $300 million...

The others thought it ludicrous..."They had a different view of the world, " one participant said acidly. "They are completely self-interested." Suddenly these paragons of individual enterprise seethed with communitarian fervour. Purcell of Morgan Stanley turned beet red. He fumed, "It's not acceptable that a major Wall Street firm isn't participating!" It was as if Bear were breaking a silent code; it would pay a price in the future...

- From When Genius Failed, by Roger Lowenstein

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting to an elderly Japanese industrialist about a gizmo he helped launch some 38 years ago. He reminisced happily on its sparse merits, its quite stunning drawbacks and the daft advertisement with which the gadget was plugged on TV.

It was an utterly failed product, but its huge value, he said (turning all serious) was to teach future generations of the company how not to launch a new product.

Yes, Japan may be old, set in its ways and riddled with terrible flaws but you just don't get Corporate Memory like that anywhere else. In the global financial industry - where sackings, poachings, mergers and failures are all part of the scene - the collective amnesia is even more striking. Thus, as Wall Street, The City and the rest of the world confronts historic destruction of wealth, combined Corporate Memory is looking more and more like my shoddy Chinese DVD player - hopelessly faulty beyond six months but also liable to blow your face off.

I refer, rather specifically, to Bear Stearns and why Corporate Memory could turn rather strongly against it now...

The great collateralised-sub-prime-credit-crunch 2008 Cherry Blossom Haiku competition!

The Nikkei crashes. A worthless broker bullshits: "it's all sentiment"

Now, the haiku above - generated within the very bosom of the Urban Dirt household in classic 5-7-5 syllable form - is just a taster of the sort of thing we're looking for this year. The haiku below came to me in a bar last week as two clowns from a bank around the corner attempted to mock the tank-top that Mrs Urban Dirt gave me for my birthday.

Sales trading: a job for trained monkeys or MAs - take your pick, Lehman...

To recap: Cherry Blossom season for Tokyo is probably only three weeks away. Every year, The Times Tokyo bureau celebrates this classic moment of ephemeral Japanorama by visiting the grave of one of the very first Tokyo correspondents of The Times in Aoyama Cemetery. A delightful, Chu-Hi-soaked annual event - often washed to oblivion by the rain - to which Urban Dirt readers are cordially invited (assuming you can locate the tomb of Captain Francis Brinkley).

Tokyo's bold plan: Global Financial Centre! Just taking the piss...

Now the tradition at these events is for a series of haiku to be read - reflecting the hot topics of the year: in this case, the abomination of world credit markets, the subprime meltdown, the insanity of the Japanese government and the (temporary?) end of the good times for the lads and lasses in pinstripes.

They can be gloomy:

Twenties New York: "Car for sale - lost all on stocks"...History repeats.

Or annoyed:

Triple-A credit...Oh why did we trust those lies? That would be the greed...

Or thoughtful:

What's "margin call" dad? Will private equity go like the dinosaurs?

We are looking for the usual perfection of the 5-7-5 stanza, though a more freewheeling approach to the genre is naturally acceptable. Answers to this blog by March 30th. Large cans of peach Chu-Hi to be won!

Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ...

Now, Urban Dirt could be imagining things, but I'm not at all sure that Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ was thinking things through when it commissioned this cute cartoon character to front its latest campaign. I may be reading too much into the classic slick of hair and toothbrush moustache, but does this little fellow not  look a teensy-weensy bit like Adolf Hitler?

I mean, perhaps that was how MUFJ wanted it to look. Perhaps this is some sort of subliminal message to the market: watch out banking sector, we're coming to take you over! I suppose if that was indeed the message they were trying to get across, here is how the conversation with the Dentsu branding guys might have gone...

MUFJ man: We're planning to take over the entire banking sector. We may later consider an expansion into Europe. We're very interested in European emerging markets.

Dentsu man: Emerging markets?

MUFJ man: You know, Poland, Hungary, stuff like that...

Dentsu man: Oh, I see. So the sort of image you want is strong, decisive and expansionist?

MUFJ man: Yes, yes. Exactly. We need a famous consolidator...

Dentsu man: I think I have exactly the chap in mind. We can call the little guy "Ado-chan" to get the female customers...

Ban the backie! Unleash hell...

You thought the Japanese birthrate was in trouble before...just wait until they ban the backie.

When Urban Dirt was a nipper, there was no finer joy in life than the magical combination of a BMX, a  playing card (for authentic motorbike sound effects) and two steel pegs screwed onto either end of the rear axle.

Sure the BMX was not "officially" a BMX. It was a preposterously beautiful imitation BMX made by an Austrian metal-bashing outfit called Puch - one of those companies that actually began life as something like Fahrradfabrikation Strauchergasse. The bicycle, as far as I could tell, was engineered to within an inch of its life, was made of weapons-grade steel and weighed more than all my friends' machines put together. Like a Russian mafioso's girlfriend, the ride was visually stunning, but required improbable strength to bring under control.

And yet even though it seemed to weigh more than our house, it had those tempting steel pegs protruding from the back wheel that craved a passenger. It was a machine destined from conception to give people "Backies" - for a seven-year-old, it was the social equivalent (or so I imagined) of having a Learjet and a Mayfair penthouse. Hang the extra weight...what girl, I slavered, could possibly resist a journey on my steel pegs?

Well, all of them, it turns out. With the very occasional exception of my sister. For some reason, the offer of a backie just didn't play very well in the Cotswolds as a seduction technique. It didn't even work that well as an offer of cheap transport.

But in Japan, the Backie is vital. So vital, in fact, that if it is taken away all hell will break loose in the world's second biggest economy. The forthcoming ban could deal the sort of catastrophic blow that the insanely blinkered government only realises was its mistake when it is picking through the ashes of a socio-financial meltdown.

No Comment. No Clue.

There was a moment six months ago when Urban Dirt had quite high hopes for Atsushi Saito - the president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and former honcho of the Industrial Revitalisation Corporation of Japan.

What he was doing looked good -  joint ventures with London, a hand of friendship to bourses across Asia and, perhaps most critically, a mildly tougher line on the sort of nonsense that corporate Japan gets up to on a daily basis.

But alas, when the chips are down, Saito-san has come up miserably short.

Last week, when Alistair Darling was in town he visited the TSE and was shown around the floor by Saito. All those lovely dot matrix screens...ooh ....ahhh...etc. When the chancellor nipped off to do his press conference, Saito sidled off stage left, but not before Urban Dirt had the chance to ask him a quick question about the madman Kitabata. [Kitabata, you might recall, is the most senior bureaucrat at the Ministry of Trade and Industry. He is also the man who told an audience two weeks ago that shareholders were "fools", "corrupt" and "greedy"]

"Do you agree, Mr Saito, with Mr Kitabata that shareholders are corrupt and greedy?"

Seemed like a fair question. A good chance for Mr Saito to declare that he is on the side of shareholders (without whom, incidentally, he would not have an exchange at all). A perfect opportunity for the newer, more robust TSE to lay its cards on the table and show that, as an exchange, it rather likes the concept of shareholder capitalism and will defend its ethos to the death.

"No comment," came the unhappy reply.

Bravo. No really. Bravo.

T'was the night before G7 and all through the house...

So Japan is playing host to the meeting of G7 Finance Ministers this weekend. The table is laid for a fairly tedious chinwag, with little in the way of solid decisions likely to arise. If somebody uses the "R" word, things might perk up a bit, but meanwhile, Urban Dirt wonders if the conversation at the Kantei tonight is going to run something like this...

PM Yasuo Fukuda (to aide): Oh bloody hell. Bank holiday weekend, perfect powder snow up at Nisseko  and we've got all the ruddy finance ministers flying in tomorrow. I sometimes wonder why we're members of G7 anyway. Nobody gives a fig what Japan thinks any more. They just come for the sushi and the chicks.

Eiji the Aide (nervous): Problem, Sir?

PM: Could be. These foreign buggers seem to know a lot about finance, for a start. A damn sight more than we do, anyway. Don't be fooled by that sub-prime stuff, Eiji my lad. They're credit-mad nutters out there, but none of them has yet screwed an economy as comprehensively as we can. Housing collapse? Our prat of a land minister has got a trick that makes SIVs look like shining beacons of stability...

Eiji: Shall I call the Disaster Prevention Agency and get them to fake-up an earthquake somewhere in Aomori, Sir? Might give you an excuse to get out of town...

PM: No, no. Better face this G7 charade like men. But Christ. Paulson and Darling are going to be a handful. Our guys don't stand a chance. I mean, those slack-jaws at the Bank of Japan can't even tell whether the price of tofu is rising or falling. Thank god the French aren't going to be strutting around like they saw all this coming. You know, I should probably give old Copperfingers a call and congratulate him on now being responsible for only the second worst trading scandal of all time. Still. This G7 thing could be pretty bloody embarrassing. I mean, it was only two months ago we were warning everyone about asset bubbles. Better get that cretin Nukaga in here to brief me.

Eiji: Right away, Sir. Do you want me to tell the chef to put gyoza on the menu? They are your favourite...

PM: Oooh. That's an idea. Paulson's not going to be quite so chipper if he's heaving dinner up all over the place. On second thoughts. Er, no, best stick to something less controversial. Tell the Antarctic fleet to fry-up the freshest whale they can muster...

(Later)

Finance Minister Nukaga: Sir?

PM: Ah Fukushiro, nice to see you. Pop quiz. What do we think of shareholder capitalism today?

Nukaga: Shareholders, Sir?

PM: Yes, yes. Hurry up. I need an answer.

Nukaga: Bastards, Sir. Unconscionable bastards. Don't deserve to have money, let alone dividends. Greedy sods seem to think corporations are all about returning profits to the people that own the companies and making money for pension funds. It's all dangerous, revolutionary subversion, Sir. Nasty business, stock exchanges. Ought to be stamped out. Am I right, Sir?

PM: Ah. (winces) Not this week, Fukushiro. You see, a couple of weeks ago I was telling all the people at Davos...

Nukaga: Davos, Sir?

PM: It's abroad, Fukushiro. Anyway. I was telling the foreigners that we actually quite want them to invest their money in Japan, and we're going to try to make our markets more attractive.

Nukaga: Ahahahahahahah. (weeping) Brilliant, Sir. Ahahahhahahh hohohohoho. Ahhh. Priceless...

PM: It's not a joke, you dunderhead.

Nukaga: Yes, Sir. (pulling himself together) I see. So this week we think shareholders are...

PM: Not evil, Fukushiro, just another part of the global economy's rich tapestry. A force to be accommodated and encouraged, rather than stabbed to death by those boss-eyed maniacs at Keidanren. I was chatting with the chaps over at Nippon Life, and they seemed to think it was probably a bad thing if all the foreign shareholders pulled out of Japan because they think we're a laughing stock. And when I say "we", of course, I mean you, Fukushiro. The thing about shareholders is they have lots of money, you see...

Nukaga: Sir. We have lots of money. A trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves last time I looked.

PM: Yes, I've been meaning to talk about that...

Nukaga: Sir?

PM: We should turn some of it into an actively managed fund.

Nukaga: (spluttering) You mean like they have in...(sniffs) ..."developing" countries.

PM: Yeah. You see this is the kind of thinking that worries me. With all these clever G7 ministers in town somebody is bound to notice that Japanese policy-making is actually more backward than most supposedly developing countries. If my ridiculous cabinet doesn't pull its finger out, Pyongyang stands a better chance of becoming a global financial centre than Tokyo....

Nukaga: Well, Sir. (proudly) I think I have the solution.

PM: (wary) Hmmm?

Nukaga: Sir. Can I borrow Y300,000?

PM: I'll ask my wife. But go on...why?

Nukaga: Well. We get all the other G7 ministers in a room, right? Fill 'em up with some sake - hey, we can use that barrel the Emperor gave you - and get Akiko and the girls from the secretarial pool to really butter them up. You know, laugh at their bad jokes, and massage their egos...

PM: Er...

Nukaga: Then we take them down Roppongi and get everyone into one of the tables at the back of Tantra. A few more bottles of splosh, a shot or two of Mexican fire-water, three private dances apiece with Blanca and Nikita  and those guys are going to be clapping us on the back and telling us what a fantastic place Japan is.

PM: It'll never work.

Nukaga: No - here's the amazing thing. It will! There are these guys called money brokers, see... 

 

Was Tokyo's best party the very last snort of the bulls?

So there it was. A Friday night that should, on paper, have been bleaker than a Philip Roth novel.

The end of one of the most hideous weeks of Tokyo trading anyone can remember. Everywhere you looked, stocks were in freefall and this time it wasn’t just Japan that was slitting its wrists. Hong Kong was in a muddy, stinking ditch, the US was looking as shaky as some of those subprime mortgaged houses, and even that oh-so-persuasive story about the Chinese economic juggernaut looked in need of a trip to Kwik-Fit.

But, ahhhh…thank Bacchus for hedonism and the unrelenting drag of excess: at least there were still some bars where the champagne was splashing around like a coke-fuelled sailor at a Playboy pool party. The question is whether Friday’s insanity – one of the biggest bar bills ever amassed in a single night’s Tokyo boozing – will mark the last hurrah of a global economy on the edge.

You Can't Beat the Feeling! (of coffee and a snout)

It's so dull making endless sport of political correctness. Comedians and columnists have been dredging it  as material for years with the same thudding tedium that surrounds those collections of mis-written insurance claims. You know the sort: "In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole."

Actually (tee hee) that one is quite good. But as with political correctness we do, in our hearts, see the point being made despite the cack-handedness of the way it all comes out. It's essentially about making people feel a bit more comfortable, and, as such, is fairly hard to condemn.

But I wonder whether Japan may have taken the anti- political correctness thing too far. I mean there can't be many countries where Philip Morris and the Coca-Cola Company are happy to indulge in a crafty spot of joint-marketing.

Yesterday a Hokkaido Takushoku stock certificate spoke to me

A very happy, very disturbing (see below) new year from Urban Dirt. Apologies for the long delay since the  last post, normal service resumes from the next paragraph...

The pumpkin-fuelled mayhem of Halloween is well behind us, but Urban Dirt has started the year spooked. Spooked as it has never been spooked before.

You see, the malign manipulators themselves (and I’m assuming poltergeist, Casper and Carrie are in on this rotten mischief) have used their mysterious powers to warn us that a major financial institution will soon collapse. Today, tomorrow, New York, Tokyo – I don’t know. But “They” have sent me an unmistakable and chilling sign: 1,000 worthless shares in a bank that imploded exactly ten years ago…

Is Mario dressed as a bumble-bee a national treasure?

I'm all for a bit of ham-fisted jingoistic symbolism now and again, but Page 36 of today's Nikkei does rather take the biscuit. We'll get to Mario in a bee costume in a second...

A full-page advert (which also appeared in today's Mainichi) has been placed by J-Power, the listed utility  that should, by rights, never have been privatised at all. For any other Japanese companies wishing to avoid the scrutiny of shareholders, by the way, the solution is as follows: if you don't want people to buy something, don't sell it. Just don't sell it. It is a general rule which includes opening an onsen or a hostess club and banning foreigners, or, most critically, selling shares in your company.

At any rate, the J-Power advertisement (apologies for the low-definition pic) shows a mighty, beatific-looking sumo wrestler heaving a gigantic barrel of water into the maw of a hydro-electric power station. It is not totally unlike those North Korean propaganda posters that eschew wonderful feats of communist civil engineering, except that it's all done in the style of a classic Hiroshige woodblock print. The slogan, which is written in mock kimono fabric, even has that authentic ring of clumsily-worded Japlish: "I am J-Power," it bellows awkwardly from the page.

I am trying hard to imagine how a Japanese company could construct a more outrageously Japanese celebration of all things Japanese. I half expected three cherry-blossom petals, a slice of sashimi and a pachinko ball to tumble out of my newspaper. Alas, they did not.

HWBs - a fearsome new acronym - a crucial economic tipping-point?

Warm, comforting and exceptionally low-tech: the humble hot-water bottle. A cosy delight to frozen toes on a frigid winter's night; a boon for tepid tummies; a searing, vulcanised-rubber ally for the cold and lonely. Who on earth could possibly submit these blameless friends to the reproachful glare of economic analysis?

The thing is, everybody interested in deflation, interest rates and consumer behaviour should be keeping a very close eye on Japanese hot water bottles - specifically  the massive nationwide surge in hot water-bottle sales. On one level, it's a cheerful wintry tale of snug nights. On another, it's a pretty worrisome signal from the world's second biggest economy.

(Three-letter acronyms have always terrified markets, by the way - SOX petrified accountants, any FSA investigation is bound to be grim and the US economy is being tortured by the financial implications of SIVs. To press-home their over-arching economic importance, I will henceforth refer to hot water bottles as HWBs)

Put the gun down...everybody just let's calm down, and nobody will get hurt

Dammit. I was wrong.

Back at the beginning of November, when I was feeling a bit bleak about things, I wondered aloud what  industry the crazed bureaucratic machinery of Kasumigaseki would hunt down and kill next. Food, I felt, was a likely contender, as it seems fairly clear that the general appetite for destruction of mostly innocent sectors is undiminished. Perhaps a tax on Michelin stars is now being mulled in the corridors of METI...

But, according to a piece in today's Nikkei, I was way off. The FSA, with typical blood-lust, wants to go after the entire financial sector. Nothing like going to the root of Japan's real problems. It's so car-crashy. It's like some fearsome Bond villain snickering over a plot to annihilate everything, but with no suave hero available to shoot him and snog his missus. The FSA (says the ever-mistaken Nikkei) is weighing-up new rules on how the banks calculate their core equity capital. Any securitized asset with large price fluctuation risks would be subtracted from the overall figure. Genius.

And what particular nut has the steamroller been called upon to crack? Ah yes, that will be US sub-prime mortgages - an admittedly dangerous asset class, but one that Japan has been shown beyond doubt that it is minimally exposed to. And it is in that relatively happy state chiefly because Japanese financial institutions were such timid little investors when the manky mortgages were being bottled-up and labelled as Triple-A champers. Japanese banks, and the quality of their core equity capital is really, really, not threatened by America's financial cack-handedness.

"By adopting a framework that reduces its Tier-1 core capital if a financial institution pours money into securitized products, the FSA aims to prevent Japanese banks from investing too heavily in such products." reads the frankly bone-chilling Nikkei article.

Yeeeees..... but, er, this bit of madness would fatally hit the banks' ability to raise money. Which is what banks need to do, especially Japanese ones.

I mean, where to start on the astounding intellectual poverty and short-sightedness of this idea? I'll have a go. 1) Surely the whole point of the sub-prime mess is that, for 99% of their lifespan, everyone thought that they were products with virtually no price fluctuation risk. Except upwards.  Yes, yes we know they were bad NOW, but then, Japanese banks are presumably not going to buy any more US mortgage packages NOW, are they? 2) Not a single Japanese bank has its back to the wall on sub-prime, but this proposal suggests they all do. Just like the new construction law suggests that every single architect and construction firm in Japan are liars and con-men. 3) Even the Japanese government knows that the Japanese banks weathered the sub-prime horrors well - after all, when all of the other central banks were flooding their markets with tens of billions in liquidity, the BoJ was sucking it out at an equally impressive rate.

Please. Somebody at the FSA. Just put the gun down. Let's all talk about this like adults and we're all going home in one piece.