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The New Silk Road - or Why I Went to Yiwu

It’s extremely rare that Urban Dirt trundles into the territory of book reviews, and with good reason. As I look left from my desk at the office shelves, I see a work library built on whim, pragmatism and donation. Here is Family and Social Policy in Japan by my old tutor, Roger Goodman, squeezed between Morita’s Made in Japan and Tirman’s 100 Ways America is Screwing Up The World. Over there is Morinosuke’s Neon Genesis of Geeky-Girl Japanese Engineering, Love Letters at Sixty, Bobby Fischer Goes to War and Yakuza Money. This is absolutely not the collection of someone who takes an orderly approach to books, and I have always avoided the discipline of sharing my thoughts on any of them.

 

But sitting on the desk in front of me is work that cries out to be made the exception: Ben Simpfendorfer’s compact but impressive The New Silk Road.

 

The well-stocked business bookshelf should, by now, have a thick wedge of China-related material in it. But it is also high time to junk the sort of breathless “Blimey, isn’t China big?” fodder that used to pad that section out. With the Olympics over and - who knows? - a newly shaped economic order emerging, the need is for more tightly-focused analysis of China’s tendrils – where they go, what they feed on and what oozes out of them. This book answers that need and, unlike a dozen travel books on my bedside table, is written with enough energy to make me drop everything and book the first flight to Yiwu. More on that in The Times later this week, but suffice to say that Simpfendorfer makes you want to go.

 

There can be no doubt that the New Silk Road’s theme, of China’s strengthening ties with the Arab and Islamic world, deserves infinitely more attention than it gets. The fact that it currently doesn’t goes a long way to proving the book’s thesis that China and the Middle East increasingly “get” each other – their relationship is modern, while relations between the Islamic world and the West feel antiquated and handicapped by history. Simpfendorfer’s subject is one on which there is an alarming poverty of Western insight and understanding. And that, ultimately, is why the China-Arab relationship is allowed to grow at such a startling pace.

 

The chapter on the geopolitics of China’s search for oil waves countless red flags over western complacency. Simpfendorfer attaches great significance to a remark by the Saudi ambassador to Washington - “China is not necessarily a better friend than the United States, but it is a less complicated friend” - and so, I’m sure, should we. In his closing paragraph, Simpfendorfer wonders aloud whether the West has realised the full magnitude of the changes related in the 172 pages that preceded it. He does not have to spell out how skimpily the issue has been covered elsewhere. In their bid to paint the bigger picture, World is Flat merchants like Thomas Friedman have missed the giant mural that covers the walls and ceiling.

Simpfendorfer’s day job is chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland; before that he was a senior economist at JP Morgan. Those titles, and the dryish, analytical tone of his day-to-day output conceal something far more interesting: he is fluent in both Arabic and Chinese and has a clear taste for expending shoe leather on the street-level search for evidence. In a chapter on the differing statuses of women at either end of the Silk Road, Simpfendorfer describes taking a box of electronic Korans, assembled by women migrants from Guangxi in a Shenzhen factory, from China to Syria. He then engages Islamic scholars on the question of whether the Arab world would ever ditch its male-centric work patterns to emulate China’s more egalitarian growth model. It is compelling, pleasingly nerdish research.

The macro themes of the book are huge – the blossoming trade links identified along the New Silk Road are nothing less than than what its author calls “the early tremors of a historic global rebalancing”. But what makes them digestible is the rich cast of people Simpfendorfer has met in his travels, spoken with at length and used to convey it all. Occasionally, one feels he would have preferred to stay among the hookah smoke and chaos of the souk than coming back to Hong Kong and putting pen to paper.

The New Silk Road leaves plenty of questions unanswered, which is fine. If anything it heightens the sense that the issues surrounding Chinese growth are more delicately poised than we assume. At its heart, Simpfendorfer’s book identifies the Middle East as a compass set at the centre of the word, and one we should be watching closely. China’s magnetic pull may not yet be as strong as America’s but The New Silk Road explains why some of the more important needles are instinctively turning in that direction.

A man talks. A codger frets. An economy crumbles?

One poster. A cartoon on a billboard on every platform in the Tokyo Metro network. Just look at it - enticing you to chuckle, but then eliciting the sort of thick tears of grief that flow from the tragedies of lost love or team relegation. One lousy poster and you open a window onto the wrenching paradox of Japan's benighted soul.

Over the past couple of days, I've been in a fascinating email to-and-fro with Jonathan Allum - the marvelous KBC strategist whose daily take on Japan is required reading for any investor who gives a hoot about the place. He belatedly came across an article I wrote back in February when everyone was in Tokyo wailing tales of woe, sackings and redemptions.  

His point - and it is a good one - is that my observation of all those fund managers in despair and analysts in savage disagreement laid down a very precise marker of the Nikkei's bottom. Sentiment, he quipped, is a contrarian indicator. Jonathan also, with a perfectly righteous nudge, reminds me that he had a "mine!" on Japan back then when most were panic-stricken and bellowing "yours!". Takers of his advice would be (and some are) richer men and women by now.

Jonathan continued, as he invariably does, with compelling analytical evidence. So compelling, in fact, that I was just inches away from calling London and telling them to book me a slot for a hefty feature on how Japan is going to emerge ahead of the US and Europe from the recession, and how cleverly it has engineered itself into that position. I may yet write such a piece, but at the moment, all I can think about is that terrible, shocking poster.

Study it closely, and you will see why this public service billboard encapsulates all the reasons to beware the bulls on Japan.

In the middle of the trio we have a man busily making phone calls, awkwardly taking notes - possibly trying to squeeze another meeting into an already oppressive schedule, or close the deal that will save his division from downsizing. He is probably the only one of the three who pays income tax, he is certainly the only one with any real business to be sitting on that train. See the desperation in his eyes. Smell the sweat of his panic. Taste the acid of his ulcer and breathe-in the dangerous proximity of career calamity. He doesn't want to be on the bloody train or on the bloody phone. It is not his fault that three hours of his day are spent going to and from work on a train. It is not his fault that his bosses, the client and his colleagues expect him to be available every second of the day: he is the Japanese economy, in all its relentless, bludgeoning approach to work.

But even as he tries, single-handedly, to rescue a once mighty economy from terminal slippage, our brave worker bee is flanked by the indomitable locusts of frustration and failure. They are old, they are cranky and they want to read their manga porn or penny potboilers in peace. Never mind that they are under constant aural assault from the Japan that THEIR generation built - the redundant roar of a country that decries every form of pollution except for noise. It is the sound of the salaryman's voice that most disturbs them. His fear-driven corporate babble is the only thing standing between them and the chronic decline of the Japanese economy, and they want him to shut up.

And worst of all, Tokyo Metro has put itself squarely on the side of the locusts. There is no chart in the world that screams "sell" so loudly as this poster.

I am not a number! I am a stupid prediction!

What is it with numbers? Why the need to generate them when it makes absolutely no sense? Why can't we cheerfully accept that the most accurate answers to many important questions are either "shed loads" or "bugger all"?

Exhibit A is yesterday's comically daft prediction by Japan's National Institute for Environment Studies in a report on floods compiled at the behest of the government. Its alarmist finding was dutifully reported in the Nikkei and a couple of other papers. By the end of the century, it shivered, the annual cost to Japan of dealing with flooding could hit 8.7 trillion yen. Not Y8 trillion. Not Y9 trillion. But Y8.7 trillion.

Yup. You read it correctly. This agency, bloated with state-funding and addled by the need to feel relevant, is offering a financial prediction based on a 91-year forward view and, astoundingly, uses a decimal point in the final figure. Which is lunacy. We are talking about 91 years in the future, for goodness sake. Anything could happen. Imagine running a government think tank in 1918 and predicting that a flight to Milan from London will cost less than the egg sandwich they serve on board, or that every word ever printed could be stored on a piece of processed sand the size of a peanut. Nobody would listen. Come up with a number - Wilbur Wright saying in 1901 that man would not fly for 50 years - and you somehow seem more credible.

Analysed more closely, that Y8.7 figure is truly ridiculous. There may not be a yen in 91 years' time and even if there were, 8.7 trillion of them might buy you a book of matches, a clip of ammunition for your plasma rifle or Italy. We may be living on the moon, or in boats or space stations. Money may not exist in the current sense of the word. The oceans could subside, rather than rise. Rain may be a yearned-for treat, rather than a dangerous threat to the economy.

This bizarre prognostication, remember, came out on a day that the government of Singapore downgraded its economic outlook for the third time in five months. That's right. A tiny city state, with a notoriously tight governmental rein on economic minutiae, has, in the space of five months, twice been forced to admit that it cannot predict where that economy will be in eight weeks' time. Singapore is hardly alone. This crisis has made a hilarious daily mockery of almost every numerical prediction out there, from Toyota to OPEC.

All very entertaining, but we need to be more realistic about things. It is not just the recent financial turmoil that has made a mockery of forecasting, but history itself. We are sensationally bad at prediction, and always have been. And forget the sort of howlers that feature in trite after-dinner speeches -  Tom Watson of IBM predicting a global market for just five computers, for example. Every day unleashes a relentless cascade of evidence that we have absolutely no idea what will happen tomorrow.

There once was corpulent banker...

Ah yes, spring. A time for cherry blossoms, baby lambs, chocolate eggs and the hysterical, ulcerated mockery of our recessionary spiral and the clowns that thrust us into it. 

Urban Dirt is thoroughly enjoying all this talk of "nascent growth" and "hockey stick recoveries" but I don't really want all the fun of a depression to be over before budding poets have had a chance to express their bile. Normally, this annual competition demands lyricists craft their entries as haiku. This year, in keeping with the lunacy of world events, it will demand they come in the majestic form of the limerick .

UD has composed a few to set the and tone of this year's jollity. Some may refer specifically to current affairs:

A despicable banker called Fred, made a serious bundle of bread. By filling his cap full of mortgage-backed crap, leaving RBS deep in the red.

Others could ridicule an entire class:

A "Sir Humphrey" hopeful called Wyn, failed all of the tests to get in. So he worked for a fund that became moribund, now he empties a bureaucrat's bin.

From the wreckage of Wall St will soar, a new definition of "poor": no more champagne or coke, for these penniless folk as the banker, once king, turns to whore.

"'Cos I'm worth it," the trader exclaims, as his bonus disgusts and defames: "without me there'd be no more trading, you see, and the world would soon go down in flames."

 "I'm a banker", the braggart would say: "kneel and worship the girth of my pay!" But reduced to a ghost is the plutocrat's boast, now he's wanted for fraud and affray.

This one from an ex-Goldman friend and Urban Dirt regular:

Now the bankers are all labelled "shifty", and their world is a good deal more thrifty, the notes that they flutter at those in the gutter are marked with a "10", not a "50".

And try not to limit your spleen-venting to bankers:

The lawyers are having their sport, now the economy's frazzled and fraught: undiminished their powers - or chargeable hours - whether criminal, civil or tort.

Good Luck!

You live by the sordid, you die by the sordid...

Right. Deep breath. Apologies to Urban Dirt readers whom this post might fatally discombobulate, but I bring vile tidings from the languid backwaters of Tokyo's Roppongi district. It seems, amid these darkened and lawless times, that there are desperadoes operating in the usually idyllic square mile of mirth. Astounding, I know, but true.

Last Friday, in an open letter which threatens to splinter the once solid-looking foundations of Japanese civil society, the American Embassy in Tokyo finally blew the lid off a terrifying new scam. This epistle is little short of journalistic dynamite. For its five paragraphs of tersely-worded bureaucratic cant offer an astonishing glimpse of nascent perils and pitfalls that not one of us could ever have guessed at in our wildest dreams.

Certain bars and clubs, it seems, are run by people who do not necessarily have their customers' best interests at heart. By the letter's final, heart-stopping stanza you may never feel safe in a Russian-managed, Nigerian-touted lap dancing bar full of Colombian strippers and thick-necked Iranian bouncers ever again. Happy ending, Sir? Not any more...

RoboSlob! Crusader of the staircase....

Whrrrr. Bzzzz. Tsss. Stand aside mortals and quiver in pathetic terror! Your puny flesh limbs are no match for the ineffable power of my mighty bionic trousers! (Well, at least until the batteries run out.)

I've been in Japan for some time now, and I've seen my fair share of brilliant inventions: a system for downloading masses of digital data through the fingertips, 3D television coffee tables, and even a titanium swizzle-stick that makes wine taste 10 years older than it really is.

All of these marvels, though, have exuded that same disappointing sense of futile genius: they are astounding, but evoke premonitions of huge commercial non-events. Honda's bionic trousers - of which The Times was given an exclusive and unexpected demonstration - do nothing of the sort. They are, very simply, astonishing. (Apologies for the rather blurry pictures which do not do these things justice) The engineers may say that the "walking-assist" legs need more work before leaving the lab, but it is hard not to believe they are already perfectly fit for the real world.

I know, I know. Gushing in print over new technology is a sure way to invite ridicule. And economic downturns inevitably raise the stakes in that game: it feels especially foolish to predict great things for something new and untested when even old favourites like cars, televisions and clothes are selling terribly. But with times getting even more horrid, we should actively suppress that instinct and delight in any innovation that survives it. Wearing the bionic trousers, strolling around the building feeling lighter than air in their supportive clutches, I imagined for a moment that I was one of the observers at Kill Devil Hills in 1903 when the Wright brothers were in town. This properly felt, for once, like the future.

An Aso goes to Washington

Well done indeed, Japan. Your economy is in abominable retreat, your public hates your government with the heat of a billion stars and your finance minister has been forced out of power in what, for legal reasons, we probably have to describe as a "liquidity crisis".

And yet, somehow, Taro Aso has managed to blag, on Japan's behalf, the absolutely best ticket in town:  next week he will become the first foreign leader to visit Barack Obama's White House. It was Hillary's invitation, by the way, which means it is just possible it represents her revenge for, well, Obama winning the Democratic nomination and all that...

And as the Great Aso prepares to ride his donkey to Washington, we can only wonder aloud at the sort of conversations that may be going on in the Oval Office

President Barack Obama (leaning back on chair finishing whispered phone conversation with his broker)...that's right, Chuck, I said sell everything - Toyota, Toshiba, NTT, I just want my portfolio the hell out of Japan. What? Oh OK, maybe keep a little bit of Mitsubishi Heavy in the bag, we never know when we're going to call on those guys to build us some nukes.

(The door opens and the president's Chief of Staff strolls in)

Obama: (startled)....er, er and as I was saying Mr, er, Enkhbaya, God bless the people of Mongolia! Yay. Yup...yup...yup...OK, bye. Yup...bye.

(looks up nervously at C.O.S) Sorry, you just can't get that guy off the phone.

C.O.S: (looking mildly sceptical) Um, right sir. Anyway, sir, I think that may be a wrap for today. There is just one thing (checks down his list of memos)...Hillary seems to have invited the Japanese prime minister over for dinner here next week.

Obama: Great! Great! Great news. That'll be great. Japan. Yeah. Great allies. Firm friends of America. Sure, sure. (Slightly flustered) Er, who, um, who's running Japan this week?

COS (Checking his memos) um, let me see here...oh yes, Aso. Taro Aso.

Obama: Aso! That's right.  And why are we so keen to have him round in the White House next week?

COS: Uh, because sir, we're not altogether sure he's going still be Prime Minister the week after that. You see, this is one of those very rare, golden opportunities with Japan when we actually know who the prime minister is at any given moment. We have to seize the moment, sir.

Let he who is without gin cast the first stone

Urban Dirt's two cents on the Sloshed Supremo is running on Timesonline, but here it is again for the benefit of UD subscribers.

For a few hours on Sunday, it seemed that Shoichi Nakagawa might get away with his mangled moments  at that press conference in Rome. Why? Because democracy in Japan simply wasn’t working.

The now infamous footage of his pathetic battle with chemistry was only a short, barely analysed, story towards the end of the news. Japanese people went to bed with the usual “shikata ga nai” – “it can’t be helped” – shrug of the shoulders and a satisfied sense that all politicians are basically idiots.

Even when they woke to read the papers, Mr Nakagawa’s crime seemed fairly minor – mainly because the local press was loyally buying the official spin about cough mixture and jetlag. The Japanese public shrugged again and satisfied themselves with the words of an ancient Japanese proverb: “tabi no haji wa kaki shite” – “the traveller discards his sense of shame”. The Finance Minister’s disgrace, after all, took place thousands of miles away.

But then, partly courtesy of the internet, it all turned sour. Certainly, the millions of clicks on the online footage of the incident made Mr Nakagawa’s position more untenable by the second. But the public was riled by something even more infuriating: the way that the mainstream Japanese media was dealing with the story.

Financial Crisis Management 101: The Deep Bow (tears optional)

It is no bloody fun, let me tell you, being sneered-at by a South Korean bureaucrat. Even when they're paying for lunch at Nobu.

But that, it seems, is the price you pay nowadays for being both British and a financial journalist: all sorts of people around the world, especially emerging market economies in Asia, are beginning to wonder why the hell they ever gave a hoot about what we thought. The following is a slightly compressed version of a lunchtime rant from a very senior Finance Ministry suit who had flown in from Seoul for a couple of days. It very nearly ruined the soft-shell crab spring rolls.

"We took advice from Wall Street and the City; we did one thing one year and a different thing 10 years later because Anglo-Saxon capitalists changed their mind about the correct medicine; we even visited your Financial Services Authority in London because it was supposed to be the perfect model of how a regulator should be structured. Well, it was all wrong. Just look at the British banks."

Ah.

Three solutions to the financial crisis: the love of Christ, the body of Eri-chan or the small-cap tracker fund of Nomura Securities.

So with the usual anaemic apologies for absence of service, Urban Dirt returns with the curious parable of the terrible Sunday hangover, the morning missionary visits of the three great "isms", and the Holy Trinity of  "magic" cures for the global financial crisis: god, sex and cash.

Picture the scene. To crown a week in which dozens of Tokyo chums were made redundant (and dozens more have a similar threat hanging over their heads like the winnet of Damocles) the survivors naturally found themselves in Roppongi toasting the safe homeward journey of a dejected pal from RBS. Things dragged on a bit with a liquidity now sadly absent from credit markets: the last remaining bull in town (works for Instinet) was buying drinks all round for the crowd at Geronimos; the beer was flowing freely on the shooting range at Point Blank; the trans-sexuals of Motown House were being plied with gin by the out-of-town Lotharios who still don't know an Adam's apple when they see one one.

The party finished, as usual, at around 5am with everyone well deserving of a gentle snooze. Impossible. Nobody, be they religious hawkers, flesh-club shills or side-parted stockbrokers, was prepared to allow that luxury.

Japan's Cartoon Cabinet

As a genuine fan of manga, anime and all things geeky, I've always suspected that Taro Aso's professed love of comics was a bit of a sham: a flint-hearted bit of politicking by a 68-year old blue-blood who probably, in his heart, thinks that Akihabara should be torn down and a statue of an Imperial Army general put in its place.

(The contract for the work, by the way, would form a central pillar of his "Let's Economy! Let's Pork Barrel!" campaign...)

But now the calculating nationalist has actually been made Prime Minister of Japan it is time the self-proclaimed otaku put his manga where his mouth is. Come on Taro, if you love cartoons so much, get them to run the place. If it would help, Urban Dirt has a few suggestions...

Finance Minister: Monkey D. Luffy - One Piece

Why? Rubber-limbed hero who spends his life in search of elusive treasure and can literally "stretch" to anything. Mr Aso wants to stimulate the economy with gargantuan public spending? Monkey is the man: public debt at 180% of GDP is NOTHING when you consider how far this new minister will extend himself and the rest of the country in search of ill-deserved doubloons...

Foreign Minister: Obake no-Qtaro

Why? The perfect choice as Japan attempts to assert itself on the international stage - a gutless ghost capable of disappearing at a moment's notice. Desperate for that permanent seat on the UN Security Council, but upset that everyone keeps blocking Japan? Problem solved. Obake just skims under the door of the meeting room and sits invisibly at the back pretending the world is taking Japan seriously.

Defence Minister: Amuro Ray - Mobile Suit Gundam

Why? Could have been any number of ultra-violent cartoon Japanese nationalists with a taste for oversized and cripplingly expensive weaponry. Golgo13 was an early choice, as was Northstar Ken, but apparently Aso felt that the job required the subtle touch of a towering, battle-hardened robot under the control of a troubled and unpredictably young lad. Untainted by historical bid-rigging scandals at the ministry, but still represents the most expensive military hardware ever conceived by mankind...

Transport Minister: Shotaro Kaneda - Akira

Why? Who better than the delinquent leader of a post-apocalyptic motorbike gang to solve Japan's  transport problems as the nation ages and the old bubble-era road infrastructure starts to crumble? Known to have strong views on toll increases, petrol tax hikes and the 100km speed limit on expressways. Has never knowingly used public transport.

Health Minister: Black Jack

Why? Who better to lead Japan through the sagging degeneration of its health system and the appalling strain of demographic decline than a maverick surgeon with scars all over his face? Astonishing feats of surgery all performed for the kudos rather than the money is precisely the sort of doctoring Japan needs. 

More suggestions welcome...

So what exactly DID make Fukuda resign?

In the world’s biggest economy, the job of running the show is something you would sell your soul to Beelzebub to possess. The White House is like Tolkien’s One True Ring in its ability to provoke covetousness, conflict and face-twisting extremes of emotion.

And absolutely rightly so. It is a prize of unparallelled worth and one which, once obtained, is ceded only under the most extreme circumstances. You scream to take the job and you scream when people try to take it away. US Presidents have been killed for what they were, how they got there and the astonishing power they wielded.

The passionate oratory of Obama, the flint-brained tenacity of McCain, the twists and turns of who has raised what in terms of campaign finance. The sanity of their choices of running mates. The nuance, the fight, the mudslinging, the depravity, the visible rawness of ambition...the tooth and claw thrill of it all.

In the world’s second biggest economy, meanwhile, the job of running the show is something you would ditch in a second if there was something good on television that night.

iPhone you long time...

A somewhat delicate topic for discussion today...

...but Urban Dirt can exclusively reveal that the world's oldest profession has taken a giant and eye-catching leap into the 21st Century digital economy. The Apple machine has suddenly become the toast of Hong Kong's harlotry. And though I'm not a betting man, I'd be prepared to wager that Steve Jobs will not be basing a major marketing push on the very particular commercial use to which his precious iPhones are being put in the Far East.

To put this in some context, Urban Dirt is currently in sunny Hong Kong, admiring the vast container ships slipping out to sea and trying to make head or tail of the wildly divergent views I've garnered  on the future of the Chinese economy. I've heard "apocalypse", I've heard "decoupling" and I've heard "steady as she goes": all with compelling arguments, but none quite compelling enough to be sure that anyone is right.

But if there were ever any doubt about the sheer ingenuity and opportunism at the street-level of the greater Chinese economy, then it has been convincingly and spectacularly dispelled today. Well, late last night...

The 10 Wii accessories Nintendo has to make...

Zeus and  Mithras! It's all happening again...

As someone who has owned every glorious generation of Nintendo's consoles, a horribly familiar wave of  doubt has just swept ashore. I now give it just six months (enough to get us past Christmas, at least) before you walk into a games store, look at the range of Wii titles on sale, and decide there is nothing of even fleeting interest. Wii Music? I can go to Don Quiote and buy a REAL saxophone for that money. Ooh! What's this? A slightly quirky sports game that makes the Wii remote behave like a tiddly wink flipper's delicate hand. Please.

Normal Service Resumes

Right.

Apologies for the dearth of posts. One regular reader has rightly described Urban Dirt as an "idle sod", and  it's fairly difficult to argue with that. Excuses include the oddity that, when Urban Dirt headed west to cover the diabolical aftermath of the Sichuan quake, access to the blogging software was mysteriously blocked out...

In the meantime, Urban Dirt has missed some truly choice moments on which to hold forth. The superb demonstrations in Seoul (hilarious); the closure of Paddy O'Kim's at the Westin Chosun in Seoul (mortifying); the sound beating of the Geronimo's Shot Record by a dedicated little team from Nomura (bullish); the defeat of the Children's Fund at the hands of J-Power (odd feelings of conflict); the "beer taxi" farce in Tokyo (now, we have to assume there's more to this than meets the eye).

So,back to normal from now on. Sorry.

UD

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.