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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.