Two anti-smoking groups announced plans to “monitor the smoking habits of professional baseball players and how the 12 professional teams are supervising their underage players.”

The Japan Society for Tobacco Control and Japan Medical-Dental Association for Tobacco Control will submit questionnaires to all 12 Japanese professional pro baseball teams in an attempt to find out about the smoking habits of players.

The survey comes on the heels of a media uproar over revelations that 18-year-old Japanese-Iranian Yu Darvish, the top draft pick for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, was caught smoking during spring training a short while ago.

John Parker has thought long and hard about North Korea’s admission that it has nuclear weapons and come up with a solution he believes will checkmate the North’s nuclear threat and could lead to the collapse of Kim’s regime. That solution is for the United States to reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea.

The usual suspects would be apoplectic, but they can be ignored: A similar move by the Reagan Administration in West Germany hastened the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and nuclear deterrence, while risky, has been effective in the past.

He seems to have covered all the angles, and his article in the Asia Times explaining his reasoning is absorbing. Some excerpts:

. . .rampant anti-American sentiment in South Korea has eviscerated the ROK army’s will to fight, making it dangerously vulnerable to a DPRK attack (this assertion will be controversial, but it is based on firsthand accounts from US Forces Korea - USFK- soldiers who train with ROK soldiers).

North Korea’s war strategy, as revealed by the high-level defector Hwang Jeong-yeop, is not merely to overrun the South so rapidly that reinforcement would become impossible. . . Rather, the DPRK’s strategy is to prevent reinforcement from ever taking place by threatening to use nuclear weapons against Japan, should the US intervene (this very possibility is a major, though little-understood reason why relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang have been so frigid of late).

. . . certain segments of the South Korean public, especially its astoundingly gullible younger generation, would hysterically oppose any such suggestion . . . most South Korean government officials, in contrast to their naive offspring, are realistic enough to recognize that their continuance in power ultimately depends on American military protection.

China basically has two goals in Northeast Asia: to avoid another Korean War, especially a nuclear one, and to avert a nuclear arms race in the region that could result in Japan, or - God forbid - Taiwan becoming nuclear states. While China doesn’t want the humiliation of having its erstwhile North Korean ally absorbed by the democratic South, that doesn’t mean it wants to prop up the DPRK at the cost of losing Taiwan, and a nuclear DPRK could have precisely that result.

. . .if not for strategic advantage, why did the North proceed with its nuclear program? And there can only be one answer: for the same reason states such as Israel and South Africa did - the need for self-preservation at any cost. The North Korean regime has always had two paramount goals: self-preservation, and reunification under its own terms. When the DPRK decided, during the (US president) Bill Clinton administration, to secretly pursue uranium enrichment . . . it faced a fork in the road: it could attain self-preservation, but only by placing the second goal in the highest jeopardy, since reintroduction of nuclear weapons to the South, resulting in a nuclear stalemate on the peninsula, would make reunification militarily unattainable. And Kim Jong-il didn’t hesitate: he chose regime survival over the hope of reunification.

This is what is so ironic about the doltish reaction of some South Korean youth to the North’s nuclear program, who cheered the North’s warheads on the grounds that “they are Korean”: by going nuclear, Kim Jong-il made a mockery of the DPRK’s entire ideology, which holds that reunification is the highest goal of the nation.

It’s so good I could quote the entire piece. Instead, I suggest you read it yourself here.

Being a big golf fan, I followed this weekend’s ANZ Ladies Masters tournament with great interest. Japan’s Ai Miyazato had tied the course record with a 63 on the first day of the tournament, and started the fourth and final day four big shots ahead of Australian Karrie Webb.

Well, to make a long story short, Webb overcame the deficit and beat Miyazato by one stroke. Too bad for Ai-chan, but no doubt we will be hearing plenty from this 19-year old phenom in the near future.

After the tournament, Miyazato showed her characteristic class and well-beyond-her-years maturity, saying, “I played very well today but I couldn’t get the putts to go in. I’m not disappointed with my week.”

Contrast this with the Tokyo Channel 12 coverage of the final round during which announcer Hidekimi Kojima and even JLPGA golfer Fumiko Muraguchi, who was with him in the announcer booth, gleefully cheered every misfortune and miscue suffered by Webb over the final few holes.

Congratulations to Karrie Webb and Ai Miyazato for treating us to some very exciting golf.

And raspberries to Tokyo Channel 12 for not knowing it is considered to be bad form and bad manners among golfers to cheer against your opponent.

Let’s start on a high note this week by presenting the Doburoku Festival held in Obu, Aichi Prefecture, which continues a tradition stretching back more than 500 years. Doburoku is the term for a white, opaque sake that contains unfermented rice solids suspended in the brew, giving it a cloudy appearance. Sake has to be passed through a filtration mesh for it to be legally called sake. This is usually a fine mesh that removes all the solids, but sometimes a coarser mesh is used to create doburoku by allowing the smaller solids to pass through. (I tried some once, but it was much too sweet for my taste.) Ten Shinto shrines around the country are allowed to brew doburoku without passing it through a mesh filter at all, including one for Imperial coronations.

Every year, the responsibility for brewing the sake used in Obu’s festival is rotated among different groups of citizens. This year’s group made 500 liters, about 50% more than in a typical year. It’s no surprise that the festival is popular with the citizens, and they started forming long lines at noon for the chance to belly up to the bar. The accompanying photo shows what happens when you imbibe the divine spirit through the doburoku.

There’s something about winter festivals that brings out the desire in Japanese men to run through splashing water wearing nothing but a loincloth. A crowd estimated at 135,000 turned out in Aichi Prefecture to see just that, as 9,000 men participated in a spectacle with a tradition dating back more than 1,200 years.

It starts with the shinotoko, a man who has received the spirit of the divinity, conducting prayers at a shrine. Then, the throng of nearly naked men rush onto the shrine grounds from all directions, yelling in unison. After their arrival, another group of men appears and douses them with buckets of water hot enough to raise steam from the ground. This year, the air temperature at festival time was 5.6 degrees C.

The men in loincloths then rush toward the shinotoko with the intention of touching him, and there is a lot of jostling and elbowing in the process. It is believed that touching the shinotoko will remove the evil spirits from their bodies.

Meanwhile, the Anba Festival, dating from the Edo period, was held in Namie-machi, Fukushima Prefecture, with young fishermen wearing white coverlets on the lower half of their bodies. After a ceremony near the fishing piers, the fishermen plunge into the freezing sea water chanting “Sorya, sorya!” and carrying a mikoshi, or portable shrine, made from a sake barrel. They undergo this chilling, teeth-gritting experience to offer a prayer for a bountiful catch and harvest. The festival also includes traditional kagura dancing and a rice planting dance performed by primary and junior high school girls (shown in the photo).

The Kagihiki Festival held in Kanoya, Kagoshima Prefecture is so exciting that a camera crew and producer flew in from Great Britain to film the event for a television program. First, two trees are cut down in the nearby mountains. One is a cypress with a hook-shaped root, representing the male, and the other is a cherry whose trunk is forked, representing the female. On a signal given by conch shell trumpets and taiko drums, the trees are dragged into the center of the shrine grounds. Then they are used instead of ropes in a tug-of-war contest between two teams, with the winner of two of three pulls declared the champion for the year. The air is filled with shouts and grunts, and even the spectators thrust themselves into the action. This year’s winning team won the first two matches, eliciting shouts of banzai!

Festivals do not always involve half-naked men getting doused with water or diving into the sea, or engaging in such roughhousing as having a tug-of-war with logs. Many traditional doll festivals are held at this time of year to coincide with Girls’ Day on March 3. One of these is the Biggu Hina Festival in Katsuura-cho, Tokushima Prefecture. The town has set up a large, pyramid-shaped stand in a local hall to hold the doll display. The stand is 5.5 meters high and has 100 levels. Katsura-cho has 50,000 dolls in its collection, and it displays 10,000 of these at one time with another 5,000 it has received from people throughout the country. While the spectators don’t get sloshed, splashed, or pushed around, they do enjoy taking photos of themselves in front of their favorite dolls.

Finally, if there were any doubts about the Japanese imagination when it comes to festival rites, the Kinekosa Festival held jointly by seven Shinto shrines in Nagoya should dispel them. More than 1,000 years old, the festival is held to drive away evil spirits and pray for the prosperity of one’s descendants, peace, and a good harvest. The festival date is January 17 according to the lunar calendar, which fell on February 25th this year.

While the main event does involve loincloth-clad men, there is a twist. The men stick long bamboo poles into the river. Then, one of group skinnies up the pole. The direction in which the pole falls predicts the area’s fortune in the year ahead. They’re in luck this year, as the pole fell in the direction indicating good fortune.

Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj of Ulan Bator, AKA Asashoryu, dominates the world of sumo and dismays the purists with his behavior inside and outside the ring. Why does he think he’s so successful?

“The Japanese are no good,” Asashoryu says derisively, morning practice over…”Japan’s economy developed and the people became weaker,” he says, elaborating by twitching his thumbs to simulate the sedentary habit of playing electronic games.

Bruce Wallace fills in the details in this LA Times article.

Well, you’ll be in good company over at Robot Japan!

Robot Japan is a virtual treasure trove of information, articles, and photos of Japanese toy robots over the years. There is even a forum where you can exchange news and views with other toy robot aficionados.

Here is a site with some amazing pics of knitted articles that are designed to look like food items, like the strawberry shortcake tissue box cover shown below.

The page text is in Japanese, but the photographs speak for themselves!

Ready for this?

Japanese professional wrestling promoters Zero One Max will hold pro wrestling matches at the Yasukuni Shrine (yes, that Yasukuni Shrine) on April 10 in an oblational service to the gods.

The event, dubbed the Yamato Kamisu Strength Festival, is being conducted to help bring back the good old days of professional wrestling in Japan. The shrine’s sumo ring will be arranged to enable the installation of a special wrestling ring for 2,000 spectators. The shrine’s sumo ring is located near an excellent spot for viewing cherry blossoms, so fans can enjoy the refined delights of an o-hanami while cheering on the choke holds. Children of junior high school age and younger will be admitted free of charge. The promoters say they hope to convey the passion of pro wrestling to the divinities.

Ready for another one?

This is not the first time pro wrestlers have fought at Yasukuni Shrine. The most recent occasion was April 23, 1961, when Japanese wrestling legend Rikidozan presided over a card that featured youngsters Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki, who would become stars in their own right. (Inoki also would later form his own political party and win election to a seat in the Upper House.) The event attracted 15,000 people.

The maiden event was in March 1921, when American wrestling legend Ad Sentel took on several Japanese judo practitioners from the Kodokan dojo, including Reijiro Nagata, and won all his matches. There is an interesting background to these matches. Sentel took on judo fighter Tokugoro Ito in 1914 and beat him. Ito had publicized himself as a “Japanese judo champion”, so after his victory, Sentel claimed that he was the “World Judo Champion” (proving that professional wrestlers haven’t changed much in the past century.) This was embarrassing for the head of the Kodokan dojo, who lined up the matches with Sentel at Yasukuni. The American’s victories popularized what some call “submission wrestling” in Japan.

Holding wrestling matches for the divinities at a Shinto shrine is not as outlandish as it may seem. There is a very long tradition in Japan of festivals with competitive events at Shinto shrines. (One example is the boat race in last week’s festival roundup.) In addition to sumo, which has close ties to Shinto, competitive events at shrines include archery, tug-of-war, and, according to my reference, even cock-fighting. The idea is that the divinities will favor the more deserving competitor, and the victors in these events will have good fortune in the year ahead.

You can read about the Strength Festival in Japanese here and here.

The wording of a recent Tokyo resolution adopted unanimously by the Japanese Diet on February 22 has the Russians wondering just what exactly the Japanese have up their sleeves.

The resolution, which was timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the establishment of relations between the two nations, contains plenty of bland diplo-speak. It calls, for example, for the “building strategic partnership, meeting the potential of the two countries.”

The part of the document that really got the attention of the Russians, however, demands that the Japanese government intensify its talks with Moscow in order to conclude a peace treaty “by resolving the problem of sovereignty over Khabomai, Shikotan as well as Kunashir, and Iturup and other northern territories” (emphasis mine). Until now, Japan has limited its claims to the South Kuriles of Khabomai, Shikotan, Kunashir, and Iturup.

When contacted by TASS for a clarification of what was meant by “other northern territories,” the foreign press division of the Japanese Foreign Ministry refused comment, suggesting that TASS contact the Diet for clarification. So TASS went to the committee in charge of organizing the work of the Diet’s Lower House, only to be told they should get in touch with the actual legislators responsible for introducing the resolution. Parliamentary sources told TASS that Naoto Kichamura of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party may be behind the document, but his personal secretary went into stonewall mode when approached, and refused to offer any information about who was responsible for drafting the resolution.

As of yet, it is still unclear whether this incident was just the product a provocative phrase that a lawmaker with nationalist leanings snuck into a resolution no one bothered to read very carefully, or if it is another sign of Japan’s increasingly assertive foreign policy.

A peace treaty between Japan and Russia has been on ice since the end of World War II due to their dispute over the so-called “northern territories.” Go here for the full (Japanese-side) story.

Here is a website that really makes you appreciate the breadth of the subject matter available on the web today. A website devoted entirely to the sights and sounds of the Japanese train system.

Sub-divided into sections for each station in Tokyo, each section contains photographs of station platforms, plus audio recordings of in-train announcements, platform arrival announcements, and even the melodies that are played to let you know that a train is getting ready to leave.

This is without a doubt one of the most amazing things I have ever seen!

I did not pursue any of the links at this site, but it appears that someone is auctioning off a Hello Kitty trailor on YAHOO Auctions.

What am I bid?

A few days ago, a Japanese news program showed video footage of a man running at Tokyo police officers who had arrived on the scene to answer a call of a man destroying his own car with a baseball bat.

Now if you are a fan of the U.S. TV program COPS, you would probably expect the man soon to be face down on the ground, arms pulled up behind him, with burly cop knees pressed into the back of his neck and the small of his back.

But this is Japan, where I guess the rate of crime is so low that police do not know how to react when they come face to face with it, because in this case the policemen turned and ran in what looks like panic. (They did return and overpower the man when he tried to drive off in their patrol car. )

You can see the entire video clip here (wait until the commercial finishes playing).

If you prefer still images, you can find a slideshow here.

Japan Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi also saw the footage and reportedly expressed anger at a Cabinet meeting, saying, “I watched a scene in which a police officer fled from a criminal. It’s disgraceful for an officer to act like that.”

When I arrived in Japan more than 20 years ago, many Japanese educators desperately wanted to reform their educational system, which emphasized rote memorization, and introduce American-style educational principles.

Well, a new report from Kyodo suggests they got what they asked for. The Association of Japanese Geographers released the results of a recent survey of university and high school students. Here are the highlights:

• 44% of Japanese university students could not find Iraq on a map. 10% could not find North Korea and 3% could not find the United States.
• 61% of the students who studied geography in high school were able to locate Iraq, while only 52% of those who didn’t study geography could find the country. (Which means that 39% of university students who studied geography in high school still couldn’t find Iraq.)
• 49% of high school students couldn’t find Iraq, and 7.2% couldn’t find the United States. When asked to point out the U.S. on a map, some high school students indicated China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).

The article also notes that geography is now an optional course for Japanese high school students. It doesn’t report that geography courses in Japanese high schools involve more than map reading, however. Right after I got to Japan, I was talking to a high school boy about the subjects he studied in school, and he showed me his geography textbook. In addition to map reading, it included such information as the location and length of the longest oil pipeline in the world. (In those days, it ran from somewhere in the Soviet Union to somewhere in Iran.)

Personal opinion alert: There is nothing wrong with rote memorization in a curriculum, and a lot right with it. I think the ultimate objective of education is to teach students how to control their consciousness—which is essential for anything that students choose to do with their life—and memorization is excellent practice for that. Some will argue that people should learn how to think instead of memorize. That’s a good idea, but it seems to me that most of what passes for thinking is really just emotionalism in masquerade.

There’s nearly unanimous agreement that studying foreign languages is beneficial, but that is not possible without a lot of memorization.

An English teacher in Japan—with the credentials to teach English as a foreign language—once asked me how I developed my Japanese language skills. I told him it was a combination of memorization and language lab tapes. He actually smirked when he heard my answer and told me I was behind the times. Modern educational theory for foreign language instruction, he informed me, dismissed the emphasis on memorization and language tapes.

It was my turn to smirk, albeit in private. He wasn’t fluent in any foreign language.

Farmers in the Kansai district of Japan are fighting a losing battle against monster nutria rats without any Pied Piper in sight.

According to nutria.com:

Nutria (Miyocastor coypus) are large semi-aquatic rodents indigenous to South America. The original range included Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uraguay. . . Nutria are herbivores and feed particularly on wetland plants.

How did they get to Japan? Nutria were imported by the Japanese military back in 1939 as a source of fur for military winter clothing and of meat for human consumption. In fact a number of countries, including the United States and Britain, also started importing the animal as a fur and meat source during the 1930’s.

When the end of the war suddenly killed demand for such items, however, many of the animals were released into the wild where they started to multiply in the wetlands of Okayama, Tottori, Hyogo and northern Kyoto prefectures. Despite vigorous efforts at controlling nutria populations, their numbers continue to grow.

The biggest problem with nutria is the damage they do to rice paddies and vegetable fields. In 2004, the large rodent did 28 million yen worth of destruction in Hyogo Prefecture alone.

Click here to see more of the art of Hisashi Tenmyouya

It was treated as a major scandal and reported in all of Japan’s major newspapers, on the TV, and in the weekly magazines.

A lanky teenaged Nippon Ham Fighters rookie named Yu Darvish, who is half-Japanese and half-Iranian was caught red-handed. He even confessed to the wrongdoing. Darvish was sent home from spring training camp and confined to the team dormitory (no report on whether it was without dinner). TV reports showed lengthy clips of Nippon Ham Fighters coaches and other officials bowing deeply to the camera as they offered profuse apologies for allowing one of their players to betray the trust of their fans.

What heinous crime was Darvish guilty of?

Using steroids?

Doing drugs?

Groping the wrong woman?

Getting his girlfriend pregnant?

Doing a Charles Barkley on an unruly fan?

Nope. None of the above. Young Darvish was guilty of the crime of. . . Smoking.

Not only that, but he was smoking while playing pachinko! Not once, but several times!!!

It’s not as if Japanese pro-ballers are all Spartan samurai who eschew the demon weed in its vaporous form. In fact, there is so much smoking among Japanese professional baseball players that many of the dugouts have “No Smoking” signs hanging on the walls.

Who knows why such a big deal is being made over a few cigarettes being smoked by a teenage boy?

General Douglas MacArthur supposedly once said that post-war Japan was like a nation of 12-year-olds. Though Japan has come a long way since then, it sometimes seems as if Japanese pro-yakyuu (professional baseball) is still stuck in the prepubescent days of old.