Flying Chair has some candid snapshots of what may be a Chinese industry that may be getting ready to explode at any moment.

Thanks to The Marmot’s Hole!

It turns out that North Korea isn’t serious about returning to the six-way talks after all. Kyodo is passing along a report from Itar-Tass that Kim Jong-il has added another condition for Pyongyang’s participation. Not only does he demand the usual from the United States, Kim now says the Japanese have to stop creating “serious problems” in the abduction issue between the two countries. Japan is applying pressure so the North will come clean about the bogus death certificates and bones, and the North says the issue is resolved and won’t discuss it again.

The Japanese are as likely to let up on their pressure as shrimp are to learn how to whistle. Even in the unlikely event that the Koizumi administration would agree, public opinion is now driving foreign policy, a rare condition in Japan. The public is not about to forgive and forget, and the news media is more than willing to help them hold the government’s feet to the fire.

The North Korean demand may be pointless, however, as the process regarding the abductions has gone beyond the bilateral phase. This report from Kyodo announces the visit to Japan of a U.N. envoy later this month to look into the abduction issue. He will meet with government officials and the family members of the abducted people. The envoy will report to the office of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in March.

I could be wrong, of course, but I get the impression that the U.S. and Japan are now resolved to apply a full-court press on the North Koreans (and the Chinese) to settle the issue without resorting to military force. Recent North Korean behavior reeks of the sweat of desperation and the realization that the rest of the world has finally thrown up their hands and said, “Enough”.

Incidentally, the U.N. envoy is Thai university professor Vitit Muntarbhorn. His official title is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea, a designation that makes me laugh every time I read it.

When police officers found a 27-year-old woman lying near a river with an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby last Sunday, they assumed that she was just one more addition to the long list of young Japanese who have been committing suicide these days. The paramedic on the scene found a body that showed no pulse or pupil movement, with rigor mortis already seeming to have to set in.

At the morgue, however, an official performing a more detailed post-mortem exam detected a slight pulse which led to the discovery that the woman was still alive!

After being rushed to a hospital the woman regained consciousness and is making a recovery.

If you have not yet seen this video of 3-year-old North Korean Mo Kin play the xylophone, please have a look.

I had mixed feelings when I first saw it, because I could not help wondering how much of her ability due to natural talent and how much is due to plain old child abuse. She looks like a little robot the way she plays.

If the above clip is not enough, click here to see Mo Kin sing a song with just about the same amount of soul as she plays the xylophone.

The poor little kid looks like she might have a lot of potential as a North Korean TV news reader.

“Japan is making profound changes, perhaps the most important shift in its attitude since World War II,” asserts Balbina Hwang, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation.

The statement comes from an AFP-Jiji wire service article printed in the Japan Times. I couldn’t find the article online, so I’ll summarize the main points here.

• The Japanese are moving away from pacifism and are beginning to actively confront China. After Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura met Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last weekend, Japan joined the U.S. for the first time in expressing concern over Chinese military spending and their activities in the Taiwan Strait.
• Hwang remarks, “It seems like the most obvious. . . reason is North Korea, but in fact it isn’t North Korea. North Korea is the easy excuse. . . but it’s really about China.
• She believes Washington has been using North Korea as a weapon against China, with the threat being a more assertive and military powerful Japan. “This is a way of subtly pressuring China that if it does not do something about North Korea, then. . . Japan will be encouraged to be more powerful,” Hwang said.
• For Japan’s part, former U.S. negotiator with North Korea, Charles Pritchard suggests that the Japanese are using North Korea “as a pretext for concerns about China”. The new Japanese stance serves the interests of both the U.S. and Japan, serving as a counterweight to China’s increasing military and economic power.
• The Japanese already have taken a more robust military stance against the Chinese, chasing a Chinese sub out of Japanese waters last fall.

In a sidebar, the Japan Times carries a Kyodo report that Japan is pressing China to provide information on its East China Sea natural gas development projects. The Japanese think the natural gas fields China is developing may stretch under the seabed to Japanese territorial waters. They’re going to drill to make sure, but if the fields do extend into Japanese territorial waters, Tokyo will claim it deserves some of the money. The Chinese say the Japanese territorial water claims are incorrect, and its own waters extend further than Japan says. Discussions in October failed to resolve the issue.

The reasoning of Hwang and others makes sense to me, especially in light of the blasé reaction to North Korea’s recent about-face for attending the six-party talks—which came after high-level meetings between the Chinese and the North Koreans over the weekend. Japan and the U.S. seem to have gotten tired of Pyongyang’s bluster and are ready to deal with the North Koreans using harsh, non-military means. And if North Korea remains recalcitrant, they’ll be holding China responsible.

UPDATE – - – - – - – - – -

J Sean Curtin at the Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global Communications examines the Japanese-American agreement and its impact on Japanese-Chinese relations in this article in the Asia Times.

Says Curtin, “This will add yet another nail in what appears to be the already heavily hammered coffin of Sino-Japanese relations.”

He also quotes commentator Ryoji Yamauchi’s explanation: “The document is a very significant step in Koizumi’s plan to end Japan’s current standing as a pacifist nation and transform it into a more assertive military force in the region.”

Here’s the entire article.

Do you know what this is?

Though it may look like a plate of Japanese soba noodles, it is not. It’s a dish of gummy noodles!

Cola flavored gummy noodles. . . Erk!

Gummy candy seems to be popular the world over, and the grosser it looks the better. You can get it shaped like human brains or eyeballs, frogs, sharks, centipedes, nightcrawlers, or in just about any other form imaginable.

Researching gummy candy was all great fun until I made the unfortunate mistake of looking at the list of ingredients on the back of a pack of something called Gummy Hot Dogs.

INGREDIENTS: GLUCOSE SYRUP. SUGAR, GELATIN, SORBITOL, CITRIC ACID, AGAR-AGAR, SLUBILIZED MILK PROTEIN OR VEGETABLE PROTEIN, LACTIC ACID, BEESWAX/CARNAUBA WAX, ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, COLORS (RED 40, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6, BLUE 1, TITANIUM DIOXIDE, CARAMEL COLOR).

SLUBILIZED MILK PROTEIN????

That sounds like the stuff that comes out your nose when someone makes you laugh while you have a big mouthful of milk!

Somehow I think I’d rather eat real worms. . .

You had to have known that this was coming!

Here’s a fun game for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like trying to rake lines around stones and other obstacles in a temple garden.

Zen Puzzle Garden does not promise enlightenment, but it does warn that you might end up frying your brain trying to get the lines to fit just right.

Use the cursor keys to move the monk around. When you step onto the sand, the monk will rake in a straight line until he either steps off the sand or bumps into something. The puzzle is completed when all of the sand has been raked, and the monk has stepped off the sand.

The monk can not walk over sand he has already raked, so be careful not to rake yourself into a corner! There is no time limit, and you can restart the puzzle or undo a move whenever you want, so don’t be afraid to experiement with different raking patterns.

The freely downloadable version of the game (Windows and Mac) comes with five different gardens to test your raking prowress. If this is not challenging enough for you, you can purchase the full commercial version for $19.95, which contains 64 gardens, including 16 “fiendishly tricky” winter gardens.

Just when people thought that arranged meetings with the intent to find a marriage partner (o-miai) were becoming an anachronism in Japan, they’ve started to make a comeback for a group that some might think would make unlikely couples—Japanese women and Korean men. The Daily Sports online reports in Japanese that Japanese women are flocking to a marriage broker that sets up meetings with eligible Korean bachelors in Seoul and Tokyo.

The broker is an outfit called Rakuen Korea (Paradise Korea) headquartered in Seoul. They began arranging meetings between couples of different nationalities in 2002. The company had registered only two Japanese women as of January 2004, but just three months later, after the success of the TV drama Winter Sonata and the first visit of dreamboat Yon-sama (Bae Yong Joon) to Japan, there was a surge of interest from ladies with stars in their eyes. By the end of the year, Rakuen Korea had signed up 3,800 Japanese women. It’s a good deal for the girls, as they get to choose from among the 6,530 Korean men the company has signed up as members. (There is no word how many Korean women and Japanese men, if any, they had on the rolls.)

Buoyed by their success, the company opened a Tokyo branch last year. A total of 30 couples have begun dating on their own after an arranged meeting, but none have headed for the altar yet. The company makes it easy for the women get involved—there is no charge for them to register. But Rakuen Korea is not entirely altruistic, as it costs a man 100,000 yen to join. For every meeting, the women pay a 20,000 yen service charge, while the men are hit up for 30,000 yen. About half the Japanese women report they are looking to get married to a Korean man, while the other half say only that Japanese nationality is not a prerequisite for a wedding partner.

The Daily Post was present at a recent meeting at a Korean restaurant in a Shinjuku, Tokyo hotel. A 29-year-old Korean man studying in Japan met with a Japanese woman in her 20s who works in an office and is studying Korean. Dressed casually, they had a relaxed conversation while the Japanese manager of the local branch and his Korean assistants sat nearby. The woman told the newspaper that marriage was not her objective; she just thought it wasn’t necessary to limit herself to Japanese men. The Korean man said he didn’t consider it a marriage meeting. He just wanted to meet somebody nice.

The only unfortunate part of this story I can see is that it is a story at all. International relationships wouldn’t be newsworthy in other industrialized countries, regardless of the reason. And if this keeps up, we can hope that it will no longer be news for Japan and Korea either.