One of the benefits of being a continuously broke writer is that I can watch banks collapsing around me without feeling the impact too much–at least not yet. Unlike others in New York City, I don’t have a massive portfolio to mourn, and I’m pretty good at doing my own cooking and enjoying small ethnic eateries and not lamenting my inability to eat at Raoul’s every week. It also, unfortunately, means that I don’t necessarily understand what is going on around me as I feel I should.
I do know enough to know that Japan experienced a banking collapse a decade ago, which prompts my 20-something Japanese friends to recall the “bubble” and how it dashed their dreams of partaking in massive Japanese wealth. So I wonder; is there something to learn from Japan’s own bank woes and its bailout?
One article I’ve read seems to think so. Examining the Swedish banking collapse and the Japanese banking collapse, the author draws the following conclusions.
RESOLUTION: The Japanese government recouped a sizable amount of its bailout funds by reselling collateral, most often land, and other assets. The abysmal times in Japan during the 1990s are now known as the “lost decade.” Even though the economy is better now, the Japan’s stock market still hasn’t returned to its peak before the bubble burst. And Japan still has about $9 billion worth of property held as collateral that needs to be sold.
LESSON FOR U.S.: Japan waited too long before resorting to a bailout using taxpayers’ money to write off the mountain of bad loans on banks’ balance sheets, experts say.
The Swedish government, claims the article, intervened quickly and as a result, the banking system recovered more quickly.
Regardless, I’m assuming (ahem, Mr. Pink, ahem) that we will begin to see a number of Japan-related articles in which the dangers of too much debt are examined and rexamined. Are any lessons applicable? Will anyone be smart enough to heed the lessons? I’m hoping the varied and intelligent readers of Japundit will weigh in with opinions.
On the bright side, massive economic downturns often go hand in hand with great creative output, so I’m hoping that artists will at least be inspired by this mess!
An imprint of DC comics intended to function as an American alternative to manga, has folded shop. On the surface, Minx seemed like a good idea; why not translate the manga medium for a more America audience, using cultural references that don’t necessarily leave parents scratching their heads? Japundits could have told publishers years ago that manga has a growing audience. To hear one of editor Shirley Bond tell it:
“I started to wonder what was going to happen in a few years when those readers would want something new,” she said at the MINX launch in February, 2007. “So I pitched this line as an alternative to manga, but also as an alternative to traditional fiction, because I thought that it was really about time that teenage readers had their own imprint and that they could experience a brand new visual reading experience.”
But it didn’t work.
One British reporter wonders why and has this to say:
just as British kids of my generation grew up watching so much Saved By the Bell and Sweet Valley High that we talk about “jocks” and “proms” even though these barely exist within our direct experience, tomorrow’s Americans will be looking around for the otaku and bishonen that are supposed to populate every school. It’s nice to see cultural colonialism happening in reverse, and of course teenagers love to plunge into an esoteric world that makes no sense to their parents, but at the same time it does seem a bit ridiculous that an American 16-year-old can’t pick up a comic that more closely reflects her own life.
At Japundit, we’ve observed for a while that popular culture isn’t necessarily flowing in the one, hegemonic direction that apologists always fear. But it does occur to me that part of the appeal of manga may be its very “foreign-ness” and its imaginative use of setting and character and design, and the narrative risks that writers in Japan take naturally. For audiences around the globe, this kind of story-telling is thrilling. Do
I’m curious to hear from the experts–this means you–on what it is about Japanese manga that is so compulsive for you and if you think its success could ever be duplicated in the west.
My apologies for the low level of posting here for the past couple of days. I have been hit by a lot of work, and I have something that required preparation to attend to tomorrow.
We also are getting ready for some major changes to the site, which will be announcing soon.
One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means “self introduction” but which seems to have a special cultural significance here.
In almost any situation where people will be interacting, be it a classroom, a part-time job or the local PTA board, a new member will always stand and make a formal self introduction, telling the others their name (including how to write it in kanji), where they’re from, what their hobbies are, and so on.
Giving this information to the other members of the group allows everyone to categorize the newcomer properly, and afterwards the others will do their own jiko shokai in turn.
These self introductions are also heavily used in ESL teaching, too, since formal self introductions are seen as the “most basic” form of human communication in Japan. Back when I was an ESL teacher, I taught children a lot, and I made sure to spend a lot of time teaching self-introductions, since I knew that the parents of my students expected that their kids have this ability before anything else and would complain if their kids couldn’t recite basic information about themselves to others.
Well, okay, that was a little misleading. But I couldn’t resist after JP’s last post.
It does seem, however, that Japan’s newly minted minister for tourism and transort, Nariaki Nakayama, had to resign after claiming that:
that Japanese people were “ethnically homogenous” and “definitely … do not like or desire foreigners”.
I was curious to read also that members of the Ainu were particularly disgruntled by this comment. According to reports, Nakayama also refused to retract his statement, claiming he’d rather resign–which he did.
Most Western nations are facing the problem of aging populations, but Japan is really leading the pack, with its combination of a very low birth rate, healthier diet and a good medical system.
Japanese older people are just like elderly from any other part of the world, sometimes friendly and interesting to talk to, and other times unwilling to take crap from anyone as they dive for the last pair of shoes at a department store bargain sale. As an American living in Japan, it’s can be interesting to strike up conversations with older Japanese, who will often talk about what the war years were like for them, or the time they saw General MacArthur, and there’s an unspoken acknowledgment of all that’s changed in the past 60 years.
Since it’s generally expected that the oldest son or daughter will take over the family house and care for the parents in their silver years, elderly folks generally have the benefit of lots of family around them, at least in the semi-rural prefecture where I live. Partially because of this system, and also (I’ve been told) because Japanese rarely leave the area where their family grave is located, you don’t see people migrating to a different part of the country when they retire as is the case with Florida.
The main social activity of Japanese retired people seems to be going to the doctor’s office every day to sit and chat with friends while they wait to be seen by the doctor for some (usually imagined) pain, and if you ever get sick in Japan you’d better have a strategy for getting to the doctor’s office early.
While most of the older people living in my neighborhood are very genki (healthy, full of energy), there’s one poor woman whose back is stuck at a 90 degree angle, making her unable to stand up at all. I’d always assumed this problem came a lifetime of planting rice by hand, but supposedly it’s caused by a chronic vitamin B1 deficiency that was a problem in the first few decades of the 20th century.
Some exciting news for people who are fond of thinking in terms of hair thickness and ear wax texture.
The Japanese can be genetically classified into two categories–people native to the Ryukyu Islands in Okinawa Prefecture and people native to other parts of Japan–researchers from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Science (Riken), who analyzed the genes and genetic structure of about 7,000 people, have discovered.
Riken’s findings, which were meant to shed more light on the origins of Japanese, were published in the online edition of a U.S. science magazine on Friday.
The biggest genetic difference in these two groups were found to be hair thickness and ear wax texture. People who originated from areas outside of the Ryukyu Islands tend to have much harder hair and drier ear wax and were discovered to be genetically closer to Chinese people.
What does this do to the “homogeneous Japanese race” theory?!?
Cyndi Lauper is in Japan right now doing a series of concerts. I saw her on the TV the other day as she did Time After Time, much like the following performance she did on TV in 2005.
