With the arrival of a new male heir for the Chrysanthemum throne, we may see more than a few disparaging comparisons of the Japanese Imperial household and its male-only policy with the royal houses of Europe, which allow females to reign.
Regardless of which gender gets to be the symbol of state in Japan, there’d be one problem with this comparison: it’s inaccurate.
Once upon a time, the Japanese used a trite but true formulation to describe their country to foreigners: “Japan is a small, mountainous island country with a high population density and few natural resources.” Those of us who were students of the language or had an interest in the country heard it so often from well-meaning people that it stopped registering.
That’s one reason why I’ve been quietly puzzled for the past few years about the dire warnings in Japan and overseas about the country’s declining population. If you’re serious about that self-introduction, having fewer people around might not be such a bad idea, right?
Well, it turns out I’m not the only one to think so. In George Will’s most recent column about Japan, he quotes two unidentified “senior officials”, and then adds his own comment:
(One senior official) asks, “Why should we increase our population?” …(T)hat is not a foolish question. In 1920 Japan’s population was 56 million. Today it is 127.5 million on a land mass the size of California (population: 36 million) that is three-quarters mountainous. A third official, noting that Japan imports 60 percent of its staple foods, says, “It might be good to have a declining population” of, say, 100 million by 2050.
But that creates another problem: Who pays for all the welfare benefits? Will’s full column, called “Japan’s Wrenching Choices”, is here.
Two minor events involving Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine seem to have escaped widespread notice. That’s unfortunate, because both may be more important than people realize.
Ichimame is an apprentice geisha working in Kyoto. She started a blog in December that now gets more than 220,000 hits a day.
Those of you who read Japanese can find her blog, called Ichi, here.
It seems the Chinese are upset over the Dalai Lama’s visit to Mongolia. Said the Chinese Foreign Ministry:
He is not “a simple or pure religious figure. He is a political exile who undertakes secessionist activities abroad.”
You know, it strikes me that the behavior of the Chinese government sure resembles that of a prune-faced, prissy old nag. They particularly like to complain about the places people visit. They gripe whenever a Japanese prime minister visits a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. They grumble whenever the Dalai Lama visits Mongolia. And they grouse whenever former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui goes anywhere, including his college class reunion at Cornell.
What’s next for these busybodies—mandating the color of everyone’s underwear? When are they going to get around to banning rock and roll? After all, they already tell their own people how many children they can and can’t have.
We don’t have to wonder what the Chinese reaction would be if the roles were reversed, because we’ve already heard it many times before. Only in the Chinese case, other countries are usually complaining about more than the comings and goings of Chinese leaders—namely, the massacres at Tiananmen Square, human rights violations throughout the country, tacit support for the lunatics currently ruling Iran, and aid to North Korea, the sole life support system for one of the vilest regimes on the planet.
They’d just get huffy and tell people not to meddle in their internal affairs.
In short, they blend the worst traits of an old biddy with those of a schoolyard bully, and are backed up by a population exceeding one billion.
We’ve all known people like this, and because they relish the role of moralistic scold, they never stop unless someone makes them stop. In China’s case, that is not an enticing prospect.
First James Hoagland, now George Will–more of the pundits overseas are starting to get it.
Will’s latest column deals with Yasukuni specifically and Japan’s relationships with its neighbors in general. And like Hoagland, he provides us with another dollop of common sense:
Such as:
But both of Japan’s most important East Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, now have national identities partly derived from their experience as victims of Japan’s 1910-45 militarism. To a significant extent, such national identities are political choices. Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA.
And:
Shinzo Abe, a nationalist who is almost certain to replace Koizumi, who is retiring next month, seems inclined to continue something like Koizumi’s policy, and for at least one of Koizumi’s reasons: China should not dictate the actions of Japan’s prime ministers.
Will also includes a fascinating comment from an unidentified “senior Japanese official”:
…(S)peaking about the incessant incursions by Chinese submarines and military aircraft into Japanese sea and air spaces, a senior Japanese official casually made the startling suggestion that China’s regime, like Japan’s regime before the war, does not fully control its military.
The columnist also makes an observation about the real state of relations between Japan and China that is similar to ones I have made here about Japan and South Korea:
But relations other than diplomatic ones are flourishing. China is, after America, the second-most popular destination for Japanese tourists….and in 2004, for the first time since 1945, Japan’s trade with China was larger than with the United States.
James Hoagland’s latest column is titled, “Remove Germany, Japan from War Probation Status”. It contains more common sense than I’ve seen in one place in several years. To wit:
Germany and Japan have served six decades on global probation. It is time for their neighbors, their citizens and the international community to acknowledge the thorough transformation of the former Axis powers into fully democratic and morally responsible nations.
and…
Prime Minister Koizumi gave China an opening to rake up Japan’s militaristic past last week by visiting the Yasukuni war shrine…But China and other Asian nations are engaged in the pursuit of tactical advantage, not historical truth, in pretending they possess moral superiority over an unreconstructed Japan.
It is the unfinished transformation of China, not of Japan, that is the urgent moral and political question today in Asia. It is China’s military buildup — not Japan’s increased willingness to take on the burdens of global security — that is the destabilizing force today in Asia. Americans and Europeans should not be taken in by Beijing’s flimflammery on the Yasukuni visit.
and…
Japanese membership in the Security Council is a necessary first step toward serious reform of the world body.
The entire column (which also deals with Gunter Grass’s recent admission that he was part of the Waffen SS) is here.
As if China did not have enough in its bowl to deal with in the form of an overheating economy, endemic corruption, and an increasingly unruly population, the British Medical Journal published a report this week revealing that the country’s harsh single-child policy has resulted in a severe gender imbalance of 119 males for every 100 females—a sharp distortion of the naturally occurring 103 to 100 ratio.
What’s the connection? “Experts say Chinese parents have resorted to sex-selective abortion to ensure their child was a boy since the one-child policy was introduced.”
Many people blithely ignore the dense, jargon-filled prose of the financial pages, particularly when the news is about another country’s economy.
But as Thomas Sowell likes to say, reality is not optional, and the reality of the Chinese economy may have serious consequences for people throughout the world–including those of us who stick to the sports pages
The People’s Bank of China raised key interest rates yet again this year—simultaneously for the first time in two years—to try to cool off an economy in danger of overheating and stave off inflation, as this Financial Express article from Bloomberg reports. The article is informative and detailed, though filled with the prose that puts off the general reader. It also parrots the Chinese government’s line that inflation is below 2%.
To discover the real world implications, you might be better off reading this David Frum article from June titled “Trouble Coming to Beijing”. Frum asserts that real inflation is probably more than 7%, which he attributes to the Chinese government’s policy of printing more money to pacify the people.
Sowell’s truism that reality isn’t optional is particularly pertinent for money matters, and Frum spells out some of the difficulties:
Thus far, China’s future looks very like Japan’s recent past. Like China, Japan chased growth in the 1970s and 1980s with an artificially cheap currency…It all came to an end in 1989. The yen rose, real estate values crashed, exports slumped, workers lost their jobs, and the Japanese political system unraveled.
But Japan possessed one great resource China lacks: democracy…China’s press, however, is not free. Chinese scandals (at least those involving the ruling elite) go uncovered. Chinese citizens are offered no peaceful avenue by which to change rulers whose policies fail. Which likely means that China will remain politically stable only so long as its rulers succeed.
So far, those rulers have delivered success…And who know? Perhaps they will continue to succeed. But if and when they fail–expect trouble.
Indeed, the trouble may already have started. The Chinese government reports a rising number of disturbances in the country: 58,000 protests or strikes involving more than 100 people in 2003, 74,000 in 2004, 87,000 in 2005….
Here’s a disconcerting thought: Let’s assume the polls Frum quotes saying that 80% of the Chinese are satisfied with their lives are accurate. That still means 20% of the people are unhappy.
Which means that the population of unhappy people in China is greater than the entire population of Japan.
The current political and economic system in China is based on inherent contradictions. We should all hope the fallout can be contained when the consequences of those contradictions begin to emerge.
Have you ever wanted to play a traditional Japanese koto, but hesitated because:
Is that what’s bothering you, Bunky?
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Visit the site to see photos of a command performance for Prince Albert of Monaco! You can order a CD to hear a band led by Do-Re-Mi Popcorn inventor Masako Naito perform such songs as The Beatles’ Yesterday and And I Love Her, Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Agua De Bebel, and the well-known surf guitar instrumentals, Diamond Head and Pipe Line!
You also can see videos and hear sound clips of the Do-Re-Mi Popcorn in performance!
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Get yours today and you’ll soon astonish your friends and family with–
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(Patent pending)
Tadamichi Kuribayashi was a descendant of samurai, yet disliked much of Japanese military culture. He graduated near the top of his class at Japan’s leading military academy, yet enjoyed Shakespeare, spoke fluent English, and almost chose journalism as his career rather than the army.
A cultured man, he spent three years in the United States as a deputy military attaché, developing an admiration for the country and becoming friends with many Americans. Kuribayashi spent the summer of 1929 driving through the Midwest in a Chevrolet, sketching the people and places he saw.
As was the case with many other Japanese familiar with the United States at the time, Kuribayashi thought it was folly for Japan to go to war with the country:
“The United States is the last country in the world Japan should fight,” Kuribayashi wrote in a letter home…According to colleague Army Capt. Kikuzo Musashino, “The general spoke about his years in America, saying they had enormous industrial resources. He said: ‘When war comes, they can convert all that ability into military use. The people who planned this war in Japan know absolutely nothing about this. Whatever way you look at this war, we can’t win.’ “
His grandson said he was sidelined for promotion during the war because “he didn’t fit in with military thinking (and) had friends in America and respected the country.”
Yet, Kuribayashi was selected with the hopeless task of defending Iwo Jima, a strategically and psychologically important objective, against the American invasion.
He did his job so well that in five weeks of fighting, one-third of all the American Marines who died in World War II were killed in that battle. When the fighting was over, U.S. troops called him “The best damn general on this stinking island.”
The story of Kuribayashi and his defense of Iwo Jima is told in this excellent article by David McNeill in the Japan Times. Registration is required, but the article is so good, unregistered readers might consider signing up for this piece alone.
As I mentioned in the second article of this Quick Hits post last week, factionalism has been the bane of postwar Japanese politics, and one of Prime Minister Koizumi’s major accomplishments—little recognized outside Japan—has been to severely hobble their influence.
In the same post, I mentioned that some elements within the ruling LDP have always detested this aspect of Koizumi’s reforms and are anxious to reassert their authority.
The Asahi Shimbun seems to think I needn’t worry so much, as they claim in this editorial that the factions are slipping into irrelevance. To illustrate the waning influence of factions, they use an example from the internal LDP race to succeed Koizumi as party president, and thus prime minister. This turn of events would have been unthinkable just a few years ago:
The 75-strong faction led by Yuji Tsushima, the second largest, has given up trying to field its own candidate. The faction, which has its roots in the now-defunct group led by former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, has traditionally been eager to promote friendly relations between Japan and China. In a book published two years ago, Abe criticized the faction’s pro-China stance.
Since Tanaka’s historic trip to China, which paved the way for the normalization of Japan-China ties, it seems that Japan’s diplomacy toward China is based on a kind of obsession that Tokyo must avoid anything which could incur Beijing’s displeasure in order to maintain friendship at any cost. Despite the fact that the Tsushima group has been playing a leading role in building relations with China, a majority of its members are tilting toward backing Abe. This is sadly inconsistent with the group’s basic tenets.
One peripheral aspect of the editorial that drove home the point to me was my failure to recognize the names of all but two faction heads (Mori and Kono). I barely knew the rest of them, much less knew that they headed factions.
That would not have been the case when I first came to Japan in the early 80s. In those days, faction heads were often more important than the prime minister. Their activities were regularly reported in the news, and people who followed politics instantly recognized their names.
The accompanying photograph may have been taken as a joke, but there was an element of truth to it. It certainly seemed as if jankenpon was the method used to select the prime minister. Indeed, all the principals in the photograph were well aware of the perception, which was the point of the picture. From right to left they are: Kiichi Miyazawa, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Noboru Takeshita, and Shintaro Abe. All were faction leaders, and all served as prime minister except Abe (the father of Shinzo Abe, the front-runner to succeed Koizumi), who rose as high as foreign minister. He died before he could win the janken game and take his turn at the top.
I for one hope the Asahi is right.
Here are three brief but fascinating updates on stories we regularly feature at Japundit: the new member of the imperial family, the identity of the new prime minister, and new revelations about China’s attitude toward Japan.
The Japanese are the first to acknowledge a tendency to develop an immediate and intense interest in a person or subject that burns brightly for a brief period before it just as quickly evaporates. Indeed, they use the expression senko hanabi—literally, incense fireworks—to describe this phenomenon.
Senko hanabi are a traditional Japanese version of the American sparkler, and they are often seen at family gatherings at just this time of year. These backyard fireworks have become a metaphor for transience, a favorite Japanese theme. (See this for a good, though a bit overwrought, description.)
Last year, my wife and I were discussing the senko hanabi phenomenon in relation to the well-known “Korean Wave” in Japan, and wondering when the Japanese focus on things Korean would inevitably sputter. She predicted interest would start to wane in December, and according to the following article written by the Seoul correspondent of the Nishinippon Shimbun, her forecast seems to have been not far off. In fact, one Korean source quoted in the article says the sharp decline in interest is not a temporary phenomenon and describes it as a bursting of the bubble.
The article is in Japanese and will stay on line for only about a week (how’s that for an example of senko hanabi in the mass media), so here again is my quick and dirty translation.
The dog days of summer are in full blazing fury now in Japan, and one of the ways the Japanese have traditionally used to beat the heat is to eat unagi, a kind of eel.
Koreans, on the other hand, take the expression “dog days of summer” more literally. Not ones to waste time trying to grab a slippery eel, they just chow down on man’s best friend instead. Or perhaps I should say slurp down, as dog soup–known as boshintang in Korean–is the preferred dish of the epicures who choose to dine on canine.
Most people outside the country know that Fido and his friends appeal to the Korean palate, but the results of a recent informal study seem to be surprising quite a few folks overseas. KBS radio conducted a telephone survey that found that 35% of Korean dog owners eat the soup–which, considering the margin of error, is the statistical equivalent of the 37% of Koreans who don’t own dogs and eat the soup.
In other words, the mournful eyes and affectionate slurps of their pets cut no ice with Korean gents who want a real man’s meal when the weather gets hot. Give the guys credit for their masculine resolve! And while you’re at it, the full AP report is here.
Considering that the North Korean government is widely assumed to be responsible for manufacturing drugs and exporting them for foreign exchange, it may have only been a matter of time before the problems they’ve been shipping abroad came back to bite them.
This report on drug use in North Korea appeared in the print edition of the Nishinippon Shimbun, written by their Seoul correspondent. The quick-and-dirty translation is mine.
The superficial view of Nikkan koryu, or interaction between Japan and Korea, is that the people of the two countries dislike each other so much they are ken’en no naka, in the Japanese phrase—they get along like dogs and monkeys.
But superficial views, especially when propagated through the media megaphone, often bear no resemblance to reality. While working on a translation a few weeks ago, I was listening to NHK AM, one of the radio stations of the Japanese public TV and radio network. Their midday programming that week featured live broadcasts from Seoul, which the network has been doing annually since 2002.
I can hear the sound of the plaster cracking in some of those preconceived notions already!
Most soccer fans worldwide whose attention and passion were lavished on the recent World Cup are likely unaware that the Japanese (and Chinese) have been playing different forms of football for more than a millennium. They’re not alone—a lot of Japanese don’t know that either!
More than 60 years after the sudden appearance and even more abrupt departure of the so-called kamikaze pilots of World War II, misconceptions about the pilots themselves still prevail overseas. Some still assume the pilots were fanatical volunteers eager to sacrifice their lives for the Emperor and save the nation by flying their aircraft into American ships–hence the use in English of the word kamikaze to mean someone conducting an enterprise so recklessly they are unconcerned about death.
The Japanese, of course, know how little of this corresponds to the truth. They’re well aware of how much fiction exists in the idea of soldiers willing to die for the emperor and selfless pilots so dedicated to their country that they enthusiastically stepped forward to join the tokkotai.
A recently published book, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, might help rectify these misconceptions.
Then again, perhaps not…
Delusionary? Undoubtedly. Yet some people in Asia still believe that Japan is the primary threat to regional peace because it has yet to apologize for World War II and Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine hinder constructive dialogue.
Well, if anyone of that persuasion is lurking on this site, now’s your chance to come out of the closet and explain why it’s Japan’s fault that North Korea just held its own Fourth of July fireworks display (July 5th in Asia) by launching five or six missiles into the Sea of Japan. One of these was confirmed to have been a Taepodong-2, which may have the capability of reaching parts of the United States. The latter seems to have been a dud, however, as it fizzled out in flight.
Prime Minister Koizumi, that hindrance to constructive dialogue, has visited Pyongyang twice during his administration to meet with Kim Jong-il. In 2002, the two leaders signed what has come to be known as the Pyongyang Declaration. Part of this declaration states:
The DPRK side expressed its intention that, pursuant to the spirit on this declaration, it would further maintain the moratorium on missile launching in and after 2003.
