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.

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.

Here’s a strange story starting to filter through the news. A Japanese man was mystified as to why food kept disappearing from his apartment. It turns out, a woman had been secretly living in his closet for perhaps as long as several months.

The 57-year-old unemployed man of Fukuoka in southern Japan called police Wednesday when the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of an intruder in his home while he was out on Wednesday, the Asahi newspaper said on its Website.

Officers rushed to the house and found a 58-year-old unemployed woman hiding in an unused closet, where she had secreted a mattress and plastic drink bottles, the Asahi said

I have to confess, reading this, I wonder how large the closet–not to mention the apartment–actually was. Do any of you have closets large enough to hide a woman? On second thought, never mind.

On the heels of Brian’s post about the truculent crows of Tokyo, I thought I’d share a charming story I uncovered about a family of very ingenious swallows.

A family of swallows lives in this youkan shop in Futaminoura, Japan.

The shop was built in the Taisho period, and specializes in sweets flavored slightly with salt from the ocean. That’s a real piece of gold on top.

Inside the shop, up high against the ceiling, is this little Shinto shrine. You can just make out a sheet of paper sticking out from the bottom shelf. It’s hard to tell from this photo, but the paper is covered with bird droppings. That’s because, at the very top, is a bird’s nest.

The store proprietor told me that the swallow population has plummeted in the area because crows will not stop attacking them. This resourceful swallow couple decided that the safest place to start a family was inside the shop. And what’s safer than a shrine?

I asked the shop proprietor if she closes the store doors. She says that she does, promptly at 7PM every night, by which point the swallows have come home for the day. She says they remain inside, quietly, until 5:30 in the morning when she gets up extra early to open the door

“‘Hot Gour-Ben’” is epoch making dishes for gourmets. It gets warm in about 8 minutes by a chemical reaction between lime and water. All you have to do is pull a string and eat it.”

Former OL turned hot Japanese comedienne Edo Harumi shows off her skills in this re-imagining of My Sharona.

Edo Harumi’s trademark gesture is to stick out her thumb and to say “goo” (good). She finds English words ending (endingoo) in “ing” and turns the final “g” into a “goo.” Part of her shtick seems to be making fun of the English that has crept into the Japanese language, even as she takes on the persona of a teacher providing “lessons” and intones old-fashioned, stagey vocal inflections. Even if you don’t understand Japanese, you’ll get the gist of her routine, and certainly her facial expressions are as extreme and funny as any old ukiyoe print of some comic actor.

Edo Harumi shows up about 20 seconds into this video, with lessons on how a girl can appeal to men (how to be a girl a guy will keep wanting to sit next to while drivingoo). In sum, this should give you some sense as to why Edo Harumi is currently one of Japan’s hottest entertainers.

“It is prohibited to conduct any group demonstration, to carry flags, placards or wear group participation arm bands. It is also prohibited to assemble, hold group meetings, sitdowns, force interview, or use violence on visitors. In addition, the authorization of the management is necessary for the distribution of leaflets or notes, indoor and outdoor photography, peddling, street and stall vending, and all public activities.

Shin-Marunouchi Bldg”

Presumably, shopping is allowed.

A longtime Japundit reader alerted me to an important beauty treatment now available at New York’s Shizuka salon, a place I went to once in search of a Japanese-style manicure.

a high-end Japanese spa in midtown, has just introduced a new “Geisha Facial,” which promises to cleanse, brighten, and exfoliate a patron’s face—thanks to a secret ingredient: bird poop. For centuries in Japan, both Kabuki actors and geishas used uguisu no fun, or nightingale droppings, to clean off their thick white makeup and soothe their faces; apparently, guanine, found in the droppings, helped their complexions.

Hopefully the bird droppings are not collected from the upper reaches of Hokkaido.

Vanity, after all, can make you sick.

Spam emailers have discovered that eating seaweed can miraculously rid women between the ages of 25 and 54 of the roll of fat around their middlesection.

Just take a couple of sea-weed tablets every day, and perhaps you too will see your weight plummet, so you too can join the ranks of women who enjoy the lowest rate of obesity in the world!

Personally, I’ll stick to weekly misoshiru and some nice sunomono with wakame.

Uguisu photo via.

Japundit noted that the number of dogs in Japan now exceeds the number of children under 10. During my last visit to Japan, I really noticed how many fewer children are out and about; they aren’t there like they used to be. At the same time, during Golden Weekend, I kept seeing dogs shepherded through the train stations in little doggie perambulators like the one above.

One writer for the Japan Times even went so far as to say:

The tininess and cuteness of the dogs, the care lavished on them, and the correspondence of their numerical growth with the decline in the number of babies suggest a kind of substitution at work. Are little dogs the babies of the 21st century?

At the same time that the birth rate in Japan is decreasing, and the number of pets are increasing, news reports cite the eerie trend that child abuse is rising. (Ditto for the US, some say). Let me be clear that I am not suggesting a causal relationship—at most, there would be a correlation. And obviously, one always wonders with these things if child abuse and other crimes are being reported differently than in the past, or if there is a true, statistically proven rise. Most people I spoke to in Japan this time felt strongly that the news really had become “worse” and more “bad things” were happening, but, as we’ve all noted, anecdotal evidence doesn’t rule the day.

I’m not the only one to note the strange synchronicity of Ed’s post on recent Japanese earthquakes, and the very large tremor which rocked China this week. It feels a bit strange to blog about a part of Asia, and to not, at the very least, acknowledge the human tragedy, particularly since China has made the unusual gesture of asking other nations for help.

NPR has a rather harrowing, but gripping account of a family’s search for their two year old son. I can’t seem to embed the player, but you can hop over to the site, and click the “Listen Now” button to hear the narration, which will surely put a human face on this sprawling wreck of a story.

On Monday, Fu Guanyu dropped off her young son, Wang Zhilu, at his grandparents’ house so she could go to work. Minutes later, the earthquake hit.

She rushed back home and saw their apartment building in ruins. She says soldiers came right away to help, but they had no equipment.

I found these signs, all over the Ginza subway line in Tokyo, to be interesting in light of earlier and somewhat debated post on Japundit.

Yes, that really is a photo of the Obama Fishing Port Entrance.

Okay. I get the Jero thing.

He’s of mixed race, from the States, with a Japanese grandmother to whom he promised he would one day be an enka star. And now he is. Hip hop costume and all.

Not many people sing enka these days. Hitomi Shimatani, a fading pop-star, originally debuted as an enka singer, before moving on to do, well, pop. So, I think it’s incredibly cool that Jero has carved out a place for himself. Plus he sounds lovely.

You don’t necessarily need to understand Japanese to get the start of this video, which displays photos of Jero as a youngster, and shows him winning a “Japanese gong show” type program on NHK. Later, he’s challenged to see how many Enka songs he actually knows out of over 100. He wins every challenge. If you stick out to the end of the video, you’ll see him bust out a few dance moves.

I came home with the Jero single. I would never do the same for that other contrastingly talentless import. Now I am playing the sad, sad Umiyuki song over and over.

Three days into a trip in Japan and my mother and I were sitting in a coffee shop in Kyoto. In came a foreigner (meaning, a white woman) with two kids. I knew they were trouble, the sort of children to whom everything–including bad behavior–is “explained,” which seems to be a trend in child-rearing these days. The younger child, a girl, had a tendency to scream, to which her mother said, “Now, do you think this is a place where it is okay to scream? If you scream, you will have to play outside.”

The girl kept screaming.

After the third screaming, my mother, ever the ferocious enforcer when she wants to be, turned around and said quite sharply (and in English) “Hey! Stop it! This is Japan. You do not scream in Japan. That is not acceptable.”

Everyone–including me–was stunned. The girl was stunned. Her older brother, her tormenter who had been the cause of the screaming, was stunned. He even tried to defend his sister, but my mother turned her steely eyes on him and said, “No. You do not scream here. That does not work. End of story.” And, really, even though Japan has seriously changes since the Showa era and I don’t get the dog-and-MILF-thing, at least the kids don’t scream.

I felt sorry for the foreign mother. She looked harried, like she was just looking for some place to rest for, oh, fifteen minutes so she could caffeine it up a bit. I thought that her kids looked mixed–like me–but that she was divorced or separated. She did not seem married. Her daughter looked wild. None of them apologized. They just ate as quickly as possible and departed. The Japanese in the coffee shop pretended to ignore the whole thing. I was embarrassed. I hate being the center of attention. I like observing. But . . . I was secretly and enormously proud of my mother. Very proud of her to try to battle social ills and try to set them straight. I love that about her.

At the same time, it can be so unsettling to see your own children publicly scolded like that by a stranger. There have been times in Japan when I’ve had the impulse to stop someone from doing something embarrassing. What are your experiences? What do you think?

After my natto-bagel post, I’m sure that some of you expats were wondering just where you could get your sticky fingers on some real natto, without having to travel all the way to Ibaraki-ken. Well, guess what? You can get it in Tokyo! Across the street from Tokyo station, in the Shin-Marunouchi building, in the basement, is a natural food store. And there you will find, nestled in a nice cooling bin, real natto.

Don’t thank me all at once.

I’m of the opinion that there is good Engrish in the world. Sometimes, Japanese-style reconfigured English finds nuances in language and word play, and expresses an emotion or observation so much better than a irony-saturated native speaker could possibly do.

This mail box, which I photographed in Kyoto, was an example of wonderful Engrish (at least to me).

And this sign . . . not so good. I’m pretty sure that the “automatically full” references a toilet bowl with automated flushing capacity. Certainly this sign is at least bathroom related. Anyway, I pushed the button.

May Day in Kyoto not only involves a parade honoring International Worker’s Day, but also marks the opening of verandas in restaurants in Pontocho along the Kamogawa River.

A pair of maiko (apprentice geisha) shoes at the entrance of a Pontocho restaurant.

The restaurant where I ate had a little screen separating our area from the veranda next door. When I looked over, I spotted a camera crew setting up equipment. A little later, it became clear why the cameras were there.

A little breeze hit the screen, and in the opening, I could see a smiling maiko.

I’m pretty sure this was some kind of news crew documenting the start of the May and the opening of the verandas, which will be accessible till September 30th.

May is also the start of the Pontocho geiko dances at the Kaburencho.

Someone managed to catch a snippet of the dances last year, and upload it onto Youtube.

We also enjoyed some tea, made by a maiko.

I recently attended Sakagura’s annual Hanami Sake Tasting. Sakagura is a (perhaps the) sake bar in New York, located in the basement of a building on the East Side in a neighborhood populated with small, authentic Japanese eateries.

I liked the sugidama hanging in the entry, all green, signaling fresh sakes!