Was anyone really surprised when the NORKS backed out of their nuclear deal with the U.S. and other nations?

According to the statement, Pyongyang has not only decided to suspend the disablement of its nuclear facilities, but is even “considering a step” to restore the facilities to working order.

Here’s a trilogy of videos on Japanese beer – one on beer vending machines in Kyoto, another one on a draft beer vending machine in Tokyo, and a final one on historical beers – beers with labels of famous people in Japanese history with short bios.

This first video is from BusanKevin in Kyoto talking about the wonders of outdoor beer vending machines in Kyoto on a hot day:

In response, I did a video on a draft beer vending machine I discovered in a pool hall in Tokyo a few nights ago.

Taste was not too bad but it gave me a huge head of foam which is quite common anyway even with live servers:

Background music by Super Girl Juice.

Later that same night I came across some “Historalicious” Japanese beer which were beer bottles with labels depicting famous people from Japanese history. Get your drink on while learning some Japanese history with Historalicious Japanese Beer – if you can read the bloody small cursive writing on the label:

Crack open a cold one and enjoy the Japanese Beer Trilogy!

When is a graveyard likely to be filled with tourists snapping pictures?

When it’s a gaijin bochi, or “foreigners’ graveyard,” which you can see in several old Japanese cities that have had Westerners living there for a long time, like Yokohama, Kobe and Hakodate.

Japanese burial rites involve cremation and placing the bones and ashes of the deceased inside a family grave, customs which are very different from the West, and these special foreigners’ graveyards are places where Europeans and Americans can be interred according to their own traditions.

The oldest can be found in Nagasaki, the only city where trade was allowed during the Edo Period, and you can see the gravestone of a Dutch trader that dates from 1778.

By far the most famous gaijin bochi in Japan is the Foreign General Cemetery in Yokohama, in the Naka Ward region that’s been popular with foreign residents for more than 150 years, and it’s up there with Chinatown and the Marine Tower on my list of attractions to hit when I’m visiting the city. The cemetery was commissioned by Admiral Perry himself, who requested a place for Westerners to be buried when one of his sailors died during his second visit to the country in his fleet of “Black Ships” in 1854.

Whenever I’m there I like to walk through the headstones and wonder what these early sojourners to Japan experienced here, and how things compare to today.

Just when Prime Minister Fukuda was thinking he might have been doing a good job avoiding the sorts of frequent rows with neighbouring South Korea that marked the terms of his predecessors, another furore kicked off this weekend, culminating in Seoul announcing that they were recalling their Japanese envoy.

Yes it’s the continued dispute of the tiny Liancourt rocks, which lie… between the two countries. (Phew, almost said “in the Sea of Japan”. That was close.)

This time the row centres on a manual for junior high school geography teachers which urges the same consideration of the Liancourt rocks (known as Takeshima to the Japanese, and Dokdo to Koreans) as of the northern Kuril islands, which themselves are the subject of an unresolved territorial dispute with Russia. The problem is that later in the manual, it is explicitly stated that “the Northern Territories are an integral part of Japanese territory.”

Cue the flag-eaters in 3, 2, 1…

South Korean President Lee Myung Bak was said to be “deeply disappointed”, while the foreign Ministry announced that Ambassador to Japan, Kwon Chul-hyun, would be recalled in protest, and they’d be summoning Japan’s ambassador to Seoul, Toshinori Shigeie, for a good telling off.

(Next paragraph contains Perspective and Proportion – avoid if allergic)
The passage at the centre of the row appears in only one (of 14) approved Junior high text, and as the Asahi article notes, “only four of 14 junior high textbooks in geography and civics” make any mention of the rocks at all.

according to an article in the new york times online,written by norimitsu onishi, the ashes in a japanese urn are an apt metaphor for the future of the system of funeral buddhism in the country.

where as in the past, the japanese reliably counted on buddhist priest’s and their rituals as a source of comfort during the time surrounding the death of a loved one, many now are choosing to go with services provided funeral homes or cremations with no services at all (preferring instead to dump their loved one’s remains in the nearest ashtray and keep their kaimyo in the toilet in case they need something to aim at when they’re drunk).

photo of a priest staring disinterestedly at a wall, hat tip to the old grey lady

while there are a myriad of reasons for this shift in attitudes towards death and the proper place of religion during this time, to numerous to be discussed in detail here, there are a few notable trends listed in the articles.

1) the accelerated drop in religious belief in the cities combined with their ever increasing populations has led to a large group of people who have no religious belief whatsoever and see no need to start on the day of their death.

2) the rural demographic, where until recently buddhism was still strong, is aging and dying off as the younger generations move to cities and the birthrates are not enough to make up for the exodus of population and businesses. this leaves country temples serving an ever dwindling number of less affluent elderly to serve, thus making many temples financially insecure.

3) the sense of japanese that buddhism doesn’t cater to the needs of the living, thus making them more indifferent to what it teaches about what happens after death; and the lack of change in that area the clerics seem to want to make in this regard.

4) a lack of moral authority apparent in the buddhist temples since the end of wwii when they began to sell prestigious posthumous names to people who paid them enough money, thus denigrating names once reserved for revered buddhist adherents with strong moral characters to an indulgence of sorts. as appropriate in situations like these payments are usually made in unmarked in envelopes on a no receipt-cash only basis.

5) the general expense of traditional funerals combined with new rent a priests employed by funeral homes to provide services for people they most likely have never met before and willing to provide honest listings of fraudulent extravagant titles that can be attained at rock bottom prices and you get a receipt.

all these factors are combining together to create an a daunting challenge to the continuing existence of temples across the country. with funeral expenses being analogous in importance to these temples as tithing is to churches and synagogues in the west in terms of revenue sources, many priests face being the last generation of clerics ministering their religion in japan.

as a consequence many temples are expected to close their doors over the coming decades, taking with them (they claim) a major source of local history and sense of community and continuity in their local precincts. of course some of the major private and state sponsored temples and unesco tourists sites will be unaffected, but many charming repositories of small town rural culture will be disappearing. so if you always wanted to visit that one out of the way zen garden that somehow escaped being listed in the travel guides and is free of tourists, now might be a good time.

soon places like this might be overgrown memories of a different age

few random closing thoughts…
a) what’s going to happen to all the libraries of coin lockers supposedly holding parishioners souls? talk about a crappy afterlife, you’re closed in a hole in the wall until the local priest can’t make ends meet and then bulldozed; lame.

b) i find it darkly humorous that the priests see many of the sources of their decline, recognize they are preventable, and then do nothing. this lethargy in response to their situation seems to come from a certain amount of apathy about their beliefs. they talk about how other religions provide sermons and community services outside of funerals to keep their faith relevant to their congregations as if it would be some theoretically nice thing to do, and then take no action to emulate. has buddhism in japan become this esoteric that it no longer has an application in people’s daily lives? i suspect that it’s just laziness on the part of the priests

c) perhaps this is just the logical conclusion to japan’s seeming cognitive dissonance on the issue of religion. after all if you don’t believe in it and didn’t live your life according to its precepts and went to your death this way, how would having an extravagant funeral change this? it you believe that human existence ends when the lungs stop breathing, the heart stops beating, and the neurons stop firing signals through their dendrites why waste your money to commemorate, dedicate, exalt, and provide a home for a soul you don’t even believe exists? and if you do believe in a deity or higher power of some sort exists, do you really think that a life spent living in sin and unbelief can be made up for by having a really cool name and a nice funeral? i guess these types of services are more for the living, but if that’s true why not remember the dead in your own way? it would be a lot more meaningful and cost effective than spending over ten thousand dollars for a piece of lacquered wood and empty platitudes from some guy who never even met the deceased.

d) think of the boon to the horror movie industry. decrepit buildings, abandoned alters, moss covered statues, rooms with soul lockers; this will be great!

Norimitsu Onishi reports in the New York Times that the Japanese government has recognized the indigenous rights of the Ainu people.

The Ainu had lived on Japan’s northernmost island for centuries, calling their home Ainu Mosir. But just as with America’s expansion West, the Japanese pushed north in the late 19th century in the first sign of their imperialist ambitions. Japanese settlers decimated the Ainu population, seized their land and renamed it Hokkaido, or North Sea Road.

And yet it was only a few weeks ago that the Japanese government finally, and unexpectedly, recognized the Ainu as an “indigenous people.” Parliament introduced and quickly passed a resolution stating that the Ainu had a “distinct language, religion and culture,” setting aside the belief, long expressed by conservatives, that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous nation.

The recognition — coming after decades of opposition by a government fearful of compensation claims — seemed timed to an international conference of indigenous peoples that Japan is hosting this week in Hokkaido. The Ainu’s lack of recognition could have proved embarrassing for Japan’s government, particularly since the conference also comes close to the Group of 8 summit meeting in Hokkaido next week.

In a study by the Hokkaido prefectural government in 2006, just under 24,000 people identified themselves as Ainu. Most were of mixed blood and lacked the telltale fair skin or hirsute features that distinguished older Ainu from the Japanese. But it is not known how many live outside Hokkaido since Japan has never conducted a nationwide census of Ainu.

“In Japan’s case, for better or for worse, the assimilation policies since the Meiji era were so successful that almost nothing remains of the Ainu’s traditional way of life,” he said. In 1869, one year after the start of the Meiji era, Tokyo set up the Hokkaido Colonization Board to encourage Japanese settlers to move to Hokkaido. The Ainu were eventually stripped of their land, forced to abandon hunting and fishing for farming, forbidden to speak their own language and taught only Japanese at school. That history — little known by the Japanese today and even among the Ainu themselves — was repeated later in Japan’s Asian colonies.

One would think that China’s recent agreement with Japan to jointly develop gas fields in the East China Sea, which defuses a longstanding territorial dispute would be cause for happiness in both countries. But the history between the two nations being what it is has caused some Chinese to condemn the deal as surrendering national sovereignty to hated enemy.

Some messages left on message boards, which are normally tightly monitored and censored by the security services, have accused the authorities of “selling out” to Japan while others described those who made the deal as “traitors.”

A small demonstration against the agreement and Japan’s claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea was also held outside the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on Wednesday by Chinese nationalists.

Demonstrations against government policy are almost unheard of in China. To take place, the demonstration would have to have been approved by the security services.

In question is Japanese involvement in the Chunxaio (Shirakaba) gas field, which is west of the line up to which Japan claims as its territorial waters. Some Japanese media is reporting that China has agreed to allow Japan develop the Chunxiao field, but the Chinese government is claiming that Japanese involvement will be restricted to investment only.

Thanks to Rune.

Reigandou is in a forest on a secluded hillside just outside Kumamoto city centre.

Also known as Musashi’s Cave, it’s the spot that legendary swordsman Musashi Miyamoto retreated to in the final years of his life, to write Go Rin No Sho (‘The Book of Five Rings’).

These days it’s something of a pilgrimage destination.

The path to Musashi’s cave is long, and the mountainside along the route is dotted with ‘500 Buddhas’. On a sunny spring day, in a silence punctuated only by the buzzing of insects, it’s quite a sight.

Diane Rehm interviewed (audio) Martha Sherrill the author of Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain.  Sherrill spent some time in Japan and found out about the story of the Akita, its near extinction, and its preservation by Morie Sawataishi around WWII.  If you’re a dog lover, you’re sure to enjoy the interview and the book.

 Here’s the Publishers Weekly review via Amazon.com:

Morie Sawataishi had never owned a dog, but in 1944, when the Japanese man was 30 years old, the desire for one came over him like a sudden… craving. During WWII, snow country dogs were being slaughtered for pelts to line officers’ coats; working for Mitsubishi in the remote snow country, Morie decided to rescue Japan’s noble, ancient Akita breed—whose numbers had already dwindled before the war—from certain extinction. Raised in an elegant Tokyo neighborhood, his long-suffering wife, Kitako, hated country life, and his children resented the affection he lavished on his dogs rather than on them. The book brims with colorful characters, both human and canine: sweet-tempered redhead Three Good Lucks, who may have been poisoned to death by a rival dog owner; high-spirited One Hundred Tigers, who lost his tail in an accident; and wild mountain man Uesugi. To Western readers Morie’s single-mindedness may seem selfish and Kitako’s passivity in the face of his stubbornness incomprehensible, but former Washington Post staffer Sherrill imbues their traditional Japanese lifestyle with dignity, and Morie’s adventures (he is now 94) should be enjoyed by dog lovers, breeders and trainers.

in january of this year, what is being called a “missing link” from the cretaceous period was discovered in iwate prefecture by one kazuhisa sasaki.

this specimen is the oldest praying mantis specimen to have legs with hair and spines.

interesting…