The election here is this tomorrow. Campaigning has to stop by law tonight. Very exciting!

BTW, it’s certainly not wrong to translate 国民党 (kuomintang: “Citizens’ Party,” or what your history books called “the KMT”) as “Nationalist Party,” but I’m not sure why the NYT does so:

Mainland Chinese officials loathe Taiwan’s current president, Chen Shui-bian, and his party, the Democratic Progressive Party, for pursuing greater political separation from the mainland. Beijing has been wary of the party’s candidate, Frank Hsieh, even though Mr. Hsieh has repeatedly voiced much more willingness than Mr. Chen to allow increased Taiwanese investment on the mainland and more cross-strait transportation links.

A victory by Mr. Hsieh could be perceived in Beijing as a high price to have paid for forcefully putting down demonstrations in Tibet.

Mr. Hsieh received an influential endorsement on Thursday. Lee Teng-hui, a former Nationalist president [!] of Taiwan who now favors much greater political independence from the mainland, said that he would vote for Mr. Hsieh.

You wouldn’t even know they were talking about the KMT there, would you?

Added on 22 March: So between drinks last night at my friend’s birthday party (unconnected to any March babies in my family), I started to wonder how you do translate 国民党. I mean, I always either read about it in Japanese (in which case the characters are used) or hear about it from people connected to Taiwan (who just call it the KMT). Wikipedia says that it can be referred to as the “Chinese Nationalist Party,” which makes a lot more sense to me than just plain “Nationalist Party” given its origins.

Happy birthday to my father and my little brother. Yes, both of them. When my parents converted to Sabbatarian Christianity when I was little, they went full-on into Nature: avoiding doctors in favor of anointings from the ministry, growing their own vegetables. My mother baked all our bread until I was in high school. (That’s why the reception of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con thing as if it were NEW! and EXCITING! made me giggle a while back.) And they decided on a home birth for my brother, so my father spent the morning of his own birthday delivering him. Dad tied off the umbilical cord with new white shoelaces. I read him (my brother, not my father) his first story. My mother, I’m assuming, rested. I have this feeling massive doses of painkillers were not part of the natural birthing plan.

Now he (again, my brother, not my father) is thirty. Thirty.

“You’re turning thirty! That makes me–”

“Past it.”

“Try waiting until the next time I visit home and saying that to my face, buddy.”

“Sure. I’m taller than you now.”

So happy birthday, guys.

It would also have been my last remaining grandfather’s birthday this week.

Three of my grandparents died in their early sixties, in rapid succession, between 1981 and 1984. My father’s father was the only one left. He remarried after my grandmother died; his second wife died, too, a decade ago. After that, he lived alone. His hearing was always bad, and he was in his own little world, but he lived in his own house until the end. His woodworking shop was in the basement. (Contemporary safety Nazis would have a coronary if they saw the way we used to play with Dad’s and Pop-Pop’s tools when we were little.) He used to make furniture for people in need at church–bedsteads and things like that. He was a regular churchgoer and made a Bible stand for the congregation that was much beloved. His income was limited, but he gave to charity regularly. He spoke with benevolence about the new neighbors–noisy, the other old-timers on the block complained, but they were polite and kept their property tidy and didn’t cause trouble.

My father’s sister checked on him and helped him out every week. My father gretzed that if he kept insisting on doing woodwork, he was going to kill himself with the circular saw at his age one of these days. I visited most times I went home. (No, not every time, to my discredit.) He was kind of abstracted in later years but always happy to hear that I was still enjoying Japan. He wasn’t totally out of touch with the talk of the day, either. Once not too long ago, I gave him a bag of rather frou-frou green tea, and he said, “Thanks! Full of antioxidants, they say, huh?”

He wasn’t the story-telling type of grandfather. He never talked about his childhood in England, or about being in Europe during the war, or about how Allentown had changed over his lifetime. He’d outlived both his wives and had trouble getting around. When he died in November, I think he was ready. My mother hadn’t even had time to get word to me that he’d been taken to the hospital. He would have turned 93 on Tuesday.

It’s been a year since Englishwoman Lindsay Hawker was murdered. The chief suspect, who escaped capture when police came knocking at his apartment door to question him, still hasn’t been found and brought in for questioning. The BBC’s Tokyo correspondent has an online report here.

The practice of showing people photographs of a suspect with possible disguises is not unusual here. But why has he not been apprehended?

“When an offender is determined to run and hide,” the detective says. “It’s hard to find him. Ichihashi didn’t have a phone or a credit card, anything that might make him easier to trace.”

…

Lindsay Hawker’s family have expressed their frustration at the lack of progress in the police investigation, although they say they have no alternative but to keep faith with the Japanese police.

Her friends too are frustrated.

Recently they gathered on a Sunday to hand out fliers appealing to the Japanese people for any information that might lead to the arrest of Tatsuya Ichihashi.

Paul Dingwell, a fellow teacher who knew Lindsay well, says the fact that this man has been able to disappear reflects badly on the Japanese.

“They should feel some kind of guilt that this has happened in their country, to someone who came here to help,” he says.

“If someone is hiding him they are just as guilty as he is, if not more.”

I was disturbed last year when Hawker’s father called her death some kind of national “shame.” At the time, of course, her death was a raw wound for her family and friends. Also, I wondered whether the invocation of “shame” might not be a shrewd way of playing off Japanese psychology to make solving Hawker’s murder seem especially urgent.

Be that as it may, statements such as “they should feel some kind of guilt that this has happened in their country” are rather nasty in their implications. Every country has criminals, the U.K. most assuredly not excluded. That part about “came here to help” doesn’t sit well, either. It feels condescending, somehow. (Wouldn’t the English find it creepy if, say, an Indian surgeon were murdered in London and her relatives complained that her death was unjust because she’d only come to England to help?) Plenty of Westerners come to Japan to teach English mostly out of a desire to have an exciting adventure abroad and sock away some money, and they deserve not to be murdered just as surely as does someone who’s motivated by a saintly desire to bring correct English to the Japanese.

And it’s hard to believe that Hawker’s friend thinks disappearing into the landscape in Japan requires some kind of sinister network of assistance. Light plastic surgery that uses surgical wire to nip in the nose or cheeks or to raise the eyelids is cheap, fast, and popular. It doesn’t change bone structure, but it would be very easy to use to avoid recognition. Besides, Japan is a country of 127 million people with huge, anonymous metropolitan areas, isolated mountain hamlets, and a very rapid transportation system. I don’t think you’d have to be Jason Bourne to figure out how to hide out. Of course, an accomplice would help, but it wouldn’t have to be Japanese society in general–just one easily gulled woman with an apartment and a source of income could do it.

I wouldn’t have a difficult time believing that the investigation methodology isn’t as advanced as what you’d find in London or Miami, but that’s because Japanese police just don’t have to deal with cases like this one very often. And even at home, murder investigations frequently drag on for years. It’s great that Hawker still has friends who are dedicated to helping to find her killer, but I don’t think it follows, in this case, that the police force–let alone “Japan” as a generalized, amorphous entity–isn’t doing enough.

While the federal government cannot figure out how to appoint a new Governor General of the Bank of Japan, it’s had no trouble filling another important position:

In a bid to help boost Japan’s international prestige and disseminate its culture, cartoon character Doraemon was inaugurated Wednesday as the official cultural ambassador for Japanese anime.

Cartoon character Doraemon is a catlike robot from the 22nd century and is considered a Japanese cultural icon.

…

“Please work hard to let people around the world learn more about Japan and encourage people to foster friendships with each other,” Komura said.

Doraemon replied by saying: “It’s an honor to do such an important job. I’ll work as hard as I can.”

Perhaps his first assignment will be to go back in time to the day this plan was hatched, draw a cluebar out of his 4th-dimensional pocket, and whack some bureaucrats with it. Hard.