The White Peril 白禍

The Yomiuri reports that new Minister of Foreign Affairs Nobutaka Machimura believes* the constitution should be amended in order for Japan to become a permanent member of the UNSC:

"The Constitution should be amended to clearly position Japan's international peace-building activities," Machimura said at the Foreign Ministry. "The Constitution should be reformed because it is better to ensure that no confusion will arise when Japan fulfills its duties as a permanent member (because of a possible conflict between constitutional principles and the position)," he added.

Last week, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced Japan would seek a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council. Koizumi said the nation would be able to become a permanent member without amending the Constitution.

Interesting. It's hard to tell whether that could be a rift-making issue or Machimura is just giving voice to something Koizumi actually wants, too, behind the soothing public talk. The Nikkei print edition--it may be on the web, but I'm too lazy to look it up and happen to have it on top of the recycling pile--ran parallel front-page interviews last Friday with two business leaders on the hot-button constitutional issues. Kakutaro Kitashiro, the chair of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, said when asked about the amendment issue:

Having no military power is a policy that doesn't square with today's international circumstances. Even a secondary school student must sense the mismatch with Article 9 [the article of the constitution that renounces militarism]. Amending the constitution is preferable to just expanding its interpretation.

I'm partial--and not just for Japan--to that sort of thinking, too. Simply loosening the interpretation of Article 9 might seem like a more tactful way for Japan to smooth its way toward open super-powerdom, but there is no way in hell the rest of Asia will be convinced not to have a conniption anyway. Koizumi would probably have to bulldoze the Yasukuni Shrine, not just stop visiting it, to mollify the PRC on that one. But a clearly-worded amendment that gives the government leave to participate in ongoing conflicts but not to launch attacks might, conceivably, play well with others who could join together to lean on China a bit. (Nothing changes, but this time, it would be a good cause. I think the petitions of India, Germany, and Brazil make sense, too.)

Speaking of bargaining with allies, the proposed US troop realignment is still a sticking point (this is from the Yomiuri article again):

Japan has asked that the United States maintain effective deterrence through the Japan-U.S. security alliance in the area surrounding Japan, while reducing the burden on local governments where U.S. military bases are located.

It's not just the non-combat deployment of SDF personnel that has made things touchy with the public; a helicopter crashed in Okinawa two months ago, and the USMC's clampdown on the wreckage was widely perceived as high-handed. The "burden on local governments" referred to above is a bit elliptical, but it probably refers to that sort of thing--the strained relations between US soldiers and the Japanese who live near their bases, I mean, not our helicopters constantly falling out of the sky. Machimura has plenty to pay attention to.
* Like all links to the Yomiuri, this one will expire in a few days; if I forget to search for the Google cache and relink it, feel free to e-mail me.

This is not a good year to live in hurricane or typhoon country: The latest typhoon (Number 21) to hit Japan has once again made landfall in Kyushu. Five people are dead and eighteen missing at this time, but it's expected to have weakened to a temperate zone low-pressure system by tomorrow. Fortunately, there were no big boat accidents; that pushed the death toll to around 40 for one of the storms that hit at the beginning of this month. Atsushi's fine; we talked on the phone as always between 11:30 and midnight. The storm is moving east-northeast, so from Kyushu it's basically moved right over Shikoku and the southwest end of Honshu. We had a lot of rain and wind here in Tokyo, too, but nothing dangerous, though I guess the storm will come closest to us overnight.

Added at 23:55: The final figures are 16 dead and 12 injured, with a great deal of property damage.

Asahi has a new poll (here's the original Japanese version) indicating that voters don't care about Japan Post reform (which is what I should have called it earlier, rather than "Postal Service reform," which makes it sound as if only the handling of the mails were involved). That's interesting, if not all that surprising. It may be that people don't perceive what's at stake in the management of Postal Savings accounts--or it may be that they do but just think the "reforms" aren't going to help and therefore aren't worth fixating on:

Those polled were also asked whether they thought Koizumi would be able to exercise his leadership in realizing privatization of postal services, given that many influential members in the Liberal Democratic Party remain opposed to Koizumi's privatization plan.

About 39 percent said no, while about 37 percent said yes.

So people may understand the import of the issue but feel that nothing substantive can be accomplished. The English version leaves out the part specifically about Heizo Takenaka's new position as head of Japan Post privatization (39% think his appointment was a good idea; 25% do not). Predictably, most people chose pensions/welfare as the most important issues, with more general economic and employment issues next.

I think that a lot of what Joe Kort says in his latest post at Ex-Gay Watch makes sense. I'm not so sure about this segment, though:

I believe that most people involved with ex-gay organizations and choose to deny their own homosexuality are turtles [that is, people who duck for cover and minimize themselves when they feel insecure].

Really? The average ex-gay autobiography I've read tends to go something like this: "One morning, after years of drinking, taking drugs, and alternately working as a hustler and being dumped by my latest exploitative boyfriend, I woke up for the hundredth time in a pool of my own vomit and realized my problem was that...homosexuality is sinful!" I'm not the first to notice this, but it's hard not to read prominent ex-gays' detailed accounts of their past lives without sensing a kind of thrill and reverse-braggadocio underneath: "I was such a bad mo-fo it took God to straighten me out!" It allows those with loudmouth tendencies to stay loudmouthed in the role of Getting the Message out. (That doesn't mean I don't think they're sincere, by the way.)

And at the same time, it seems only fair to mention the flip side: I think a lot of the more militant gays haven't worked through their God issues. By this I mean that they avoid the process of confronting the possibility that the anti-gay religious folks are correct, which would lead to practicing homosexuality only once they were secure in the examined belief that it was the right path for them. Normally, I try not to speculate about what's going on inside people's heads, but I can think of no other explanation for the weird touchiness and reflexive dismissiveness of a lot of gays when the subject of religion or transcendence comes up. I wish people (on either side) didn't feel the need to make themselves feel better about their own choices by deriding those who make the opposite ones, but that problem is probably as old as civilization and doesn't seem to show any signs of abating.

One of the big news items here in Japan over the last several months has been the reform and privatization of the Postal Service. I haven't avoided it for fear of boring you--though it's not the sort of topic likely to make you a hit at dinner parties. It's just that there's been so much back-and-forth. It is, though, a very, very important issue here in Japan, because Postal Savings accounts hold a lot of the wealth of Japanese households and put it at the disposal of Ministry of Finance project managers. This editorial (subscription only--sorry) from last week's Nikkei English on-line edition delineates pretty well how things have developed:

The privatization plan will divide Japan Post into four companies respectively operating the mail, savings and insurance services as well as the nationwide network of post offices, but the four operators will remain under the integrated management of a holding company.

The holding company will sell its shares in the savings and insurance units to turn them into private businesses, but it is not clear what percentage of the stock will actually be sold. Moreover, the government will continue to own at least one-third of the holding company, allowing it to maintain its involvement in the savings and insurance companies, at least to some extent, unless the holding company sells its entire interest in them.

The mail and network management entities, which will remain under the full ownership of the holding company, will be required to provide uniform services nationwide in exchange for receiving special treatment, including a continued monopoly in the mail delivery business.

The branch network management company will inherit post offices and workers from Japan Post. The government appears to be intent on ensuring that the other three new postal companies will use the offices and workers of the network firm to protect these politically important jobs. Such forced dependence on the existing post office network will frustrate the new companies' efforts to refashion themselves into more efficient and profitable players.

This scheme — creating an entity to take over Japan Post's infrastructure and virtually forcing the other postal companies to use it — seems to be simply a ploy to avoid radical changes in postal operations while making the reorganization look like a reform, just as the plan adopted to privatize public road corporations based on a two-tier structure was merely a scheme to keep building new roads.

The envisioned savings and insurance companies are unlikely to achieve management independence as long as they are tethered to the infrastructure operator, which will not be freed completely from government control. This is not a formula that lends itself to independent and transparent accounting at the postal companies.

The basic design of the privatization will certainly cause this crucial reform initiative to go awry and it will do nothing to further privatization's primary goal: ending the government's stranglehold on a big chunk of private savings that is causing serious distortions in the financial markets and undermining fiscal discipline. Achieving this goal requires a swift and complete end to the government's involvement in the privatized postal companies.

If you've got a sense of déjà vu here, you may be thinking of what happened to California's energy providers, which taught us all the difference between privatization and deregulation. (And I must note, in fairness, that unlike the USPS, the Japanese Postal Service provides mail handling of pretty much unexceptionable quality.)

Added an hour later: Because I'm distracted by the Vertigo DVD and am also a scatterbrained idiot, I forgot to note why I'm finally bringing up the Postal Service reform in the first place: It's what drove the selection of new appointees in the cabinet reshuffle Prime Minister Koizumi announced today. Heizo Takenaka, who's going to end up with more joint appointments than Stanley Fish soon, will still be in charge of economic policy and fiscal administration, and he's also been named the head of Postal Service privatization and reform. That's a new, ad hoc post, of course.

Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, who has distinguished herself largely by not having a big mouth like her predecessor Makiko Tanaka, is outgoing; she'd been reappointed in the last cabinet change. Her replacement is MP Nobutaka Machimura, who apparently has lots of connections in the US. He was Minister of Education back when (1) that's what the position was called and (2) there was last a flap over Japan's government-approved social science textbooks. More directly related to diplomacy, he was State Secretary of Foreign Affairs under...uh...Obuchi? Japanese PM's sprang up and died like Mayflies in the late '90's, so I don't remember. I wonder whether he was picked not just for his US ties but also because he's somehow seen as being a good figure to guide the Japanese push for permanent membership on the UN Security Council? I mean, he would almost have to have been, but I haven't seem him cast in that light in the preliminary reports.

Phooey (phoois, phooit...). I saw this FoxNews story on a recent Michael Jackson conference at Yale, but I was still munching over a way to say something useful and funny about it. As always, Alice in Texas proves the simplest ideas are the best:

FoxNews: panelists discussed how pedophilia allegations have fed into false stereotypes about gays.

Alice B: Do people no longer have phone directories to read?

It's a shame that the people studying pop culture in the academy do such a horrible job at it, because in my experience in college, it was really valuable. In a modern poetry class I took sophomore year, I asked the professor about including Madonna (Erotica had just come out) in my final paper, and his response was, "You may include a section on Madonna, as long as--I don't know how you anticipate doing this with the work of such a thoroughgoing vulgarian, but I wait with interest to see--you really think you've found a way to ground her in the traditions of American poetry."

And he meant it. Whenever we conferred about the paper, he took pains to make sure I was focused on the old stuff of proven, lasting value (Dickinson and Eliot) and showing how I thought it illuminated what Madonna was doing. For that matter, we also, in tenth grade, took a break from reading Chaucer and Beowulf and Pepys's diary to do one of our assigned five-paragraph themes on a work of contemporary fiction. "Good junk," our teacher called it--Updike, or whatever. The idea was to take the principles we were learning to apply to the foundational or great works and see how talented authors right now were still using them in a lesser but meaningful way. But we did it once, and then it was back to...I don't know, Party Patches, or wherever we were. On most educational issues, I'm slightly to the right of the average convent school nun, but I do think that it's good to work artifacts of popular culture into lessons sparingly. The continuity of Western civilization is probably the most valuable lesson of the humanities/social science part of education.

But of course, that's not the way researchers approach it. Most of the pop culture studies material you see involves closed readings, with only other pop culture or current events for context. The interpretive framework is almost invariably based in cultural studies, the poison seeds of which were germinating when I was in college. The idea seems to be to reassure students that they can just kind of glance at what's around them and see everything they need to know to understand art and the mysteries of life. Because, you know, if there's anything kids in their late teens and early twenties won't do without being shown how, it's navel-gazing.

Just one thing from the article that did make me chuckle:

Jackson "in many ways is the black male crossover artist of the 20th century," said Seth Clark Silberman, who teaches about race and gender at Yale. "He has grown up in front of us, so we have a great investment in him, even though some people today may find his image disturbing."

Some people may find his image disturbing? Sheesh. You know, if anyone out there has a list of people who are not disturbed by Jackson's current image, please do me the kindness of forwarding it to me so I can stay the hell away from them.

Okay, I am so totally going to go to the office right after I post this, but Meaty Fly is resurfacing occasionally and noted, a week ago, that an advisory panel to PM Koizumi recommended that China be regarded as a potential threat. I can't imagine who in his right mind would think otherwise, but as MF says, it's the sort of thing that is guaranteed to get the PRC pissed. President Hu also told a Japanese official this week that visits by Koizumi and his cabinet to the Yasukuni Shrine are an obstacle that must be resolved to improve China-Japan relations.

See, this is the sort of murder we used to have in Japan before people started flipping out and doing spooky serial-killer/Se7en stuff:

A former nurse was sentenced to death on Friday for murdering the husbands of two other nurses to receive payouts on life insurance policies taken out on the victims.

Japan has what I believe is the largest life insurance market in the world--I'm pretty sure the UK's is second, but I may have them reversed. The offing of a spouse to get the cash used to be the sort of killing you'd read about once every few weeks. Now there seems to be some sort of competition on to see who can come up with the most motiveless crime and most macabre corpse disposal, in which climate you're almost tempted to applaud these women for hewing to tradition by committing murders with a point of some kind and trying to make them look like accidents.

Almost.

I've done enough ragging on John Kerry that it's only fair to point out that I was mostly impressed with what he said in this interview with The Washington Blade. His response to this question strikes me as sounding genuine rather than evasive:

Blade: OK, last question. I�m curious: If you had been born gay [SRK rolls eyes], how different do you think your life would be?

Kerry: I can�t tell you the answer to that question because I don�t know what my � you know, I just can�t tell you how I would have responded to it. Would I have been at the forefront of the crusade in the 1960s or would I still be, as some people are, living a double life or something, I don�t know.

And his last word on the marriage debate is also one of the clearest statements I've heard from him yet about anything:

I think, you know, and I�ve said this before, I think marriage raises a different issue in the minds of a lot of people because of its deep religious foundations and institutional structure as the oldest institution in the world.

It is the oldest institution in the world � older than country, older than our form of government, older than most forms of government. And people view it differently.

What�s important to me is not the terminology or the status; what�s important to me are the rights. The rights. That you shouldn�t be discriminated against in your right to visit a partner in the hospital. You shouldn�t be discriminated against in your right to leave property to somebody, if that�s what you want. You shouldn�t be discriminated against if you have a civil union relationship that affords you the same rights.

Now I think that�s a huge step. There�s never been a candidate for president who has stood up and said I think we should fight for those things. And you�ve got to progress. Even that, I take huge hits for.

And you know, I stood up on the floor of the Senate and voted against DOMA because I thought it was gay bashing on the floor of the United States Senate. I was one of 14 votes. The only person running for reelection who did that.

If only he addressed every issue, including how he plans to keep terrorists from incinerating us all, as clearly.

Dale Carpenter's most recent article makes, as usual, a lot of good points. His discussion of the continuum of attitudes among gays in the Log Cabin Republicans is one of those things that are puzzling at first but sound obvious once explained to you.

Something he doesn't really address, though, is why "Republican-first gays" would join an organization with "gay-first Republicans" agenda. You don't need a formal group to be able to socialize and exchange ideas, right? And if you seriously believe that Republican principles are universally correct and thus more important than gay advocacy, wouldn't you be driving that point home most effectively by being just an active party member whose homosexuality only comes out organically, in the course of interacting with people?

Maybe that's one of the reasons that, despite my disaffection with the Democratic Party and frequent votes for GOP candidates, my encounters with gay Republicans have not moved me to change my registration. I understand what people are trying to get across when they say things like, "We should be Americans first and gays second," but to me that involves falsely isolating gay issues from everything else in life--less shrilly than leftist queer activists do, to be sure, but just as perniciously.

All real-life political decisions involve prioritizing, and gay issues are just like everything else in that we sometimes have to put other values ahead of them. I don't see why we deserve congratulations for doing so like everyone else. Well, okay, that's a bit harsh. I empathize completely with gestures of the I'm-queer-but-I-still-love-America type, and I've been tempted to make them myself. But I think that in the end, they just encourage people to believe that our sexuality is something that everything we believe is somehow oriented by. In that sense, if LCR is going to be useful, it's probably better for it to focus on frankly evaluating candidates and platforms through the single-issue lens of gay advocacy, leaving it to be understood that other, potentially more important reference points exist but are outside its ken.

The DPRK may be preparing to test-launch another missile:

The United States and Japan have detected signs that North Korea is preparing to launch a ballistic missile capable of reaching almost anywhere in Japan, Japanese government sources said on Thursday.

The preparations were detected after the reclusive communist state refused to take part in a fourth round of six-party talks on ending its nuclear ambitions and said it would never give up its nuclear deterrent.

Tokyo and Washington had detected the signs after analyzing data from reconnaissance satellites and radio traffic, the Japanese government sources said.

The Nikkei Japanese edition also reports that the North Korean central news agency was published as saying, "If the US brings about a nuclear war (on the Korean Peninsula), it is inevitable that US bases in Japan will draw Japan into the same nuclear war as well.*" Don't you love that? The DPRK regime was just sitting there south of the Yalu, minding its own business, getting on with the quiet domestic tasks of deciding which citizens to imprison and which to let starve to death from its incompetent economic policies, when the US swaggered by and forced it to get all bellicose.

Fortunately, no one's certain that there's a launch planned; everyone's just on watch. We'll see. As far as the blow it might deal to the six-member talks goes, who seriously believes the DPRK would have been persuaded to give up its missiles, anyway? It has a notorious record for breaking agreements. I don't think negotiations should be stopped, of course--things could get really ugly if everyone openly gave up speaking to each other--but I think the disruption of this particular round of talks is less significant than having yet another show of animosity in the region.
* Lit., "US bases in Japan will become a fuse that draws the flame of that nuclear war to Japan, too." Evocative metaphor, huh?

With all the bad news about how the deeply unwise push for gay marriage now is faring, it's nice to see evidence of the slow, steady, organic progress that means real gay equality. I'm not sure that I trust the HRC's criteria for how nice companies are to gay employees to be those I'd use, but I can only imagine they're pretty exacting:

The number of companies receiving the top grade rose to 56 in 2004, from 28 in 2003 and just 13 in 2002.

Ford previously scored 85 percent, but by adding gender identity to its non discrimination policy, which already included gays and lesbians, the score took a considerable jump.

I do think, however, that I need this explained to me:

Ford [the CEO of Ford Motor Co.] pointed to the need for the automotive industry to help nurture minorities, especially minority owned suppliers.

"In order to keep Michigan competitive in a global economy, we must continue to focus on the importance diversity plays in growing our economy," Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said. "Promoting diversity makes good business sense and will help position Michigan as an economic powerhouse in the 21st century."

It's that part about "nurturing," in connection with the adults who are responsible for making car parts that won't fail when I swerve to avoid a deer, that worries me. If "promoting diversity" means reminding automakers that blacks are just as capable as whites of making top-quality windshield wiper blades, great. If it means persuading a skittish foreman that someone he's pretty sure is gay can do assembly line work, also great. But the point should be to give people the tools they need to evaluate performance without letting superfluous personal characteristics get in the way, and to let all employees and suppliers know they'll be on equal footing. I'm not sure where the nurturing comes in.

*******

Speaking of queers and cars, Atsushi and I spent several hours driving around Kyushu in his new ride this weekend. It's kitted out with an electronic map and GPS navigation--I assume most new cars in the States are, too? Very sophisticated, very useful, and very annoying.

I got over the fact that our whereabouts were being tracked by satellite pretty quickly--it's not as if the government had implanted a secret chip somewhere in the thing. But of course, every three seconds, that soothingly impersonal female voice was saying, "You will continue without turning for at least the next five miles" and "You are now entering Miyazaki Prefecture" and "You will make a left turn in approximately 700 meters...You will make a left turn in approximately 300 meters...You will make a left turn here."

AAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!

Atsushi twinkled with easy-going amusement as always: "Darling, would you rather have me shoving a map at you and asking whether we're near the turnoff yet? Or pulling over every twenty kilometers? If the CD's started repeating, why don't you put in something else you'd like to listen to." Yeah, okay, you're right. I'm calm, really. Court and Spark. Gorges full of rocks and grass. The occasional spiraling bird. We're good. In fact, once we got into the mountains, I settled into watching the digital map twist around as we took each hairpin turn--and ended up making myself good and carsick. But it was a good weekend.

Sometimes Amritas is too nice. He quotes a book by one Marie Nishimori called Warning! Never Imitate Him: A Collection of Bushie's English, which is--how's this for a novel idea that'll have you rolling in the aisles?--a collection of the President's solecisms with pointers on how to avoid them.

Amritas chivalrously refrained from pointing out what's on the lady's homepage, but if you look at the header, you can get a sense of her (unsurprising) politics. (Given Japan's notorious environmental policies--what one can only hope are the most destructive in the developed world--she's got her work cut out for her at home. Be that as it may, Nishimori wants the Japanese reading public to know that Bush sucks.) Her way of selling her book is this:

ブッシュの school yard bully「学校のいじめっ子」的政治にムカついてる方も
テッド・ニュージェントが日本人を Japs と呼んでることを知り怒ってる方も
単に英語をお勉強したい方も
この本を読んで背筋が寒くなりながら爆笑しましょう！

For those who are sick of Bush's schoolyard bully approach to politics...
For those who were angered when Ted Nugent called the Japanese "Japs"...
For those who simply want to study English...
Read this book, and you'll simultaneously laugh out loud and get the chills!

Ted Nugent? I haven't read the book, so it's possible that Ms. Nishimori pads out the Bush part with an excursus into anti-Japanese, anti-Gaia talk of all kinds. But taking things at face value, WTF does something Nugent said on some radio program a few years ago have to do with Bush? Yes, he's backed Bush for reelection. And Kim Jong-il hopes Kerry wins. So what? There are only two real choices in a US Presidential election; each candidate is going to have legions of supporters who did things he did not endorse. Unless we know that Bush heard of the incident and reacted along the lines of, "Japs? Heh-heh, that's a good one. Have to use that some time," it's irrelevant. And please tell me Ms. Nishimori and other lefties would be wringing their hands over Nugent's Lenny Bruce-like litany of racial slurs if he'd come out in favor of Kerry.

Sometimes, I simultaneously laugh out loud and get the chills myself when I think of my political position these days. I'm not really one of those people whose politics changed dramatically after 9/11. It's not that I was a fount of wisdom about terrorist threats before then, mark you; but I was a Reason-reading guy who believed (living in Asia has a funny way of doing this to you) entitlement programs were sucking energy away from the federal government's core responsibilities, including strong national defense. And of course, I'm "socially liberal," which isn't a term I'm fond of but gets the point across.

I've supported Bush in the WOT, and I think he's a sincere and likable person. But I'm not a fan. I'm from a working-class family and got into an Ivy League school on my brain; I studied hard to learn an Asian language and majored in comparative literature. Legacy kids like Bush push all my buttons, trust me. And no, the fact that he overcame his typical rich-kid problems with drink and dissolution doesn't get me all aquiver with admiration at how well he's redeemed himself.

Still and all, I was brought up to recognize when I'm being childish, and I know that my feelings about Bush's background don't necessarily say anything about his performance as President. There's plenty to criticize--he's offered to spend so much federal money that I sometimes wonder why he doesn't just go the whole way and order the USAF to drop silver dollars from helicopters over all US population centers--but to get to the point of criticizing it usefully, you have to stop foaming at the mouth and start paying attention to the policies. Or not even always policies, exactly: There are potentially troubling questions about the way the Bush family exercises its influence, even if you accept that influence-peddling is how old rich families operate. But you have to look at facts and tease out their implications dispassionately if you expect people to trust your interpretations, and almost no one on the left seems capable of that anymore. And then, of course, you eventually have to confront the question of why Kerry is a better alternative, which is not a task I would wish on my worst enemy at this stage. It's not surprising that some enviro-nut (if her name is pronounced ma-ree and not ma-ri-eh, as it appears from the way she spells it in Japanese, she may be a foreigner or half-Japanese, BTW) can't make a coherent case against Bush, and it's not her responsibility to push effectively for Kerry.

But I wish someone could. While I plan to vote for Bush, I'd prefer to do so knowing that I've had access to a variety of the best opposing arguments and have dealt squarely with them. I don't mind making a choice I'm not 100% enthusiastic about as long I know what trade-offs I'm making. Unfortunately, "He speaks ungrammatically, and Ted Nugent likes him!" appears to be about as good as the opposition is going to get.

The Ministry of Education and Culture is apparently doing a bang-up job of teaching elementary school children our place in the universe:

When 348 fourth- to sixth-year elementary school children from four prefectures including Hokkaido and Nagano were asked to choose one of two options to correctly describe the earth's relationship to the sun, only 56 percent correctly answered that the earth revolved around the sun. A total of 42 percent said the sun revolved around the earth.

The survey also asked 720 children from six prefectures about why the shape of the moon appeared to change. Less than half of them (47 percent) correctly chose the answer "Because looking from the earth, the positional relationship between the moon and the sun changes."

When the students were told, "Name the celestial object that revolves around the earth like a satellite," 39 percent answered, "the moon" while 27 percent chose "mars" and 24 percent said "the sun."

Now, the lesson here to my mind isn't that the vaunted Japanese educational system is a total sham. It's that it isn't the perfect engine for producing uniformly informed citizens that starry-eyed (heh-heh) collectivists of all stripes would have us believe. The sample size, it is true, is not very big. Also, the researchers tested children in some of the less-affluent prefectures (though it's possible that they went to schools in high-income areas within those prefectures--I haven't seen). But that shouldn't matter much if the apologists for the Monbusho are correct and the national Compulsory Education Curriculum is bringing the fruits of good central planning to all corners of the state, et c.

BTW, I think this is my favorite part:

The associate professor said there was a problem with the current curriculum introduced in 2000 that gives a Ptolemaic system-type explanation that only looks at the movements of the sun, moon and stars as observed from the earth. He said changes should be made when the curriculum is next revised.

I'm pretty sure that even in third and fifth grade, we were taught by the planetarium director--in simplified terms, obviously--about the Ptolemies and the Greeks in Greece.

And why they were...um...WRONG, even though their explanations made the most sense based on the best information available to them. Maybe Japan is saving that part for junior high school now.

Tomorrow I leave for Kyushu for the three-day weekend. Looking forward to it; it's the first time I'll be seeing Atsushi's new place. The weather also seems to have cleared some after the typhoon-hammering they've had there this summer. Still like an oven, though, apparently. But that's okay. Atsushi bought a new car when he moved, and this'll be the first time I'm seeing it, too. I mean, I don't expect to be surprised at what it looks like. He's the kind who likes what he likes, so he basically bought this year's model of his old car, in an even more conservative color. But that's one of his charms. Another is that he's big-time sexy when he's driving.

Unfortunately, one of the things Kyushu is famous for is tarako, or cod eggs. Friends have asked for it as an　お土産 (o-miyage, a gift consisting of a local specialty that you bring from home to friends abroad or bring back for the homefolks when you go on vacation). I like regular old fins-and-scales fish, but (possibly as a vestige of having been brought up following the Levitical health laws) I don't share the Japanese belief about seafood that the more it looks like a sci-fi movie monster, the more of a delicacy it is. However, I will be flying back from Kyushu with vacuum-packed cod roe in my luggage because...well, my friends refuse to be content with the usual tasteless cream-filled pastry that seems to be the "specialty" of most other places in Japan. One of these days, I'll tell you about the time I bought and airmailed 50 jars of farm-made apple butter from my hometown as an o-miyage. After that experience, I decided I don't love my friends quite that much.

Anyway, hope everyone who's been in the direct line of a giant storm is okay, and hope everyone else has a great weekend.

Amritas has got my number:

"[O]ppress their own people"? The average AmeriKKKan is oppressed by the fundamentalist fascist Racist� RepubliKKKan Reich. That's why Sean is in Japan. Why do you think Sarah is really in Germany?

It's true. I moved to Japan to escape racism and xenophobia.

Actually, not often, but every once in a while, someone does just baldly ask me, in the middle of a political discussion, "Okay, so if you're so damned rah-rah-America, why do you live abroad?" It's a fair enough question, I guess. I haven't gone back to America because I'm happy where I am and think I'm doing something worthwhile. I'm in a relationship with the MOMD. I have great friends. My job doesn't involve rescue work or treating lepers, but I really do get to feel as if I'm helping people discover their competencies and achieve their goals. It's a nice plot of the garden of civilization to be working in. And Tokyo, for all its flaws, is a wonderful city and suits my personality. Why disrupt any of that?

Oh, and as a sidelight: One good thing about Japan is that this whole Dan Rather memo thing could never have happened as it did. I mean, you can definitely picture NHK doing exactly the same thing--in fact, NHK would probably have generated the memos in its own newsroom.

But you wouldn't have the audience standing around gaping with disbelief about it. In Japan, everyone knows that 75% of what you see on the news is partial baloney, and the other 25% is total baloney. Ditto with government statistics and the figures on corporate financial statements. People feel betrayed but not surprised when yet another untruth is brought to light. Of course, part of the reason is sad resignation, not healthy skepticism: The bureaucrats who make a lot of the real decisions are not elected, so the public has less incentive to get gung-ho about politics than it does in the States. And much of the interaction between government and big business that's considered "negotiation" here would be called "corruption" at home.

On the bright side, where revelations of malfeasance tend to bring a humiliated-but-quick resignation (often by a sacrificial lamb who is not the chief malefactor) in Japan, this whole CBS thing has the potential to produce a deeply satisfying (to the public) explosion of humiliation for most of the major parties involved. CBS seems to be disposed to brazen it out, but you never know.

Another Mitsubishi Fuso vehicle has had clutch failure--though this time there was no accident. The shaft detached and caused the dumptruck involved to stop in the middle of the highway, though. It was a 1984 model and, thankfully, I suppose, had a clutch that was already under recall (thankfully because it means they haven't discovered yet another defective part).

*****

For obvious reasons, Hitomi Soga and her family have gotten much of the attention. But there are other touching stories among the repatriated abductees from North Korea. Kaoru Hasuike will be allowed by the law department of Chuo University to return to his studies. Hasuike is 46; he was abducted while a junior home in Niigata Prefecture on vacation in 1978. He hasn't decided whether to go back to classes or do distance learning--understandably, there are significant readjustments he's still making.

*****

More darkly, two death row inmates were executed today; one was Mamoru Takuma, who went on a stabbing rampage in an elementary school near Osaka in 2001, killing 8 children. As they always do when Japan carries out an execution, human rights groups (and the Japan Federation of Bar Associations) are understandably protesting the lack of transparency in Japanese capital punishment. This Reuters story outlines things pretty well. Japanese executions take place when they're least likely to dominate the news cycle, and there's no prior warning. I'm not familiar enough with the way it all works to know whether the ability to appeal is really significantly curtailed; the part about not letting the families of those to be executed know until the same day does seem pretty harsh.

Of course, the reporter can't resist ending this way:

Capital punishment has aroused little debate among Japanese, who are shown by polls to strongly support the death penalty, and occasional efforts to suspend or abolish it have made little headway.

But with Japan and the United States among a handful of advanced nations where the death penalty is carried out, questions are being raised and international pressure increased.

Unless I'm remembering wrong, a woman Minister of Justice, Ritsuko Nagao, was the one who signed the highest number of execution orders in a single year in recent history. I think it was six inmates in 1996, but I'm not finding confirmation. This was after a long stretch in which executions had been few and far between in Japan. Lately, I think two or three a year has been the norm.

My searches are still not up to Toren's levels of weirdness, but the first half of September has produced a few, uh, winners. "Princesses in peril" would be my favorite were it not ten times more fabulous than my real blog name. For that, I'm simply obligated to hate it.

I also apparently came up for "korean gay flight attendants," my education about which has depended on a lamentably small (if promising) sample.

There was an entry for "beach uninhibitedness." I assume that was one of them heteraseckshals being dissolute and can only hope that my example of discreet chastity made an impression.

Someone searched for "teresa heinz kerry only an idiot health care," which strikes me as containing more linear logic and point than any position I've heard emanating from the actual Kerry-Edwards campaign.

And I think I was most touched by "how do you detect your wife having a lesbian affair," to which I can only say, Don't look at me, buddy!

But good luck. Maybe keep an eye on that friend she made in her self-defense class....

America and Japan are fellow travelers in more than just the WOT. If the Social Security debate has got you rattled, you might appreciate this "it could always be worse" news:

The Nippon Keidanren* (Chaired by Hiroshi Okuta) reported on 13 September that, by its calculations, if Japan's consumption tax is not raised [by 1% per year, it says elsewhere in the article], the balance of federal debt will reach 5 times GDP, the rate of hidden national burden (the ratio of tax and Social Insurance revenues to national income) will exceed 100%, and the government will go bankrupt by 2025.

Contemplating my retirement planning, I'm getting a real Auntie Mame moment here. As in, Vera Charles when her friends get the news that Black Friday has made their rock-solid investments worthless: "And everyone said I was such a fool spending all my money at Tiffany's!"
* Its website uses the transliteration as its English name, which would translate to something like "Japan Economics League." I should note that there's no guarantee that it has its figures right, but that's not all its own fault. No one really knows the extent of government or corporate debt in Japan, since rules for more transparent accounting were just put through (and incompletely) a few years ago, a decade after the Bubble burst.

Damn. Never published this last week. The Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta doesn't seem to be getting much play in the American press. Thankfully, there were only 9 deaths--multiple times fewer than in the Bali bombing--but there were nearly 200 people injured. Simon World makes the following point:

What matters is what the American people themselves believe. Using the major media and the blogosphere as (an admittedly imperfect) proxy, there has been some expressions of sympathy and interest, but far broader indifference and ignorance. Instead there's much concern over whether George Bush dodged a medical 30 years ago and whether the proof was faked. I agree it is an issue. So is John Kerry's Vietnam record. But there are nowhere near as important an issue as what does need talking about. Where are Bush and Kerry planning to take America in the next 4 years? What are they planning to do in the war on terror? On Iraq? On helping allies like Australia? On defeating al Qaeda, JI and their ilk? There seems to be a major case of not seeing the forest for the trees at the moment in American polity. The losers are not just Americans, but the world.

I think it's dangerous to take the blogosphere as representative of the American public, which was probably paying as little attention to the Dan Rather memo story as it was to the Jakarta bombing. I suspect that for a lot of people, the attention-grabbing issue was the 9/11 anniversary, which was impending last week and happening Saturday.

I generally only post on something if I think I have commentary to add, and I don't conceive of myself as a news source (though I'll occasionally give translations of key parts of Japanese articles). But Simon is right: Australia is an ally, it was targeted, and we should be showing support. So though it's late, let me say that we're with Australia.

In a veiled way, I've tried to indicate when I think the Koizumi administration deserves more expressions of solidarity from Americans for its support in the WOT, too, since much of it--especially the deployment of SDF personnel in Iraq--comes in the face of a good deal of opposition. (Thankfully, while Japan has been named as a target by al Qaeda, there have been no attacks here, and the Japanese taken hostage in Iraq have been released.)

Unfortunately, underappreciation of our allies' loyalty isn't the only problem; I wish Americans also had a better sense of what those allies are up against, in practical terms. The sheer number of people and shipped items that travel daily through Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai and Singapore is mind-blowing. The populations of most East Asian countries are huge, too. There was talk a few months ago that al Qaeda was setting up a cell here, probably for money laundering, and the Algerian-French man in question wasn't caught despite being wanted by Interpol. This is in Japan, a country with Westernized infrastructure, in which non-natives are very visible and the law enforcement systems highly developed. Most other Asian countries are far less organized, and those with home-grown terrorists cannot rely on better border patrols to help screen them out. I can understand why Iraq tends to absorb people's attention, since our own men and women are over there, but the world is a big place. Asia is probably the best place on Earth if you want to move yourself and your stuff undetected, and the evidence is that Islamist terrorists know it. Thanks to our friends here for doing what they can.

Okay, you know that mushroom cloud they saw over North Korea across the border from China on Friday? Well, we certainly heard about it here in Japan (flyover country for the DPRK's test missiles). There didn't seem to be much to say about it, since, unlike the explosion a few months ago, when casualties were reported almost immediately, there have been none from this weekend. It seems to be as certain as it can be that the explosion this weekend wasn't nuclear. The DPRK says it was for a hydroelectric project. North Korea is very mountainous and has plenty of hydroelectric potential--in fact, it's significantly more resource-rich in many ways than the South--so that's not a far-fetched explanation. Neither is South Korea's conjecture that the explosion might have been an accident in an underground munitions facility. In any case, the Chinese have reported no influx of the injured into their hospitals across the river, so it's possible that it was a controlled blast with no injuries, or (more darkly) that the operation was so secret that the DPRK is not allowing the injured to be treated where they might be noticed. You never know, especially since the North Korean government would account for its actions the same way no matter which was true:

The BBC said that when [DPRK Foreign Ministry official] Paek was asked why North Korea had not explained earlier about the blasts he told Rammell Pyongyang had not done so because all foreign journalists were liars.

Glenn Reynolds has decided to take a break from posting about contentious things like the election and tackle gay marriage. It's an uncharacteristically long post, and I agreed with most of it. I especially liked this passage:

Now, of course, any question beginning "what is John Kerry's position. . ." is a tough one. But — correct me if I'm wrong here — the only real difference between Kerry and Bush is that Bush has offered vague support to the certain-to-fail Federal Marriage Amendment. But it's, er, certain to fail. Now that's a difference, I guess. But it's not a huge one, and to me it doesn't seem to be a big enough difference to justify the vitriol. (Kerry's been, maybe, more supportive on civil unions, but I wouldn't take that to the bank.)

I support gay marriage, of course, though I'd be lying if I said it was as important to me as it is to, say, Andrew Sullivan. But if you look at the polls, it's opposed about 2-1 by voters. What that means is that you're not likely to see much difference between the parties until somebody thinks they can pick up enough votes to make a difference.

I think that gay marriage is good for everyone. Marriage is a good thing, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be just as good a thing for gay people as for straight people. Judging from the gay couples I know, it would be a good thing — and I'm entirely at a loss to understand why people think gay marriage somehow undermines straight marriage. But to get there, you need to make that case, not just accuse opponents of being closedminded-biblethumping-bigotsoftheredneckreligiousright. (Andrew Sullivan made some of these positive arguments quite well in Virtually Normal, but I don't think the tone on his blog has been as constructive of late.)

That last sentence is tact of the most delicate. Somehow over the last few years, gay marriage went from being something to work toward, as current gay life recovered from its origins in the social upheavals of the '60's and '70's, to being something that the government has to provide right now if we're to stop being "second-class citizens." And, of course, it's not just Andrew Sullivan.

Stephen Miller has posted his own non-endorsement of Bush on the IGF Culture Watch blog:

I wish I could support Bush, since I'm in his camp on a wide range of issues (the War on Terror, entitlement and tort reform, pro-investment tax cuts). But I can't. He's sold my vote to the religious right.

Yet I won't be voting for Kerry, with whom I disagree on most foreign and domestic policies, not to mention his wishy-washy position on topic G (he opposes gay marriage and supports state amendments to ban 'em, but claims he also opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment � just not enough to vote against it).

That's nice, but who does it leave? Lyndon LaRouche? Also, as Reynolds pointed out, the fact that the FMA looks pretty certain not to pass should be factored in, but few people do so. Whether it changes the character of Bush's election-year endorsement of the amendment is an open question, but a question that has to be given due consideration. (Many gays, of course, twist themselves Tantric trying to excuse Kerry's endorsement of the Massachusetts amendment and failure to vote on bringing the FMA to the table.)

And then there's the fact that the religious right is not the only constituency that opposes gay marriage. I know a number of married people who have personally, and in public, treated Atsushi and me as a perfectly "legitimate" couple but don't believe all the implications of gay marriage have been thrashed out sufficiently.

If I keep going, I'm in danger of producing yet another anagram of my usual gay marriage rant. That would be a dull old thing for everyone, so I'll cut it out and just hope once more that people can stop talking past each other sooner rather than later.

[pause]

Well, okay, I would like to point out just one more tangentially related thing that's been bothering me lately. Last week, I left a rather intemperate comment on this post at Classical Values, and immediately thought I'd been out of line and kind of panicked. Rereading it, I suppose it fortunately wasn't as belligerent as I was feeling. But the issue (of anonymity, not of outing) came back this afternoon when I received an e-mail from Janis Gore pointing out this story, which mentions short-fused lawyer John Rawls in connection with the proposed SSM ban in Louisiana. There's a picture of a gay couple in their living room, addressing envelopes for a drive to oppose the ban.

You know, when I see people from little regional cities--and I want to make it clear that I'm not tarring the South here; there's just as much busybodying in the Mid-Atlantic--who are willing to have their names and faces put in the paper in relation to gay issues, I think of these anonymous website commenters who bitch about gay marriage and the ineptitude of the HRC and hostile politicians and the meanies on the religious right and blah blah blah, and I want to backhand them.

There are plenty of honorable reasons not to use your full name on-line--from fear of identity theft to the trade-offs you might be making to work in an environment that's not gay-friendly. The fact remains, though, that our gains are mostly made by people who are willing to be unsecretive and take whatever sacrifices go along with that.* It's they who are going to make things better for the gays of the future, assuming our pushy activists don't spoil it all by issuing straight folk a new ultimatum every five minutes. For that matter, even the activists, tiresome as they can be, are putting themselves out there for what they believe, using their real identities. I don't think there's any ethical obligation for people posting under a pseudonym to absent themselves from discussions of gay issues. I do wish they'd show some respect and stop griping that other people aren't doing enough to make their lives easier.

* Especially if they aren't among those of us who live in super-big cities where there's already a lot of pressure on people to appear hip and gay-positive, which is why I say "they" rather than "we"

9 September is the anniversary of the opening day of the bar where Atsushi and I met. This year, for the first time in three years, I went to the anniversary party alone; Atsushi sent a congratulatory e-mail to the bar's message board. The guy who runs the place, who along with his partner of 17 years has become one of my best friends, responded that he's glad we're still together (despite Atsushi's being transferred to a distant city) and that we've become "like a pair of mandarin ducks."

This is a Japanese expression, though I suppose it might be a borrowing from Chinese. It's usually used as 鴛鴦夫婦 (oshidori fuufu, "Mr. and Mrs. Mandarin Duck"), to describe a couple that's settled and obviously devoted to each other. So I was touched. I was also amused enough to start my next message to Atsushi with ガーガー (gaa gaa: "Quack quack!") under the assumption that he'd seen our friend's post. (He had.)

And I idly looked up mandarin ducks on Google and found this page, which made me smile. Like a lot of male birds, mandarin drakes have colorful plumage to attract mates (they shed it outside the mating season and look like the females then, says one of the sites I read, which I think is also not unusual).

What was funny about it was that it really is what people tell us we look like as a couple. I mean, where one is decked out and the other plain. I'm not particularly high-maquillage, but I like intense colors and work in a casual enough office that I can wear them on weekdays. Atsushi works at a bank and has to dress conservatively, but--I can say this with confidence after three years with the man--he also really, seriously prefers black, white, navy, and charcoal grey. Only. He has a single (very dark) maroon T-shirt, a single (very dark) hunter green T-shirt, and a single (very dark) cocoa-brown cardigan. Otherwise, everything in his closet is a wintry neutral.

That's not a complaint--he has that Asian coloring that's just heart-stoppingly beautiful in black and white--but it's funny to go shopping and see him make a beeline for the grey clothes. Like, that's what catches his eye. I, on the other hand, was once asked by a friend who was going through my closet for a shirt to borrow, "Do you have anything in here that's not orange or purple? Oh, my bad! I guess this counts as magenta." Atsushi laughingly pointed out that that's why I have to wear khakis all the time; my shirts and sweaters don't go with anything else except jeans.

Anyway, I thought the picture was cute, even if we could always be snazzier if we tried. It also, being from the Meiji Shrine right here in Tokyo, reminds me that I'll get to see Atsushi this weekend. I'm flying down Saturday morning, and we're going to a hot spring. (No lewd jets-of-foam jokes, please; our friends have amply attended to those already. I have to say, I don't mind that everybody's a comedian nowadays. I just wish they didn't all have to be the same commedian.) Just five days to waddle through first.

It does not seem frivolous on 11 September to update the story of Hitomi Soga, a now-repatriated Japanese abductee to North Korea, and her husband Charles Jenkins, accused deserter from the US Army during the Korean War. Japan has a mutual-extradition treaty with the US, so there was a long series of negotiations over whether he would bring their two daughters to Japan so that the four of them could restart their lives here. Ultimately, the family was reunited in Indonesia and came to Japan to have Jenkins, who is said to be ill, admitted to one of the major research hospitals.

Japanese public sentiment is pulling hard for Jenkins to be permitted to settle with his wife in her hometown. The Japanese government, accordingly, pressed the US to show clemency. I don't know how much that has affected Jenkins's treatment--he just turned himself in--but I do know that it's hard to imagine the following scenario surrounding an accused military deserter almost anywhere else in the world:

Details are not yet clear, but according to the US Army, pay calculated at the rate for an officer of Jenkins' rank and years of service would amount to base pay of $2200 per month. Adding in housing and living allowances would bring the total to $3270.

[I'm snipping out the section that explains that he's been advanced some cash already and will not be asked to repay any money even if found guilty.]

[I]n Camp Zama, where Soga and Jenkins's family would be able to live together, there are, in addition to barracks, family housing, a school, and recreational facilities. Jenkins would also be free to use the 18-hole golf course and fishing pond.

Yeah, America's the real world center of barbarous, unforgiving inhumanity, huh?

I was going to wait to post this until I get home from the office tonight. But the date has been 11 September here in Tokyo for 11 hours now, and something about the way all the folks back home in the States are getting ready for bed, the way they did on 10 September three years ago, makes me want to say it now.

On 9/11, I came to Atsushi's apartment to watch what was happening on CNN. The whole night, while I sat staring at the television, shaking in anger, he came out to keep making me tea. He had to wake up at 6:30 as always, but he must have gotten up six or seven times overnight to boil water and change the leaves and express relief that the attacks had stopped. Over the next few days, messages from friends kept coming to my cell phone: "So sorry to hear about what happened in America. I hope your friends in NY and family in PA are safe. You must be white-hot mad--here's to a quick retaliation by your government." And last year, when I took Atsushi to meet my parents, his mother (who was a child during the War and married into a family whose property and holdings were wiped out by the bombing of Tokyo) asked him to offer a flower at Ground Zero while we were in New York.

Sixty years ago, Japan and America were in a war that made a disaster area of the Pacific Rim. By 2001, I could be an American man living in a gloriously rebuilt Tokyo, in a relationship with a Japanese man, with Japanese friends who expressed fellow-feeling with America when we were attacked. The Japanese Prime Minister has been one of our staunchest allies; the Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been sent on non-combat missions in Iraq. Japan's relationship with America and the rest of the West will always be complicated, but it is undeniable.

This is possible because our civilization is the real deal; the things we value are the things that are worth valuing. Our people are free. We feel a sense of control over our own destiny. We have hope and can-do resilience, which make it unnecessary to cling like death to grievances and turn them into inheritable grudges. Yes, America and Japan and the UK and the rest of the democracies sometimes do bad--seriously bad--things in our relations with the great wide world. We don't always live up to our ideals. We have plenty of individual resenters in our midst, too. But resentment and destructiveness aren't what characterize us. Indeed, we're even nice when we're vengeful: Since 9/11, we've spent our energy debating how to protect ourselves without having to be too hurtful to other people and peoples in the process. And we're still getting on passenger jets and taking elevators up skyscrapers.

I can't think of what to say about those who died without feeling as if I were exploiting them for symbolism, so I will just say that they aren't forgotten in the two languages I love, today those of allies rather than enemies:

Rest in peace.
安らかに眠って下さい。

Added at 23:00: Minutes after the moment of silence to mark the attack by the first plane, Atsushi sent me a cell-phone message: "CNNを見ていた？9・11から3年だね。悲劇を乗り越えるアメリカに敬服します。 [Were you watching CNN? 3 years since 9/11. I really admire America for so triumphing over tragedy.]" At the end of that sentence was a graphic of a star. I think I'm done crying now.

Virginia Postrel reports on a design-contest entry that envisions a hospital people might not find off-putting. She then notes:

You have to be pretty obtuse to define hospital "function" without paying any attention to how the environment makes patients feel--but that's exactly how hospitals have historically viewed the problem. Aside from the sheer ugliness of most health care environments, lots of them are also extremely confusing to navigate, adding that extra dollop of stress that patients and their loved ones so need and want.

But of course, that's only true of first-world hospitals, and only very recently. I'd wager it used to be that mere antisepsis and standardized-looking equipment carried a reassuring feeling of safety, standard practices, and quality control. (The layouts, I can't think of a defense for, though hospitals are no worse than government offices, airline terminals, and all manner of other public facilities in that regard.) Louis Pasteur made his discoveries about germs only a century and a half ago, after all. And hospitals in less-developed countries still can make you yearn for ugly vinyl tile and the acrid smell of disinfectant. It's a measure of how advanced our health care systems are that we think of sterilization as a given, something we can guarantee and work around in the process of making the environment more psychologically restful.

I am seriously going to go bonkers if I hear this locution out of some fag'n'dyke activist's trap one more time before Election Day:

"I don't think any self-respecting gay individual can vote for George W. Bush and I think that Republican leaders like Washington DC council member David Catania have made it clear that Bush has given the LGBT community no reason to reelect him this fall," Stonewall Democrats' Marble told 365Gay.com.

You know, I can see someone making the case that public opinion will not allow Kerry to skedaddle out of Iraq and soften up on the WOT even if he wants to, and that therefore it's okay not to be a single-issue war voter, and that therefore gays should vote Kerry-Edwards because (despite their no-show on the vote to bring it to the floor) they don't support the FMA. I'd be hard to convince, but it's an argument that could be made respectably. Or you could talk about the Bush administration's inconsistent approach to securing our borders and entry points. And on and on. However, to say that we all vote, or should vote, solely on the basis of whose policies are gay-friendly--to say this less than a week before the 9/11 anniversary--what the hell are these people thinking?

And for one homo to inform others what constitutes their self-respect as gay people is just...I mean, excuse me, Marianne? I didn't let my parents, my pastor, my gym teacher, or the Book of Leviticus define my self-respect for me, and now I'm supposed to let you do it? And that would be because...you look hot in Brooks Brothers, maybe? I have no problem with lobbyists' saying they think a vote for so-and-so will be damaging to the rights of gays in the long-term, or what have you. That's presumably what their job is, or part of it. Say that a lot of LGBT voters aren't thinking analytically enough about the issues--fine. Argue. Make your case contentiously. Make it passionately if you're fired up about it. Push the handful of issues your organization works on. But don't play the self-respect card every time someone in the Family weighs making a trade-off you don't understand. All that does is reinforce the idea that some ideological laundry list goes along with being out, which has to be one of the very most pernicious ideas floating around gay activism (and the competition is fierce). And yes, I know it's the Stonewall Democrats, and no, I don't expect anything more. It'd be nice to be able to, is all.

Land o' Goshen, isn't it November yet?

So. The question clearly is: Are Republicans willing to let gays contribute to the American economy for a few overtaxed years of working life before herding us into death camps, or will they have us all exterminated the very moment after a reelected Bush is sworn in? At least, that's the clear question to some people I've talked to. If you're interested in other possibilities, Rex Wockner seems to have about the best summary I've seen of what happened during convention week. We already know that the platform backed up Bush�s endorsement of the FMA and specified that homosexuality is �incompatible with military service.� And we know that the speakers (Giuliani and Schwartzenegger are almost always named together to demonstrate this, sometimes with Pataki and McCain) put a more moderate face on the convention regarding social issues.

The most cynical interpretation of last week's events is that the platform was calculated to get the hard-right vote, the speakers were trotted out to get the centrist vote, and one of the two is a scam. (Which one depends, naturally, on your own ideology.) I don't have the energy I'd need to get into my views of the gay marriage controversy yet again.* Suffice it to say that if its proponents wanted a showdown, they basically got it, with the predictable result that the minority that constitutes less than 5% of the population had less leverage than everyone else.

Don't misunderstand--I ache for the Log Cabin Republicans people. They have a whole set of problems that are not their own fault and are not specific to this election year. The noisiest gay liberals--using the word colloquially--have spent the last three decades hammering home the messages that (1) gayness and leftism/Democratic party affiliation go together like bacon and eggs, (2) gays demand to be loved for what we are, and (3) no one must ever be allowed to speak a word against gay people without getting hell for it. In that context, it's hard to blame some conservatives for believing that gay advocacy stands for nothing but entitlements, special protections, and intrusive public school programs. And it's correspondingly hard to imagine that LCR people don't get sick of constantly having to go out of their way to be the nice gays that everyone can do business with. I know that would drive me nuts. I was not impressed by the content of the ad that everyone got so heated up by last week, and I'm not LCR myself, but I made a donation just for the sake of moral support. They're our guys and gals, and they're working for us in the way they think best, and they felt kicked in the teeth.

I do have to ask, though, do people still think making marriage the focal point of gay advocacy is a good idea at this point? There is nothing close to a consensus among gay activists on why we need it--some talk about equal protection, some talk about inheritance and hospital visitation and taxation, some talk about the health benefits of long-term relationships, and some talk about the taking of one's place in adult society (in a sort of anthropological sense). That's not a criticism, BTW. I think debate is good. But the fact remains that it is still a debate. In the wider society, marriage and childrearing have gone through all kinds of destabilization in the last 40 years or so. We shouldn't be suckered by those conservatives who say that with the WOT and current state of society, "Now is not the time" to be discussing gay marriage, in the clear hope that we'll just go away and forget about it. On the other hand, if we get pushy and really cause a backlash, we could succeed in making life suck for those who come out several decades from now. Is that what we want?

I have no affection for the Republican Party. But my sense is that many of its members are genuine live-and-let-live types. They may not be pro-gay, exactly, but they recognize that part of being an American is the ability to choose your own happiness, and they can't look at two people who clearly nurture and sustain each other and tell them that society should stand in the way of their relationship. They may be immovable on marriage but open to persuasion on, say, hospital visitation and social security transfers.

Whose voices were loudest during the drafting of the RNC platform, I don't know. But it's possible that some who supported the FMA clause and the part about "the accompanying benefits afforded couples" were willing to do so because they were aware that they're unlikely to come to anything. That is to say, perhaps the message sincerely was to back off this particular issue right now, not that you can't be gay and Republican. For those who adhere to the denying-gays-marriage-rights-keeps-us-second-class-citizens line, I realize that that's a non-distinction. But we and those who come after us have plenty to lose if we try to change people's minds by fiat. Much as it offends my crabby loner sensibilities to say so, we need to choose our battles and capitalize on goodwill where we can find it; persuasion takes longer to accomplish, but its effects last longer, too.

* Sorry for the flurry of self-linking. Got started and couldn't stop.

Added on 7 September: And the link to the 365gay.com page is fixed. (Thanks for letting me know, Mike.) Confounded smart quotes! I could've sworn I'd un-selected them....

So it was stronger elsewhere; it usually is:

An earthquake measuring 6.8 on the open-ended Richter scale hit western Japan on Sunday, setting off tsunami waves along the Pacific coast, but there were no reports of serious damage, national broadcaster NHK said.

Two people were slightly injured in the city of Kyoto, although some of the strongest tremors were felt in the area of Nara, the ancient capital of Japan where there are many temples.

Here in Tokyo, it was one of those spooky swaying quakes that lasted for a while, as opposed to a quick shake. Glad there was no damage closer to the center. As the article from Reuters points out, people in the Kansai area are still on edge from the Kobe earthquake a decade ago. (The Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe region isn't considered an earthquake zone in Japanese terms, so construction codes were not the same as they are here in Tokyo-Yokohama.)

I also hope everyone in Florida is okay. This is a bad year for storms all over, it seems. Western Japan has also had its share of typhoon casualties and property damage this year, so when I haven't been watching the weather report to see what's happening in Florida, I've been worried about Atsushi in Kyushu. Yet another reason to look forward to fall.

I haven't had much to add to everyone else's comments about the sort of people who would keep hundreds of children captive for days, with no water, in midsummer, and then bring the roof down on their heads. It does dominate the thoughts, though, especially in combination with other news this week.

South Korea has been doing lab tests with uranium enrichment. The results were apparently a small amount that was "close to" weapons grade. Now, if there's going to be a headline that reads "----- May Be Close to Developing Nukes," I'd much prefer that the ----- be South Korea over some of the alternatives. (Additionally, the experiment was done four years ago, and the IAEA inspectors found no evidence it had been expanded upon since then.) And despite the clear potential for diplomatic problems that would result from the ROK's developing nuclear weapons, with the DPRK less than a two-hour drive from Seoul, who could possibly blame it for wanting to do so?

I wonder, does North Korea get much play in the US media? Here, it's in the news all the time. Some of the reasons for that are obvious: It's nearby, so the potential for patrol boat skirmishes and things is high, and there's some Japan-North Korea trade. But what you most memorably see (I'm talking over the last five years or so) on television are human interest stories about refugees. For a while there, it seemed as if there were a new Japanese wife of a North Korean escaping back here through China every Thursday. Often, she would tell the reporter, her voice and face distorted to protect her identity, about eating potatoes when there was no rice--a shocking deprivation to East Asians. And that was before the appalling Japanese abductee story broke and began dominating news coverage. Recently, the focus has also been more on diplomatic talks, particularly now that the six-way nattering over the DPRK's nuclear program is doing the on-again-off-again thing.

And that leads to the other exposure you get to North Korea here: excerpts from its news broadcasts, usually when some higher-up has made an anti-Japanese remark or some trade issue or summit has been reported on. The North Korean TV technology is so antiquated it has to be seen to be believed. The microphones have that dead sound the local news from an unaffiliated station had in the '80's. There's only one camera angle. And this creepy girl in traditional Korean costume (whose job is to grin like a lunatic and deliver fulsome praise about Kim Jong-il) often appears against a blue screen. And I mean just a blue screen, as if they'd forgotten to put in the background footage. In a humorous-but-not-funny way, it reminds you what riches we have: the lamest music video by the most faceless new pop-product non-talent in our world gets production values that are many times better than the broadcasts North Korea uses to remind citizens that they live in the perfect society.

I was going to say that this is all some comfort because, you know, if the DPRK can't get it together to make a decent news broadcast, they probably can't contrive something as tricky as nuclear warheads that detonate. But that's ridiculous, because if there's one thing all these types care about and will put every last resource into doing successfully, it's wrecking things. The reasoning runs, If your way doesn't produce a prosperous society that nurtures its citizens, don't bother changing; just blow the opposition and their artifacts up (and don't forget to torture the children while you're at it) until there's nothing left to stand as a rebuke to it. There's no fate bad enough for such people, but the Russian authorities had the right idea in making them dead, even if it's determined that they acted precipitously.

The Daily Yomiuri has a dual interview with former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and US Ambassador to Japan (and White House Chief of Staff toward the end of the Reagan administration) Howard Baker. The English version focuses mostly on their impressions of Reagan and, against that backdrop, what leadership is. But in the Japanese (I'm assuming Baker spoke in English and Nakasone in Japanese, but I'm not sure whether to call it the "original"), there's more about Japan's role in the WOT and on current issues along the Pacific Rim:

The Japan-US relationship is one of amity. Japan sent SDF personnel to Iraq, but that was on its own behalf. It was not just predicated on the Japan-US friendship. Of course, America applauded the deployment, but the SDF was sent in the national interests of Japan. [Yes, it's that repetitious in the Japanese version.--SRK]

We are well aware that Japan has a pacifist constitution. We acknowledge fully that there are restrictions on the SDF. Howvever, the world perceives Japan as a superpower. Japan has begun to take on the responsibilities of a major nation. The deployment of peacekeeping forces (PKO) to the Golan Heights and East Timor is such a role of a superpower. And I think that the deployment of the SDF to Iraq was also in that vein.

For Japan, the chief threat now is not North Korea. The very biggest i