Stay In the Loop

If the United States is to hold a presidential summit with North Korea, there are several allies we need to consult in advance.  One of those allies is Japan. The purpose of consultation with allies ahead of a big diplomatic summit is to make sure those allies, Japan, South Korea, and others, understand the American position and goals.  Consultations remove ambiguity, and assure allies that whatever offers the US might make at the summit, the alliance will remain. It is true that the US does not always consult allies on these matters, and that may not be a bad thing depending on circumstances.  For South Korea and Japan, this is a critical matter of security. Lives are on the line. With good information, Tokyo could craft good policy for a world that is hopefully post-detente. Ideally, South Korea and Japan should be at the summit as stakeholders or at least observers.  China could get a seat for the same reason, but so far there is no talk about any parties beyond Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, and possibility a host if the summit is held in a location other than Panmunjom, the Joint Security Area. North Korea might prefer to conduct the talks only with Kim and Trump in the hope to keep him isolated and blind.  In light of all this risks, Prime Minister of Japan Abe Shinzo may have to take some extraordinary steps of his own and seek a meeting with Kim Jong Un.

Not a Meeting of the Minds

On March 8, Kim Jong-un announced through South Korean diplomats that he wanted to talk to Donald Trump.  The offer passed through South Korea, and Trump accepted it immediately. He did not uphold any preconditions, or add new ones, or even take any steps to make sure the offer was genuine.  He just took it and ran with it. Then his staff had to spend the next two days hemming-and-hawing about whether or not an offer for a DPRK-US summit had even been made, or if Trump had actually accepted it.  From the looks of things, Trump certainly wants to do it and soon. To say this man’s “shoot from the mouth” style is serving him and us poorly again really does not illustrate anything. There is a reason the US has never held presidential summits with North Korea before.  It takes a long time to prepare a high level diplomatic meeting, and Trump no longer has the staff he needs for that. Hundreds of American diplomats and staff have quit since January 2017. The most experienced North Korea expert in the US State Department Joseph Yun retired right before the offer came in, and new people have not been applying to jobs in the State department.  Without the advice Department of States staff would give, the North Koreans will be able to manipulate Trump very easily, and so avoid giving anything up in exchange for a prestigious meeting.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War: A Review

 “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"-- Vizzini, The Princess Bride

            From 1954-1975, the United States of America was involved in a land war in Asia: the struggle for the future of Vietnam.  Vizzini’s remark gets passed around frequently, often with regard to the Vietnam War, sometimes Afghanistan and other places, because it seems to ring true.  The US lost the Vietnam War, and the locals won it.  Right?  Ken Burns and Lynn Novick remind the viewer that Vietnamese lost the war too.  It was a civil war, between two different ideologies with their own foreign allies.  Although The Vietnam War is very America-centric, the documentary strives to show us both sides of the Vietnamese perspective as well through interviews with the people who were there, and in so doing strives to be a definitive history of what the Vietnamese themselves call “the American War.” 

Good Turns At Pearl Harbor

It isn’t all bad news.  Last May, Barack Obama became the first American President to visit Hiroshima.  On December 27, 2016, Abe Shinzo became the first Japanese Prime Minister to visit Pearl Harbor.  There is a fine symmetry to these visits that illustrates the power of good, genuine gestures in the careful dance of diplomacy.

Why Do They Look White?

People often ask: why do characters in anime look white?  The answer is because you come from a majority white country, and due to the tropes of animation.  Most of the time, anime characters are not drawn to look white; they are cartoons and cartoons are meant to be cyphers.   Understanding the implied ethnicity of a cartoon character comes down to a conversation between the audience and the creator, just like all art.  Cartoons, be they western or Japanese employ a visual language known to the creator.  Visual languages are constructed through context, and the audience may miss an awful lot of the language if they do not share the creator’s context, leading to misunderstandings.  This happens to all art.  The audience brings their own context to the piece.  If you have the same context as the creator, you are likely to understand them more easily.  But we Westerners bring our own context when we watch foreign media, and vice versa.   Animation is a global medium now, and animators influence each other from opposite ends of the globe.

The Clinton Rules Remain In Effect

            This is absurd.  All evidence would seem to indicate that Hilary Clinton did not do anything wrong.  On July 6, FBI Director James Comey said there was no reason to prosecute, and went on for fifteen minutes about how Hilary is awful because Clinton.  On July 8, Comey contradicted himself in his testimony before Congress, when he admitted that none of the thousands of e-mail exchanges Hilary Clinton turned over to the FBI were actually marked classified.  Oops, my mistake.  Two were marked classified by mistake, as in they did not need to be marked at all.  So much for extremely careless. 

            But the story will not die though.  Bad stories never do, especially stories about the Clintons.  The Clintons are the most scrutinized political couple in history, ahead of only Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.  The source of this scrutiny is always the same: Republicans carry it out with the help of a willing news media.  It does sell clicks.  We call it the Clinton Rules: the normal rules of evidence do not apply, any innuendo, rumor, or drug-fueled imagining is worthy of investigation, assume guilty until proven innocent, make damn well sure to bite and hold.  Don’t believe me?  I do not need to prove it, because the press does a fine job for me.  Jonathan Allen admitted it on Vox last year!  How many scandals have the Clintons been involved in over the last two decades?  What were the consequences?  So far, the only prosecution in all that time was Bill Clinton’s impeachment for lying about an affair.  Maybe, just maybe the Clintons keep their perch and come out of the meatgrinder unscathed repeatedly because they have never done anything else wrong.  I know what most people are thinking, because they have written it.  A lot, they have written.  The rules do not apply to the powerful!  Rich man’s Justice!  JUSTICE! JUSTICEJUSTICE!  Is it so utterly unbelievable that someone powerful is actually innocent?  I thought after someone cries wolf too much, we were supposed to start ignoring the boy. 

オバマがアジアで

大統領は、アジア5月27日の週に過ごした、とかなりが行われました。彼は最初、米国との貿易を促進するために東南アジアに行き、その過程で、彼はベトナムに対する武器禁輸を解除すると発表しました。木曜日までに彼は三重県伊勢市にあるG-7サミットのために日本に行っていたし、金曜日に広島を訪問する最初のアメリカ大統領になって、広島平和記念公園にサイド旅行をしました。武器禁輸を持ち上げると、大きいですが、広島への訪問は、容易に大きな話です。以上の劇的な1、少なくとも。そこ旅の両脚について言いたいことがたくさんあるが、彼らは大統領の政策を介して接続します。オバマ氏は、常に21世紀がされることを知恵受け入れた「アジアの世紀を;」による東アジアと南アジアの周りに生活水準の継続的な改善、および私たちの残りの部分に大陸の増加経済的重要性に。私はアメリカ合衆国の大統領としてアジアに彼の最後になると信じてこの旅行は、完璧なフィナーレになります。

学習性無力感

2012年12月14日には、気の狂ったナイフを振り回す男は河南省、中国でChenpeng村の小学校の外に立っていた、と警察は彼を圧倒する前に、24人を刺しました。被害者のすべてが、23人の子供と（攻撃者がもともとナイフを盗んだ人から）1高齢者の女性は最終的に回復しました。その音のいずれかがおなじみていますか？サンディフック悲劇は、時間後に同じ日に発生しました。 （コネチカットで20対河南省では0）の死者数の格差はすでに過去4年間で上に述べてきました。これは、ポリシーが暴力的な爆発の影響を軽減できることを示しています。中国はナイフ銃乱射を持っている唯一のアジアの状態ではありません。日本、韓国、台湾およびその他の国は、あまりにもそれらを体験します。 Chenpengでの攻撃者は、銃器へのアクセス権を持っていなかったので、彼はナイフを使用していました。これら銃乱射を防止する難不可能であるが、異なるポリシーの選択と、それらを軽減することができます。

Obama In Asia

The President spent the week of May 27 in Asia, and got quite a bit done.  He first went to Southeast Asia to promote trade with the US, and in the process announced that he would lift the arms embargo against Vietnam.  By Thursday he had gone to Japan for the G-7 summit in Ise, Mie Prefecture and on Friday made a side-trip to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, becoming the first American President to visit Hiroshima.  Lifting the arms embargo is a big, but the visit to Hiroshima is easily the bigger story.  Or the more dramatic one, at least.  There is a lot to say about both legs of the trip, but they connect through the President’s policies.  Obama has always accepted the wisdom that the 21^st century will be “the Asian Century;” due to the continuing improvements in the standards of living around East and Southern Asia, and the increasing economic importance of the continent to the rest of us.  This trip, which I believe will be his last to Asia as POTUS, makes for the perfect finale.

Learned Helplessness

On December 14, 2012, a crazed knife wielding man stood outside Chenpeng Village Primary School in Henan Province, China, and stabbed 24 people before the police overpowered him.  All of the victims, 23 children and 1 elderly woman (from whom the attacker originally stole the knives) eventually recovered.  Does any of that sound familiar?  The Sandy Hook tragedy occurred on the same date, hours later.  The disparity of death toll (0 in Henan versus 20 in Connecticut) has already been remarked upon in the past four years.   It shows that policy can mitigate the effects of violent outbursts.  China is not the only Asian state to have knife-rampages.  Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other countries experience them too.  The attacker in Chenpeng did not have access to a firearm, so he used knives.  It is difficult-to-impossible to prevent these rampages, but with different policy choices, they can be mitigated. 

助けて！イノシラだぞ！

皆さんは福島が放射性イノシシによって破壊されているニュースを聞いたことがあります。いいえそうではありません。イノシシは、彼らが照射されることになる '、放射性」ではありません。二つの言葉の違いは、彼らは非常に異なる現象を説明し、単なる衒学ではありません。私は3月11日の5周年記念のための私の最後の回想の記事でこのことについて話しました。放射性物質が不安定と周りのそれ自身の粒子を投げることを意味します。放射線照射は、生物や物体が放射性物質を吸収した、および潜在的に有毒になることを意味します。自然と今までに大きく注釈のない行っている3月11日の可能な長期的結果のいくつかについて非常に現実的、非常に重要な話が人騒がせな見出しの下にある埋葬されました。本当に排気し、まだ人間を欠いているし、福島の一部で野生を実行している動物があります。日本は常に大きなイノシシの人口があったので、彼らは福島排除ゾーン内数で上げることは驚くことではありません。

人間は去るたびに、自然が引き継ぎます。ウクライナでは、我々はすでに自然の買収にチェルノブイリの除外ゾーンを見てきました。動物は戻って来て、植物はすべてをおいしげます。私は、任意のあった場合チェルノブイリ立入禁止区域に戻って移動元住民のいずれかの話は、なくなっていると思います。時々私は、人々は、国立公園に除外を有効にするとよいでしょう言うのを聞きます。私はウクライナに行ったことがないが、私はチェルノブイリ周辺の写真や映画を見てきましたし、それは非常に不気味です。私の部分については、私はほとんど面積はわずか30年前に放棄されたと考えていることはできません。今、同じプロセスは、福島県で発生され、それは潜在的な問題です。まだ日本に散在除外ゾーンからの難民が戻ってしたいと思います。しかし、彼らは戻って行くことができますか？これは、バックイノシシに戻ります。イノシシは日和見主義者です。彼らは、ちょうど国内の豚のように、ほとんど何でも食べるようになることができます。イノシシは、本州では非常に、非常に稀であり、時折、黒クマを除き、無捕食者で、除外に安全に繁殖することができます。

Run For Your Lives! IT'S BOARZILLA!

You may have heard the news that Fukushima is being ravaged by radioactive wild boars.  No, it is not.  The boars are not ‘radioactive,’ they would be irradiated.  The difference between the two words is not mere pedantry, they describe very different phenomena.  I talked about this in my last reminiscence post for the fifth anniversary of 3/11.  Radioactive means the material is unstable and throwing it’s own particles around.  Irradiated means the organism or object has absorbed radioactive material, and could potentially become toxic.  Buried under the alarmist headlines is a very real, very important story about nature and some of the possible long term consequences of 3/11 that have gone largely unremarked on until now.  There really are animals running wild in the parts of Fukushima that were evacuated and are still devoid of humans.  Japan has always had a large wild boar population, so it is no surprise that they turn up in numbers inside the Fukushima exclusion zone. 

３・１１の後五年

2010年4月7日に、私は宮城県大崎市で英語を教え始めました。大崎は北日本にある人口密度は薄いけれども、大きな農業の町です。【ほぼ一年の間、それは家でした。私は非常に深く、それの世話をし、まだやるようになりました。】私が去ることになっていた数週間前に、強大な地震がその地域を襲い、福島第一原子力発電所でメルトダウンを引き起こした津波が起こりました。 15,000人以上の人々は亡くなり、数万人が家を失いました。私は緊急避難を余儀なくされました。 5年前に起こったことをどのくらい覚えていますか？特別な日の記憶に、何を関連付けていますか？ あるいはその時間に？私は時計を見ていなかったので、時間は私の記憶に焼きつきませんでしたが、日付と曜日は焼きついています:2011年3月11日金曜日。

私はすでにここでその話をしたので、繰り返すことはしません。その代わりに、私の個人的な経験を読むことができます。私はこれまでに、何十回もその話をしてきました。私は残っている人生の間、それを語ると確信しています。地震の話は、私が“the foreign quarter”と呼んでいたところに住んでいた友人たちについてです。そこは、外国人住民が多くいる小さな田舎町のアパート群です。そては、遠くにいる私の家族が経験し、そして彼らがどのように答えかという話です。私の話は、私が省略したことにも注目すべきです。私が死について話すことはありませんし、聴衆が尋ねない限り、原発の大惨事を省く傾向にあります。 私にとって、3月11日は、地震と二次的影響に関するできごとでした。原発の大惨事は地震の二次的なものです。揺れと津波がメルトダウンを引き起こしたのですから。はるか北福島の東北での破壊が、私の心突き刺さりました。しかし、世界のほとんどのため福島第一原子力発電所は、【センターステージを取ります】。【それはあまりに多くの注目を集めているので、私は、なぜ原発事故に多くの人が注目し、なぜいまだに私が嘆いているかを、私はわかっていることを書きました。】人々は他の結果を除外する方法で、3月11日を原子力災害だと言い続けています。10年間で人びとは、これらのことをどのように振り返るのだろうか？地震が発生したこと、被災者に対して責任を負うことを人々に思い出させるべきなのか？地震と津波がどのくらい絶えゆく地域に致命的な打撃を与えたか、私が説明しなくてはならないことを理解しています。それが期待されているのです。ほとんどの人は東北のことを聞いたことがなく、今後もそうでしょう。【だからそうすべきなのです】。 【しかし、私はまた私が福島第一の重要性を無知のまま軽視することを懸念します。私は恐怖を感じました。ほとんどの人にとって、放射線も魔法のようなものかもしれません。】腫瘍および奇形を引き起こすいくつかの、特別な、エキゾチックで気味の悪いもの。【不安定と球体（というか、円。放射線は光線から派生）の周りの微分子。いいえ、放射線は内物質の特性です。これらの分子は、他の物質を打ったときに起こることは、それらがどのように相互作用するかによります。】多くの場合、原子力発電に使用されているウランやセシウムのような要素は、ヒトに対して毒性です。放射線の危険性は、材料が毒性であるか否かによります。これは通常の場合です。あなたは花崗岩が放射性になりうることをご存知でしたか？【もし、カウンタートップを横目で見ただけなら、私に伝えないでください。】これまでのところ、福島第一は、あらゆる人間の死を引き起こしていません。少なくとも、関連づける方法はない。ストレス誘発性の病気だけでなく、放射能中毒の可能性もあるであろう、メルトダウンは影響を受けやすく、75,000人の福島県人が避難しています。その苦痛は本物なので、私は、その影響を軽視することを心配してます。

すべてを、常に慎重にあなた方が読んでくれることを、私は願って終わりにします。

English version here

3/11 At Five

           On April 7, 2010 I started teaching English in Osaki, Miyagi Prefecture.  Osaki is a sparse but large farming town in northern Japan.  For almost a year, it was home.  I came to care for it very deeply and still do.   A few weeks before I was due to leave, a powerful earthquake struck the region, setting off a tsunami that in turn triggered a meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  Over 15,000 people died, tens of thousands more became homeless.  I was forced to evacuate in a hurry. 

Giant Squid

A giant squid swam into a harbor in Toyama Prefecture, and thank the gods of technology, people recorded videos.  It's so beautiful.

The Magic of The Atom

So, I’ve been seeing this around the interweb’s various social media lately:

        Now, I have no knowledge of the identities of the two posters, just-shower-thoughts and mallemerok.  I don’t know if they are Americans or not.  I don’t care.  Even if they were just having fun, the internet is taking them at face value.  And that’s where I come in.  I know I’m nerd-raging, but this is the sort of thing I started this blog to talk about.  The first poster is wrong.  You can find nuclear-spawned heroes and monsters in both American and Japanese popular culture.  The second poster is also wrong, because the narratives you get in our two countries are more the same than anything else.  The tumblr posters think the difference in the narratives is the outcome, but the heart of both narratives is that nuclear radiation is a source of power that is in effect, magic.  I do know that mallemerok is talking about the atomic bomb, and that event casts a long shadow over the Japanese imagination.  If I do not mention it, someone will think I need it pointed out.

When we think of nuclear spawned monsters we think of Godzilla and The Hulk, the Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms, and just about any movie featuring a giant version of an ordinary animal.  Amongst the heroes, Spider-man and the Hulk are the most famous and enjoy a large following in Japan.   But Japan’s Astro Boy also gets his powers from nuclear fuel and the lesser known Inazuman owes his powers to a radiation-triggered mutation.   The common connection between the stories about Spider-man and Godzilla is that nuclear radiation created them, but both characters go against the laws of physics.  Well, to say the likes of Spider-man and Godzilla break the laws of physics is to under-sell it.  There really is no science whatsoever in these stories.  They are so far from reality almost no one even bothers to go through the bad science of comic books and Japanese tokusatsu.  

What you have in these stories is: a) nuclear science is a source of power, b) so it confers power on other beings.  Well, a) is true.  Conferring power on another being is something that magic does.  In other words, popular culture treats nuclear science like a classic superstition.  With the right invocation, the atom gives its gifts.  Spider-man does not know the right invocation, but he could reproduce the accident that gave him his powers if he experimented.  Astro Boy’s creator Dr. Tenma did know the right invocation.  So did Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi.

Two high profile gun rampages within a week.  A lot has been said.  Every once in a while, when one of these makes the news overseas, my Japanese friends ask me to explain what the hell is even going on.  I do my best, I don't know how well my answers work for them.  My friends ask me these questions because mass shootings really do not happen in Japan.  Japan does have the occasional knife rampage, vehicular homicide, and gangland shootings, but not the kind of seemingly random events of violence we Americans deal with.   They do have very strict weapons control.  Almost nobody in Japan owns a gun and the police rarely carry them.  But that does not mean that Japan has no interest in weaponry.

A few weeks ago I announced that this blog was going to have weekly updates.  I apologize for not following through on that.  I haven’t given up, and I intend to keep writing here. 

So, on to today’s subject: changes in Chinese population control laws.  It is now legal for Chinese couples to have up to two children without special permission or pain of punishment.  A seemingly simple change speaks volumes about China.  If you remember, the Communist Party first announced plans for this round of reforms two years ago at the Party Congress that also anointed Xi Jinping as paramount leader.  In that post, I mentioned that Chinese Communist Party reformers like to work slowly, carefully and very deliberately.  And here we are, two years after they first announced it, the government of China relaxed the birth control laws.  The announcement made a lot of waves, and raised a lot of questions about it’s actual significance to China. 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: What We Know and When We’ll Know It

It’s been a long road.  After eight years of negotiations 12 countries finally agreed on something.  That alone is a pretty big deal.  Getting 12 people to agree on one thing is hard enough.  Unfortunately, I think much of the story about the TPP so far has been distorted by misinformation and anxiety on the part of the general public.  It has been hard to debunk the myths, scaremongering, and misconceptions about the TPP thus far because there is not enough information to present in response.  We had that problem because until last week, there was nothing.  We had statements of priorities from various trade representatives, but no actual deal.  A statement of your priorities has all the standing of a grocery list.  You need your partners to agree to the same things for them to have any meaning. 

I'm back!

Hey there, fellow Asia-philes!  It's your old Uncle Alex.  After a very long hiatus, I'm finally ready to return to blogging.  A lot happened in the last year, and I just needed fewer things to deal with for a time.  I'm settled in at a new job, new digs, new city and eager to return to my old interests.  So I'm planning to revive the blog and commit to a regular schedule of a writing.  I intend to do at least one major post a month; a nice long analytical piece.  In between those, whenever my muse inspires me I will post something, shorter.

There is plenty to talk about out of Asia.  For instance, Japan's new defense policies, the Trans Pacific Partnership, economic temblors in China, and of course, a mainstay in this space: North Korea!