My comment to this article was censored.
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2019年9月4日水曜日
Anti-Japanese moderation at Japan Today (FujiSankei)
2019年5月30日木曜日
The Leader Who Was ‘Trump Before Trump’
I don't like Abe and I don't vote LDP but this article is ridiculous drivel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/opinion/abe-trump-japan-illiberal-authoritarian-turn.html
Nakano Koichi and others of his ilk need to spend some time in Communist China, preferably in a "re-education" camp for Uighurs. The word "authoritarian" deserves more careful usage.
I cannot understand what he is trying to do with this article. Possibilities that come to mind include:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/opinion/abe-trump-japan-illiberal-authoritarian-turn.html
Nakano Koichi and others of his ilk need to spend some time in Communist China, preferably in a "re-education" camp for Uighurs. The word "authoritarian" deserves more careful usage.
I cannot understand what he is trying to do with this article. Possibilities that come to mind include:
(1) Pissing contest among Koichi, Jeff and Jake to see who can get the most ridiculously exaggerated nonsense about Japanese politics published in English;
(2) Advertising for NK's sound byte service for gaijin reporters who speak only English;
(3) Reassure Amuricans that however awful Trump is, he's not as bad as Abe;
(4) Reassure Japanese lefties that Abe is even worse than Trump;
(5) An attempt to influence voters in Japan because as we all know the New York Times in second only to the Japan Times when it comes to influencing the Japanese electorate;
(6) Get some pocket money for a few beers because his wife has cut his allowance.
2019年4月23日火曜日
The Happiness Report That Makes Me Very Unhappy
2019年3月23日土曜日
Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14 in Japan
Suicide has become the leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14 in Japan for the first time in the postwar period, an analysis of government demographic data has shown.
This is a typically moronic Japan Times article sourced from Kyodo.
Suicide is at the top of the list in Japan because other causes of death, especially accidents have been sharply reduced.
Data for the US for exactly the same age cohort is not available but a number of recent reports have said essentially the same thing as this CNN report.
This is a typically moronic Japan Times article sourced from Kyodo.
Suicide is at the top of the list in Japan because other causes of death, especially accidents have been sharply reduced.
Data for the US for exactly the same age cohort is not available but a number of recent reports have said essentially the same thing as this CNN report.
The total death rate for 10- to 19-year-olds in the United States declined 33% between 1999 and 2013 but then suddenly soared 12% between 2013 and 2016, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (PDF).
The report, released Friday, revealed that this rise in deaths is attributable to injury-related deaths, such as traffic accident fatalities, drug overdoses, homicides and suicides, as opposed to illness, such as cancer or heart disease.
Among 10- to 19-year-olds around the world, road traffic injuries were the leading cause of death in 2015, followed by lower respiratory infections and suicide, according to the World Health Organization.
To move suicide down from first place in the cause of death league table, it is clear what the Japanese government needs to do: increase the number of young people that get killed in traffic accidents. Homicides due to American-style gang warfare would also help as would drug overdose deaths. Getting the cooperation of industry to increase air pollution to Chinese or Indian big city levels would do wonders in terms of the numbers killed by respiratory disease.
As is their want, the Japan Times deleted my comment pointing out that with a 1, 2, 3 ranking, if you want to decrease the relative importance of 1, you increase the importance of 2 and 3.
It's the same for measures of gender equality. The female labour force participation rate in Japan is high and growing but still lower than the male rate of 85% with the result that Japan gets a bad rap for gender equality base on the female/male ratio.
That's easy enough to fix. Adopt policies the throw guys out of work. Exporting manufacturing jobs is a good way to do this. If male employment declines more than female employment, the gender gap is reduced and society is better off, or at least that's what advocates of reducing this gender gap seem to be saying.
That's easy enough to fix. Adopt policies the throw guys out of work. Exporting manufacturing jobs is a good way to do this. If male employment declines more than female employment, the gender gap is reduced and society is better off, or at least that's what advocates of reducing this gender gap seem to be saying.
It’s Not Just Japan. Many U.S. States Require Transgender People Get Sterilized
In the past few days there have been a number of news reports derived from a Human Rights Watch missive citing a recent Japanese Supreme Court ruling to the effect that it was not unconstitutional to require people who want formal legal recognition of a gender change to be "sterilized."
In other words, if you are a biological male but want to be legally recognized as female, you need to have your male kit (aka junk) removed.
All the usual Japan bashers and those who hold to the belief that countries run by white people do it better chimed in with all the usual cliches about Japan and its alleged cultural backwardness.
This article by someone with a vested interest in the subject shows that some political entities run by white people are just as "backward" as Japan.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-not-just-japan-many-us-states-require-transgender-people-get-sterilized
The Daily Beast sometimes gets it right.
One obvious question in this context is what do women think about this. How many women would want a biological male with all his reproductive kit still in place showing up in their changing room at a fitness center solely on the basis that "I regard myself as a woman and therefore I am a woman."
Aside from the failure to recognize that Japan was anything but unique in having the sterilization requirement for formal recognition of gender change was the total and abject failure of any writing to note that there are not a few feminists particularly in Britain who reject the idea that a trangender biological male with or without his/her original plumbing is a woman and such recognition constitutes "female erasure."
2019年3月21日木曜日
Yet another pundit suffering from numerical illiteracy
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in 2012, has promoted the message of letting “women shine,” and he rightly boasts that Japan’s female labor force participation rate has now risen above that in the United States. However, at just under 70 percent of women ages 15 to 64, that rate nevertheless remains below levels in Europe and Canada (75 to 80 percent), and is far below the participation rate of 85 percent for Japanese males.
"Far below the participation rate ... for males" is easy enough to fix. Put guys out of work and on the dole. That will improve the ratio straight away because as pundits like BE seem to forget ratios have a numerator and a denominator. You can make the ratio "better" either by increasing the numerator or decreasing the denominator. Both approaches will yield the same numerical result.
On any measure of gender equality, Japan fares abysmally in comparison with other advanced democratic countries. It ranks 110th in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, flanked by Mauritius and Belize.
Indeed. Japan has a very long way to go if it wants to get into the top ten and rub shoulders with the likes of Nicaragua (5th) and Rwanda (6th), but even Emmott's own Britain has some work to do. It does not make even to 10th rank, currently held by Namibia.
Similarly the US is sandwiched between Mexico and Peru, well below the likes of Zimbabwe and Uganda.
I suppose it would be churlish to point out that the claim "On any measure of gender equality, Japan fares abysmally in comparison with other advanced democratic countries" is complete BS. Japan actually scores rather well on Georgetown Index.
But, as I always say, "When it comes to Japan, never let facts stand in the way of what you want to write."
Racism in the Japan Times
The Japan Times commenting policy says
"Don’t disparage a person’s race, religion, color, gender or sexual orientation or generalize about a nationality or race."
Many of the posts here "generalize about a nationality" (mine, which is Japanese) in an extremely negative way.
Where are the moderators? Or is it forbidden to generalize about every nationality except Japanese?
2019年3月18日月曜日
Burden-sharing a remedy for falling birth rates in East Asia
This article contains numerous factual errors. It is typical of items appearing in EastAsiaForum: wishful liberal hope trumping hard reality.
-
“East
Asian countries now have the lowest fertility rates in the world”
The
World Population Review and other sources show a number of European
countries among the ten or twenty lowest fertility rate countries
including Moldova, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Cyprus, Bosnia And
Herzegovina, Spain, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and Germany.
-
While Japan’s current fertility rate is higher than those of other
societies in East Asia such as Singapore and Hong Kong, its decades
of low fertility mean that it is the most rapidly ageing population
in the region and is facing severe labour shortages.
Hong
Kong is not a country.
Japan
is facing labour shortages primarily because the economy is strong,
not because of past low fertility.
-
“The
Japanese government reported that fewer babies were born in 2018 than
in any year since 1899, the first year that records were kept. Other
East Asian societies look to be on track to follow in Japan’s
footsteps.”
The
number of babies born in Japan is down because of shrinkage in the
fertile age cohort, not because of a declining fertility rate. The
Japanese fertility rate bottomed in 2005 and has been generally
increasing since then albeit with some wobble at the second decimal
place.
It’s
not just East Asian countries that are reporting the fewest babies
born since recording keeping began. Finland is just one country
outside of East Asia where this happening.
Moreover,
Nordic countries overall are experiencing declining fertility. The
lowest fertility rate Nordic country is just barely higher than
Japan.
-
“There are two solutions to population decline: increase immigrant
flows or raise the birth rate.”
The
issue is not population decline but work force (aka taxpayer decline)
or in technical terms the dependency ratio.
-
“If immigration is not necessarily the panacea, what is? Making it
possible for women to participate in the labour market and
simultaneously have two or more children if they wish to.”
No,
this is not a “panacea” and that is clearly demonstrated by the
Nordic example. Norway has repeatedly been held up as the best
country for working women with children. When I was teaching my
国際視野から見た日本の育児支援制度
(The
Japanese System for Child Rearing Seen in International Comparison)
course, I used a NHK program about Norway on this very subject.
Nonetheless,
Norway is experiencing a falling fertility rate. Prime
Minister Erna Solberg stressed
this falling fertility rate in her 2019 New Year’s speech.
-
Japan
and South Korea are cases in point. Their demographic crises have
brought into sharp relief the difficulties that married women face in
trying to manage responsibilities in the workplace and at home.
Gender inequality is extremely high in both of these spheres in the
two countries.
But,
the Nordic examples show that high rates of gender equality are not
necessarily associated with high or rising fertility rates.
Further,
it is odd that China is not mentioned here. Its impact on overall
East Asian demographics is far greater than that of Japan and Korea
combined. While it rates higher than Japan and Korea in terms of
gender equality, it too has a falling fertility rate.
-
International
surveys consistently show that Japanese and Korean men contribute the
least to housework compared with men in other OECD countries.
But,
again those other OECD countries also have falling fertility rates.
Korea is the lowest fertility rate country among the 35 OECD members
but Japan is mid-range.
-Studies
of dual-earner couples in many parts of Europe demonstrate that the
propensity to have a second child is related to the share of
household work done by the male partner.
That
may well be the case but the impact of this is not sufficient to
offset other factors that lead to lower fertility rates and it is
certainly no panacea for declining fertility rates.
-
The
evidence is clear that gender inequality and fertility are closely
linked in many East Asian societies, particularly in Japan and South
Korea.
Correlation
is not causation.
2019年3月10日日曜日
Mercenaries and their Club Med facilities don't come cheap
President Donald Trump is pushing a plan that demands allies pick up the full cost of hosting U.S. troops in their countries, plus a 50 percent premium for the privilege of American protection, according to a news report.
Called “Cost Plus 50,” the plan would cost five or six times more for countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea, Bloomberg news reported Friday.
I thought the U$A was the world's policeman, not the world's gun for hire, but maybe it's time for some truth in advertising.
Another joint smoked in the Netherlands
While some believe the establishment of the joint venture was intended to pay Ghosn remuneration that would not be subject to disclosure in Japan, Ghosn’s side had told Mitsubishi the joint company would draw up strategies to maximize the effects of its partnership with Nissan, the sources said.
The two companies injected about ¥2.1 billion into it last year to help cover its operating costs. But about half the amount was paid to Ghosn, one of its board directors, between April and November 2018, according to the sources.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/03/09/business/corporate-business/nissan-mitsubishi-shut-dutch-joint-venture-amid-carlos-ghosn-pay-inquiries/
Only a billion yen for nearly seven months of "work"? That's practically slave labour. This needs a Jeff Kingston editorial and a visit from a UN provocateur.
EHK
2019年3月5日火曜日
外国人記者が斬る！ 多くの納税者が知らない「国際捕鯨委員会」脱退の政治的背景
Not often that I agree with David McNeill, but I generally agree with the points that he makes in this interview.
This point in particular is particularly noteworthy and something I did not previously know.
これまで、私の母国アイルランドなどのＩＷＣ加盟国が日本に対し「公海での調査捕鯨をやめれば、日本沿岸での商業捕鯨を認める」といった妥協案を提示したことが何度かありましたが、日本はいずれも拒否してきました。しかし、今回のＩＷＣ脱退により、日本は事実上、妥協案を受け入れたということになります。
(Ireland had repeatedly proposed recognition of commercial whaling in Japanese waters if Japan would stop is "research whaling. This compromise proposal was repeatedly rejected by Japan but Japan has essentially done the same thing with its recent withdrawl from the IWC.)
Unintended humour?
Taking these steps is vital to protect staff, their professional standing and the conditions under which they work, as well as the integrity of The Japan Times and the survival of the distinctive and important journalism it practices in an environment where press freedom is under threat.
https://tokyogeneralunion.org/japan-times-editors-open-letter
Leaving political issues aside, at its best the Japan Times makes it up to the level of a high school newspaper in rural Oklahoma. Despite claiming to have approximately 130 staff, it produces very little content of its own. On any given day, much of what appears in the paper is bought in from various wire and syndication services.
If anything, the Japan Times is a major source of misinformation about Japan. My favourite example:
That a woman could be arrested in this day and age for such an act — and in a country where sexually explicit manga and imitation-vagina sex toys are sold at convenience stores — seemed absurd. Surely the police had more “obscene” things to go after?
The porn, such as it is, that has been available in convenience stores is not sexually explicit as that term is usually defined and these stores do not sell sex toys of any kind.
My guess is that the author thinks Don Quixote, which does sell both male and female sex toys, is a convenience store.
Either the foreign editorial staff does not know enough about Japan to spot such absurd claims or more likely they are happy to publish anything that denigrates Japan and the Japanese.
Other commentary on this flap at the Japan Times.
'Fear' and 'favor' chill newsroom at storied Japanese paper
'Comfort women': anger as Japan paper alters description of WWII terms
Taking these steps is vital to protect staff, their professional standing and the conditions under which they work, as well as the integrity of The Japan Times and the survival of the distinctive and important journalism it practices in an environment where press freedom is under threat.
https://tokyogeneralunion.org/japan-times-editors-open-letter
Leaving political issues aside, at its best the Japan Times makes it up to the level of a high school newspaper in rural Oklahoma. Despite claiming to have approximately 130 staff, it produces very little content of its own. On any given day, much of what appears in the paper is bought in from various wire and syndication services.
If anything, the Japan Times is a major source of misinformation about Japan. My favourite example:
That a woman could be arrested in this day and age for such an act — and in a country where sexually explicit manga and imitation-vagina sex toys are sold at convenience stores — seemed absurd. Surely the police had more “obscene” things to go after?
The porn, such as it is, that has been available in convenience stores is not sexually explicit as that term is usually defined and these stores do not sell sex toys of any kind.
My guess is that the author thinks Don Quixote, which does sell both male and female sex toys, is a convenience store.
Either the foreign editorial staff does not know enough about Japan to spot such absurd claims or more likely they are happy to publish anything that denigrates Japan and the Japanese.
Other commentary on this flap at the Japan Times.
'Fear' and 'favor' chill newsroom at storied Japanese paper
'Comfort women': anger as Japan paper alters description of WWII terms
Reinventing the Japan Times: How Japan’s oldest English-language newspaper tacked right: Updated
Recommended:
Why South Korea and Japan still can’t put the past behind them
History is messy and painful. Even today few Koreans acknowledge that millions of their compatriots collaborated with the Japanese. Far better to define the Korean character as emanating, pure and brave, from a far-distant moment when it revealed itself in opposition to a monster. For some politicians, Japan-bashing is part of the point.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/03/02/why-south-korea-and-japan-still-cant-put-the-past-behind-them
The Irish have largely managed to get over 800 years of brutal British control. The Koreans seem incapable of getting over 35 years of Japanese control that was no worse and probably better than Britain in Ireland.
Disclaimer: My surname was carried to the US via County Cork, Ireland.
Why South Korea and Japan still can’t put the past behind them
History is messy and painful. Even today few Koreans acknowledge that millions of their compatriots collaborated with the Japanese. Far better to define the Korean character as emanating, pure and brave, from a far-distant moment when it revealed itself in opposition to a monster. For some politicians, Japan-bashing is part of the point.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/03/02/why-south-korea-and-japan-still-cant-put-the-past-behind-them
The Irish have largely managed to get over 800 years of brutal British control. The Koreans seem incapable of getting over 35 years of Japanese control that was no worse and probably better than Britain in Ireland.
Disclaimer: My surname was carried to the US via County Cork, Ireland.
It's OK. They are not sex slaves.
Behind Illicit Massage Parlors Lie a Vast Crime Network and Modern Indentured Servitude
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/massage-parlors-human-trafficking.html
Curious that the NYT uses indentured in this case but sex slaves in the "comfort women" case. Yet another instance of the NYT having one standard for Japan and another for predominantly white countries?
In point of fact a large fraction of "comfort women" and prostitutes in general in the Japanese empire were in fact indentured, typically to secure funds for their families.
2019年2月28日木曜日
Where are the used pantie vending machines?
In twenty years of teaching foreign nationals in Japan, I had a number of (male) students who went looking for such things. Only one, a Norwegian student, found something that might have been such a vending machine and it was not a machine that one might imagine. It was one of those things that dispenses plastic eggs with toys inside. The sign was very coy and gave no definitive answer to what was in the plastic eggs.
Exotic vending machines is a standard story in the foreign press but in a quarter century in Japan I have seen very little other than soft drink vending machines. Beer vending machines used to be common outside off licenses but they are largely gone and now can be found only inside of hotels.
I’ve seen condom vending machines in public places, but not recently. I know a few places where there are vending machines for soft-core porn magazines but they are not on the street. You have to know where they are.
Further, the journalists and other writers who have played up this story have been engaging in what I call cultural racism - trying to show the Japanese as weird and deviant.
Do an English language search on “used panties” or “used knickers” and you will find that there are on line sites for this kind of thing in the US, the UK, Australia, and I would imagine other countries.
That these claims about such vending machines live on is, to put it bluntly, based on (cultural) racism, the idea that the Japanese are so deviant culturally you can find things in Japan that exist nowhere else.
Even if such machines existed they would not be outside on the streets and they would be a sign not of perversion but of technological backwardness, that Japan did not yet have the on-line marketplaces that exist in the Anglophone countries.
NOTE: This is an edited version of a response to a question posted on Quora. The original thread and response is here.
Who is Tarnishing Whom or What: Jeff Kingston on the Incarceration of Carlos Ghosn
Who is Tarnishing Whom or What
INTRODUCTION
On 17 January the Washington Post published an opinion piece by Jeff Kingston a professor at Temple University Japan under the title “Brand Japan is taking a hit.” The nominal purpose of this article appears to be informing an audience that the arrest of Carlos Ghosn and recent reports of misogyny in Japan are harming the image of Japan. In his concluding sentence Kingston writes, “ Alas, the old, conservative, male elite that still dominates Japanese society is betraying Brand Japan along with the aspirations of women and young Japanese.”
Leaving aside the question of whether this assertion is valid, is not this
a message for the Japanese people to be delivered in the Japanese language, not an American audience that presumably already has its image of Japan tainted by those who are in Britain termed “pale, male, and stale”?
As far as I have been able to determine, Kingston has written nothing in Japanese for Japanese readers despite a voluminous output of commentary telling the Japanese in general and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in particular that they ought to do this, that, and the other thing. Not only does Kingston not write in Japanese for a Japanese audience, judging by the references in his more nominally academic writing about Japan, he does not read Japanese. In his essays in his Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan, there are no references to Japanese language articles, even articles that might support his claims. Further, as shown below, he has not read widely or carefully in even the English language reports pertaining to the arrest of Carlos Ghosn.
GRADING HIS ESSAY
In what follows, I provide commentary on the first half of Kingston’s essay much in the manner I did for undergraduate students essay over nearly four decades teaching Japanese history and sociology. I limit myself to what Kingston has to say about the Carlos Ghosn case because what constitutes misogyny is highly subjective and because the Ghosn case is more timely.
(JK) Pity Carlos Ghosn. Japanese prosecutors have denied bail to the jailed former Nissan chief executive, extending his two months in pretrial detention where he is subject to up to eight hours of interrogation a day without access to legal counsel.
(EHK) He has access to legal counsel although he does not have counsel present while being questioned. The French system (and other continental legal systems) do not necessarily allow lawyers to be present during questioning or require them to remain silent. A New York Times article noted this fact and it is explicitly stated in a British government advisory for British nationals arrested in France.
If Ghosn was a foreign national arrested in France, he would have little chance for bail and according to a British government publication, foreign nationals typically spend 24 months in pretrial detention. In the case of Brazil, it is 18 months. In Lebanon “you can be held on remand indefinitely without specific charges being brought.” In other words Ghosn is not necessarily worse off in Japan than a foreign national would be in any of the three countries where he holds citizenship.
Bail is, moreover, a system of extreme class inequity. For that reason California recently abolished cash bail and moved to a system that gives judges great (some say too much) latitude in deciding on conditional release. Nearly one-quarter of the enormous US prison population is made up of people who cannot make cash bail.
(JK) By wearing him down psychologically, prosecutors are trying to coerce the Franco-Brazilian-Lebanese executive into signing a confession drawn up in Japanese, a language he isn’t fluent in.
(EHK) Ghosn’s son has asserted that his father is being pressured to sign a confession. His lawyer (Motonari Otsuru) has publicly denied this saying, "Not once has Mr Ghosn said to us he has any concerns about being asked to sign something in a language he doesn't understand."
(JK) From the time of his “perp walk” in handcuffs as he was escorted off his private jet until he appeared in court with a rope around his waist ….
(EHK) By using the American slang term “perp walk,” Kingston is inadvertently drawing attention an American practice. Not only is it common in the US that those charged with crime appear in handcuffs, they are often shackled and dressed in orange jumpsuits. Pregnant prisoners have been forced to give birth while handcuffed. Roger Stone, arrested in conjunction with the Mueller probe appeared in court handcuffed and shackled.
According to the New York Times, “Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a federal prosecutor with a somewhat cavalier approach to the rights of the accused, built a tough-guy reputation by marching accused Wall Street types before the press.” The same article goes on to note, “One of the more famous walks of recent vintage involved Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who in 2011 was managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a likely candidate for the French presidency.”This produced outrage in France with numerous commentators describing the arrest as a lynching.
If Kingston’s goal is to present the Japanese approach as being out of line with “global standards,” introducing the American “perp walk” is a singularly odd way to do this.
(JK) He has been “prosecuted” by a cascade of leaks in the media that make his conviction appear inevitable. Indeed, less than 1 percent of defendants are acquitted, despite qualms in the legal community and civil society organizations about the extent of false confessions extracted under duress.
(EHK) Anyone who follows American court cases and investigations will know that leaks are hardly a Japanese peculiarity as a Google search on “Trump leaks” will instantly confirm. Moreover, Japanese judges are generally described as being tone deaf when it comes to public sentiment rather than being swayed by it.
The “less than 1 percent” acquittal rate, more usually stated as a 99% percent conviction rate, has been well explained by Harvard University Law School Professor J. Mark Ramseyer in a study published in 2001 and collaborated by all subsequent research on this subject. Japanese prosecutors simply do not go forward with cases they think they might lose. In practice they drop approximately 40 percent of possible criminal prosecutions rather than risk an acquittal.
There is, moreover, nothing particularly notable about a 99% conviction rate if US Federal Courts are used as the comparative standard. They too have 99% plus conviction rates. Some US Federal Courts have a 100% conviction rate.
If there is any country that extracts confessions by duress, it is the United States, not Japan. Numerous sources state that 95% of criminal cases in the US are handled by plea bargains. A plea bargain “is an agreement that, if an accused person says they are guilty, they will be charged with a less serious crime or will receive a less severe punishment.”
Plea bargains involve both coercion and duress. Often agreeing to a plea bargain is a condition for getting bail. This is the duress part. The coercion comes from the risk you run in going to court under the charges prosecutors have lodged against you. Studies show that if you do go to court without having agreed to a plea bargain, you stand a high probability of being convicted and receiving a sentence more than twice as long as what you would have received otherwise (up to seven times longer for drug offenses). The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are highly critical of US-style plea bargains.
(JK) By global standards, the former chief executive of one of the world’s most profitable car company was not overpaid, but by Japanese standards, he was, and that’s the yardstick authorities are applying to his case.
(EHK) This statement is completely false. How much he was being paid is not at issue. He (and Nissan) has been charged with understating his compensation on a required financial report. False statements on financial reports are a serious legal matter in general, not just Japan, and ironically the reporting requirement that is at issue here was one introduced based on an American model and in response to foreign criticism that Japanese reporting requirements were too lax.
As for Ghosn being overpaid, there was actually more criticism of this in France than in Japan. In February of 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that Renault shareholders and the French government had insisted that Ghosn take a 30% pay cut as a condition for getting a final two years as Renault CEO.
His flamboyant lifestyle which included renting the Versailles Palace for his second wedding did not sit well with the French public. The Renault union has shown little sympathy for Ghosn.
AFP interviewed Renault workers after Ghosn’s January court appearance. Comments ranged from indifference to hostility. "He's rolling in gold and doesn't increase pay for his employees," said one. Union official Philippe Gommard commented on Ghosn’s somewhat gaunt appearance. "I don't think workers will be too upset that Ghosn has lost weight. On the contrary, given how employees work in this factory, their working conditions, and given how he is seen as always asking for more while always taking more for himself, I don't think anyone here will miss him.”
He has also been the subject of satirical cartoons in the French press. One had him complaining that there were no gold flakes on his rice at the Tokyo Detention House.
Even before his arrest, Ghosn was being described as the personification of the “Davos man,” a not particularly positive image. Subsequent to his arrest, the same Wall Street Journal that had described his arrest and interrogation as an inquisition carried a long and detailed article documenting his extravagant lifestyle and use of Nissan-owned facilities for personal, non-business activities.
(JK) The puritanical zeal exhibited in the Ghosn case may play well to the domestic audience, which is apparently thrilled by the takedown of a greedy gaijin (foreigner).
(EHK) Kingston offers no evidence that the Japanese domestic audience is “apparently thrilled by the takedown of a greedy gaijin (foreigner)” and this assertion contradicts his previous accurate claim that Ghosn was “lionized” in Japan. It is also known that the whistleblower responsible for the investigation of Ghosn was not a Japanese but a gaijin.
(JK) Yet no such enthusiasm was evident in a number of recent Japanese corporate scandals such as Olympus (cooking the books), Takata (dangerous air bags) or Tokyo Electric Power (Fukushima fiasco).
(EHK) This is the single most bizarre sentence in this article. Clicking on the link for Olympus takes the reader to a BBC article that states, “Six executives sacked by Japan's Olympus have been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in damages after a massive accounting fraud.” The link for Tokyo Electric Power takes the reader to an article in The Guardian describing how three former executives of the company are on trial for professional negligence. That Japan did not prosecute Takata or its executives is irrelevant. Three Takata executives were prosecuted in the US and the company fined one billion dollars. Further, the defective Takata airbags were manufactured by a subsidiary, not Takata itself, in Coahuila, Mexico.
(JK) Ghosn is also accused of submitting falsified documents. That, to be sure, is a serious offense. Yet last year prosecutors decided against indicting bureaucrats for tampering with documents submitted to the Japanese parliament that exonerated Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in a scandal involving a sweetheart land deal. Double standards?
(EHK) Quite possibly, but this is a whataboutism argument and the kind of thing that gets a “two wrongs don’t make a right” argument when I have the temerity to point out that Japan is not the only country with warts. I have found that critics of Japan revel in comparisons that show Japan in a bad light but as soon as I introduce a comparison that shows Japan no worse than another country or even better it elicits the “two wrongs don’t make a right” or “just because the US/UK or wherever is worse than Japan, that does not mean that Japan should not strive to be better.”
There is, moreover, a double standard in Kingston’s reference to the “sweetheart land deal” more usually referred to as the Moritomo Gakuen scandal. Kagoike Yasunori (65) and his wife were held for 300 days in the same system that is holding Carlos Ghosn. Although the Japanese press speculated that they were held solely to keep them from further embarrassing Abe, Kingston’s favorite target, I could find no evidence that Kingston expressed sympathy for their plight let alone editorialized about it. To be sure, Kagoike and his wife are not a very appealing couple, but ten months incarceration for an alleged non-violent crime is still ten months incarceration whether you are Japanese or a Davos man with French-Brazilian-Lebanese citizenship, $60 million in Nissan stock and a declared income that was running at more than $340 thousand per week at the time of arrest.
CONCLUSION
I would not accept something like Kingston’s piece as an undergraduate essay. I’d hand it back and say rewrite it. You don’t have to agree with me but you need to demonstrate that any comparisons you make or imply between Japan and other countries are comparisons of Japanese reality with foreign reality, not comparisons of Japanese reality with foreign ideals. Further, if there are numerous sources that do not support your thesis, cite them and explain why you think they are not relevant, don’t just ignore them.
Finally, if you are saying what the Japanese should or should not be doing, write in Japanese in Japanese language venues. Better yet, if you think your ideas would improve Japan: (1) naturalize and vote; (2) stand for election. Naturalization is not difficult. Naturalized foreigners have been elected to the Diet and local government office. Even if election attempts fail, giving stump speeches will enable more Japanese to get the message than if writers confine themselves to English language venues.
NOTE: For a version of this commentary with footnotes and links, click here.
INTRODUCTION
On 17 January the Washington Post published an opinion piece by Jeff Kingston a professor at Temple University Japan under the title “Brand Japan is taking a hit.” The nominal purpose of this article appears to be informing an audience that the arrest of Carlos Ghosn and recent reports of misogyny in Japan are harming the image of Japan. In his concluding sentence Kingston writes, “ Alas, the old, conservative, male elite that still dominates Japanese society is betraying Brand Japan along with the aspirations of women and young Japanese.”
Leaving aside the question of whether this assertion is valid, is not this
a message for the Japanese people to be delivered in the Japanese language, not an American audience that presumably already has its image of Japan tainted by those who are in Britain termed “pale, male, and stale”?
As far as I have been able to determine, Kingston has written nothing in Japanese for Japanese readers despite a voluminous output of commentary telling the Japanese in general and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in particular that they ought to do this, that, and the other thing. Not only does Kingston not write in Japanese for a Japanese audience, judging by the references in his more nominally academic writing about Japan, he does not read Japanese. In his essays in his Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan, there are no references to Japanese language articles, even articles that might support his claims. Further, as shown below, he has not read widely or carefully in even the English language reports pertaining to the arrest of Carlos Ghosn.
GRADING HIS ESSAY
In what follows, I provide commentary on the first half of Kingston’s essay much in the manner I did for undergraduate students essay over nearly four decades teaching Japanese history and sociology. I limit myself to what Kingston has to say about the Carlos Ghosn case because what constitutes misogyny is highly subjective and because the Ghosn case is more timely.
(JK) Pity Carlos Ghosn. Japanese prosecutors have denied bail to the jailed former Nissan chief executive, extending his two months in pretrial detention where he is subject to up to eight hours of interrogation a day without access to legal counsel.
(EHK) He has access to legal counsel although he does not have counsel present while being questioned. The French system (and other continental legal systems) do not necessarily allow lawyers to be present during questioning or require them to remain silent. A New York Times article noted this fact and it is explicitly stated in a British government advisory for British nationals arrested in France.
If Ghosn was a foreign national arrested in France, he would have little chance for bail and according to a British government publication, foreign nationals typically spend 24 months in pretrial detention. In the case of Brazil, it is 18 months. In Lebanon “you can be held on remand indefinitely without specific charges being brought.” In other words Ghosn is not necessarily worse off in Japan than a foreign national would be in any of the three countries where he holds citizenship.
Bail is, moreover, a system of extreme class inequity. For that reason California recently abolished cash bail and moved to a system that gives judges great (some say too much) latitude in deciding on conditional release. Nearly one-quarter of the enormous US prison population is made up of people who cannot make cash bail.
(JK) By wearing him down psychologically, prosecutors are trying to coerce the Franco-Brazilian-Lebanese executive into signing a confession drawn up in Japanese, a language he isn’t fluent in.
(EHK) Ghosn’s son has asserted that his father is being pressured to sign a confession. His lawyer (Motonari Otsuru) has publicly denied this saying, "Not once has Mr Ghosn said to us he has any concerns about being asked to sign something in a language he doesn't understand."
(JK) From the time of his “perp walk” in handcuffs as he was escorted off his private jet until he appeared in court with a rope around his waist ….
(EHK) By using the American slang term “perp walk,” Kingston is inadvertently drawing attention an American practice. Not only is it common in the US that those charged with crime appear in handcuffs, they are often shackled and dressed in orange jumpsuits. Pregnant prisoners have been forced to give birth while handcuffed. Roger Stone, arrested in conjunction with the Mueller probe appeared in court handcuffed and shackled.
According to the New York Times, “Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a federal prosecutor with a somewhat cavalier approach to the rights of the accused, built a tough-guy reputation by marching accused Wall Street types before the press.” The same article goes on to note, “One of the more famous walks of recent vintage involved Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who in 2011 was managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a likely candidate for the French presidency.”This produced outrage in France with numerous commentators describing the arrest as a lynching.
If Kingston’s goal is to present the Japanese approach as being out of line with “global standards,” introducing the American “perp walk” is a singularly odd way to do this.
(JK) He has been “prosecuted” by a cascade of leaks in the media that make his conviction appear inevitable. Indeed, less than 1 percent of defendants are acquitted, despite qualms in the legal community and civil society organizations about the extent of false confessions extracted under duress.
(EHK) Anyone who follows American court cases and investigations will know that leaks are hardly a Japanese peculiarity as a Google search on “Trump leaks” will instantly confirm. Moreover, Japanese judges are generally described as being tone deaf when it comes to public sentiment rather than being swayed by it.
The “less than 1 percent” acquittal rate, more usually stated as a 99% percent conviction rate, has been well explained by Harvard University Law School Professor J. Mark Ramseyer in a study published in 2001 and collaborated by all subsequent research on this subject. Japanese prosecutors simply do not go forward with cases they think they might lose. In practice they drop approximately 40 percent of possible criminal prosecutions rather than risk an acquittal.
There is, moreover, nothing particularly notable about a 99% conviction rate if US Federal Courts are used as the comparative standard. They too have 99% plus conviction rates. Some US Federal Courts have a 100% conviction rate.
If there is any country that extracts confessions by duress, it is the United States, not Japan. Numerous sources state that 95% of criminal cases in the US are handled by plea bargains. A plea bargain “is an agreement that, if an accused person says they are guilty, they will be charged with a less serious crime or will receive a less severe punishment.”
Plea bargains involve both coercion and duress. Often agreeing to a plea bargain is a condition for getting bail. This is the duress part. The coercion comes from the risk you run in going to court under the charges prosecutors have lodged against you. Studies show that if you do go to court without having agreed to a plea bargain, you stand a high probability of being convicted and receiving a sentence more than twice as long as what you would have received otherwise (up to seven times longer for drug offenses). The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are highly critical of US-style plea bargains.
(JK) By global standards, the former chief executive of one of the world’s most profitable car company was not overpaid, but by Japanese standards, he was, and that’s the yardstick authorities are applying to his case.
(EHK) This statement is completely false. How much he was being paid is not at issue. He (and Nissan) has been charged with understating his compensation on a required financial report. False statements on financial reports are a serious legal matter in general, not just Japan, and ironically the reporting requirement that is at issue here was one introduced based on an American model and in response to foreign criticism that Japanese reporting requirements were too lax.
As for Ghosn being overpaid, there was actually more criticism of this in France than in Japan. In February of 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that Renault shareholders and the French government had insisted that Ghosn take a 30% pay cut as a condition for getting a final two years as Renault CEO.
His flamboyant lifestyle which included renting the Versailles Palace for his second wedding did not sit well with the French public. The Renault union has shown little sympathy for Ghosn.
AFP interviewed Renault workers after Ghosn’s January court appearance. Comments ranged from indifference to hostility. "He's rolling in gold and doesn't increase pay for his employees," said one. Union official Philippe Gommard commented on Ghosn’s somewhat gaunt appearance. "I don't think workers will be too upset that Ghosn has lost weight. On the contrary, given how employees work in this factory, their working conditions, and given how he is seen as always asking for more while always taking more for himself, I don't think anyone here will miss him.”
He has also been the subject of satirical cartoons in the French press. One had him complaining that there were no gold flakes on his rice at the Tokyo Detention House.
Even before his arrest, Ghosn was being described as the personification of the “Davos man,” a not particularly positive image. Subsequent to his arrest, the same Wall Street Journal that had described his arrest and interrogation as an inquisition carried a long and detailed article documenting his extravagant lifestyle and use of Nissan-owned facilities for personal, non-business activities.
(JK) The puritanical zeal exhibited in the Ghosn case may play well to the domestic audience, which is apparently thrilled by the takedown of a greedy gaijin (foreigner).
(EHK) Kingston offers no evidence that the Japanese domestic audience is “apparently thrilled by the takedown of a greedy gaijin (foreigner)” and this assertion contradicts his previous accurate claim that Ghosn was “lionized” in Japan. It is also known that the whistleblower responsible for the investigation of Ghosn was not a Japanese but a gaijin.
(JK) Yet no such enthusiasm was evident in a number of recent Japanese corporate scandals such as Olympus (cooking the books), Takata (dangerous air bags) or Tokyo Electric Power (Fukushima fiasco).
(EHK) This is the single most bizarre sentence in this article. Clicking on the link for Olympus takes the reader to a BBC article that states, “Six executives sacked by Japan's Olympus have been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in damages after a massive accounting fraud.” The link for Tokyo Electric Power takes the reader to an article in The Guardian describing how three former executives of the company are on trial for professional negligence. That Japan did not prosecute Takata or its executives is irrelevant. Three Takata executives were prosecuted in the US and the company fined one billion dollars. Further, the defective Takata airbags were manufactured by a subsidiary, not Takata itself, in Coahuila, Mexico.
(JK) Ghosn is also accused of submitting falsified documents. That, to be sure, is a serious offense. Yet last year prosecutors decided against indicting bureaucrats for tampering with documents submitted to the Japanese parliament that exonerated Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in a scandal involving a sweetheart land deal. Double standards?
(EHK) Quite possibly, but this is a whataboutism argument and the kind of thing that gets a “two wrongs don’t make a right” argument when I have the temerity to point out that Japan is not the only country with warts. I have found that critics of Japan revel in comparisons that show Japan in a bad light but as soon as I introduce a comparison that shows Japan no worse than another country or even better it elicits the “two wrongs don’t make a right” or “just because the US/UK or wherever is worse than Japan, that does not mean that Japan should not strive to be better.”
There is, moreover, a double standard in Kingston’s reference to the “sweetheart land deal” more usually referred to as the Moritomo Gakuen scandal. Kagoike Yasunori (65) and his wife were held for 300 days in the same system that is holding Carlos Ghosn. Although the Japanese press speculated that they were held solely to keep them from further embarrassing Abe, Kingston’s favorite target, I could find no evidence that Kingston expressed sympathy for their plight let alone editorialized about it. To be sure, Kagoike and his wife are not a very appealing couple, but ten months incarceration for an alleged non-violent crime is still ten months incarceration whether you are Japanese or a Davos man with French-Brazilian-Lebanese citizenship, $60 million in Nissan stock and a declared income that was running at more than $340 thousand per week at the time of arrest.
CONCLUSION
I would not accept something like Kingston’s piece as an undergraduate essay. I’d hand it back and say rewrite it. You don’t have to agree with me but you need to demonstrate that any comparisons you make or imply between Japan and other countries are comparisons of Japanese reality with foreign reality, not comparisons of Japanese reality with foreign ideals. Further, if there are numerous sources that do not support your thesis, cite them and explain why you think they are not relevant, don’t just ignore them.
Finally, if you are saying what the Japanese should or should not be doing, write in Japanese in Japanese language venues. Better yet, if you think your ideas would improve Japan: (1) naturalize and vote; (2) stand for election. Naturalization is not difficult. Naturalized foreigners have been elected to the Diet and local government office. Even if election attempts fail, giving stump speeches will enable more Japanese to get the message than if writers confine themselves to English language venues.
NOTE: For a version of this commentary with footnotes and links, click here.
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