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Those  Were  the  Days

12/13/2018

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Friday, December 14, 2018.

Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
14F Kioicho Bldg.,
3-12 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku,
Tokyo 102-0094

​When I came to Japan Emperor Showa had just died.  Prime Minister Noburo Takeshita had just resigned and Chiyonofuji was the reigning sumo Yokozuna under challenge from the behemoth Konishiki.  Tsutomu Miyazaki was murdering little girls, Odaiba was still under development, Shunichi Suzuki was still the Governor of Tokyo, and the new Tokyo City Hall in West Shinjuku was under construction.  Ikebukuro’s Sunshine 60 building was then still the tallest building in the land.  Takako Doi, rising to the zenith of her career, was a symbol of the “ona no jidai.”  The blue-hued ¥500 notes that were discontinued in the late-1980s were in their final months of circulation, and vending machines still accepted them as they were retooled for the ¥500 coin.  Since then I have seen several generations of vending machines and electronic station ticket gates, each one an incremental advance over its precursor.  Similarly, the famous Japanese bullet trains have undergone several generations of advanced models.

Rie Miyazawa scandalized people with her fine art nude photo book, “Santa Fe.”  (I own two copies of it.)

The Oedo Line subway in the capital didn’t exist yet.  Not by that name, anyway.  While it was under construction it was called the “Number 12 Line.”  It was christened “Oedo Line” by Governor Shintaro Ishihara.  I never liked that name.  Better to call it simply the “Edo Line.”

I don’t recall ever seeing a station platform safety gate or barrier in those days.  It took a terrible accident at Shin-Okubo Station on the Yamanote Line in Tokyo, in which two Korean men were killed by an oncoming train while trying to rescue a Japanese drunk from the tracks, for train companies to get with the safety program and start a vigorous safety gate campaign.

“Tachi-shoben,” public urination, was still fairly common.  I haven’t seen that in a long time.  The same is true of spitting in public.  Gobs of spit everywhere really irked me in those early years.  Most of all was the work place smoking.  I used to work in an office that featured a blue cloud of tobacco smoke hovering overheard.  I bought a charcoal filter gas mask and made no secret about wearing it at my desk.

The Internet, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Starbucks, cell phones, digital cameras and e-mail didn’t exist yet.  High school girls were enamored of “pokeberu” pagers, and they wore “loose socks.”  Without a choice of international supermarkets, many foreigners here relied on care packages from home, or else the Foreign Buyers Club in Kobe.  Christmas decorations were available then, but Halloween was not yet a thing.  In Harajuku, Takeshita-dori was only half the story.  In those days Inokashira-dori was closed to traffic every Sunday so that electric bands could take over the street.  I took thousands of photographs.

There has been a revolution in banking since then.  When I arrived, ATMs were isolated inside banks.  After 3:00 p.m. they were not accessible when the banks closed.  There were no ATMs in convenience stores, department stores and stations.  24-hour access to money didn’t exist.  And, ATMs did not accept foreign credit cards, bank cards or debit cards like many of them do now.  Unfortunately, I got caught a couple of weekends with no money and had to spend my days at home with no food, drinking water, waiting for the banks to open on Monday morning.

Those were the days!


Published as "Looking back on the good, and not so good days" online and as "Those were the good old days  -  or were they?" in the print edition on Sunday, December 23, 2018.
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Hiroshima

8/2/2018

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Thursday, August 2, 2018.

​Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4 Shibaura, Minato-ku,
Tokyo 108-0023


I recently visited Hiroshima for the first time.  I wanted to go in July, before crowds descended on the city for the annual atomic bomb memorial anniversary.  it is a beautiful city, and I would like to visit it again.  Downtown is small enough to walk everywhere I wanted to go.  Plus, the city is organized and primed to host international visitors.  Multi-lingual tourist information is easily available, and in the Memorial Peace Park itself the park is well-wooded, signage is excellent, there re plenty of bench seats for resting and there are many public toilets available.  No garbage receptacles, though.

I worry that overuse of the word "peace" renders its true meaning and motivation anodyne:  the Peace Park, the Peace Museum, the Peace Fountain, the Peace Boulevard, the Peace Bell, the Peace Clock, the Peace Cenotaph with the Peace Pool and the Peace Flame, etc.  After roaming around the city on my own for a couple of days I joined a tour for my last day, before returning to Tokyo.  It was then, while listening to my Japanese guide, that overuse of the word "peace" began to aggravate me.  Others in the tour group seemed not to appreciate that in 1945 there was a war going on.  It was total war.  It was a war that Japan started and that Japan waged in a notoriously heinous and criminal fashion.  It was a war that Japan stubbornly refused to give up long after its cause was lost, preparing to sacrifice its own civilian population in a fight to the death against battle-hardened U.S. Marines.  And it was a war in which Japan allied itself with Nazis!  In the summer of 1945 there was still no end in sight, so I'm thankful the Americans used their new weapon to force the Japanese government along.

Of course, the A-bomb did not push Japan into surrender.  Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese General Staff was prepared to push on.  What decided the issue was the very real threat that the Soviets would parachute into Sapporo and take the northern island of Hokkaido.  Surrender to the U.S. became the lease offensive of a list of evil options.


But I could be wrong.



Published in The Japan Times on Sunday, August 12, 2018 as "Too much focus placed on 'peace'."

I don't like the title chosen by the newspaper.

​The use of atomic weapons was a terrible thing, no denying.  I am somewhat averse, but not completely averse to terrible things.  Knowing how bad atomic weapons are, we may not legitimately judge the decisions, behaviours or values of the past by our contemporary values.  We can do it, of course.  We do it all the time.  But doing so is illegitimate.  Even worse was the use of conventional weapons which killed more people and did more damage due to more extensive use.  People are prone to let atomic/nuclear weaponry distract them from the evils of conventional weaponry  -  and they are prone wrongly to judge the past by our present values.  In addition, Allied forces were/are not free of accusations of wartime atrocities.  The annual homage to Chiune Sugihara is interesting and predictable.  While his efforts to save Jews are commendable, his actions make him simultaneously a hero to the world and a traitor to his country.  Interesting.  I've long suspected that his story is revived once a year in Japanese media as a purification ritual to distance themselves from their guilty association with war crimes, or at least with their Nazi allies.  Or not.  It's never suggested in Japan that Sugihara was a traitor.  I admit that I'm not very interested in Mr. Sugihara, although I know his story quite well.  Chiune Sugihara bores me.  I know that there were dissenting opinions in U.S. power circles about the new weapons' use.  Some dissenting opinions were fair and some were ridiculous, but none of them were/are convincing.  By the summer of 1945 the Imperial Navy and Air Force were fundamentally gone and the USAAF was bombing Japan at will and largely unopposed.  But the Imperial Army was still deployed, still armed, still dangerous and still game for war.  Japan was sending out peace feelers, and it might be said that the stubborn Anglo-American insistence on "unconditional" surrender was a problem that by itself artificially extended the conflict by fortifying the Axis will to resist.


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God's existence and President Duterte

7/7/2018

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Sunday, July 8, 2018.
 
Reader’s in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4 Shibaura,
Minato-ku,
Tokyo 108-0023

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's questionable grasp of Christian theology  -  specifically of Roman Catholic theology  -  is somewhat wanting.  His recent criticisms of the Church in his country make him sound like a man who never really understood what he was taught in his catechism class as a boy, but who formed his religious ideas from popular culture instead and formed all his opinions on that basis.

About his promise to resign if God's existence can be proven (“Prove God exists, and I’ll resign:  Duterte,” Sunday, July 8, 2018), it must be said that proving God's existence is not really the issue.  Putting aside for a moment sophomoric arguments about what constitutes "proof," I must first wonder what proof the President would possibly accept.  None, I suspect.
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Heisei  Era  Japan

6/24/2018

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​Sunday, June 24, 2018.
 
Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4 Shibaura, Minato-ku,
Tokyo 108-0023
 
My life in Japan is contiguous with the Heisei Era.  A retrospective of Japanese life in the Heisei Era is resonant with me because it touches many of my personal experiences here.  My 1980s were occupied mostly with study  -  seven years of university.  My leap into adulthood, employment and independence came with my arrival in Japan.  My plan was to travel farther, to get as far away from my Canadian hometown as I could get without approaching it again from the opposite direction  -  to discover the diametrically opposite antipode and reside there.  Tokyo is not it, but when I arrived here I discovered a country of the living:  a place to be human.

Rainy Season.  I wasn’t prepared for it.

Recruit Scandal.

Doi Takako and the “ona no jidai.”

The investigation, arrest and prosecution of the child murderer Miyazaki Tsutomu.  His case introduced the term “otaku” to me.

I was riding the Marunouchi Subway Line in Tokyo about 90-minutes before Aum Shinrikyo released deadly gas there.

Attempts by prime ministers and cabinet ministers to dismiss homelessness as a lifestyle choice in the face of legions of homeless people sheltering in major train stations in the capital.

Yukio Aoshima ran a delightfully minimalist election campaign for the Tokyo Governor’s office  -  and won!

When Hideo Nomo cunningly escaped his rigged Japan League contract in order to play Major League Baseball he was openly vilified in the Japanese press as a traitor  -  until he was successful, when he was immediately eulogized as a hero.

The yen was sky-high on money markets and Japanese ladies were dancing their money away at Juliana’s.

Kogyaru culture and loose socks.  Street music in Yoyogi Park every Sunday.

A sick American president vomiting on Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.

I got to see Chiyonofuji wrestle.

Writing.  196 of my letters printed in The Japan Times.



​
Published in The Japan Times on Sunday on Sunday, July 1, 2018 as "One life amid the Heisei era."

I forgot to mention Miyazawa Rie's nude photo book, Santa Fe (1991).  Miyazawa was a teenage model and at the age of 18, as soon as she was finished with high school, she and released this book of nude photographs shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  It caused some controversy at the time, Japanese people wondering what it meant or what is said about young Japanese womanhood that this is the sort of thing they do directly out of school.  I have two copies of the book.  It's not erotic.  Bound collections of full-frontal female nude photography is a genre in Japanese culture.  Is it pornography?  Maybe.

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Hague  Convention 7,  Christopher  Savoie  2

5/7/2017

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Sunday, May 7, 2017. 

Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4 Shibaura,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023



Thank God for Christopher Savoie.  I always remember the American father who forced Tokyo to act on the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction which it signed in 1980 but then ignored.

“Years after Hague signing, parent who abducts still wins” (Monday, May 1, 2017) and “Parental abduction victims hold rally to push for joint custody rights” (Saturday, May 6, 2017) are the most recent additions to my thick file of Japan Times stories on this issue which I began keeping in September 2009.  That is when Christopher Savoie famously, valiantly, virtuously and rightly tried to re-claim his kidnapped children from his Japanese ex-wife by seeking asylum with his youngsters inside the American Consulate in Fukuoka.  “Asylum” is self-evidently the right word for it.  Ultimately, he failed.  The consulate turned him over to Japanese authorities, but the Fukuoka police and prosecutors dropped their case (“Fukuoka cops drop child-snatching case against Savoie,” November 14, 2009) and deported him instead.  Prosecuting him would have been too shameful for Japan and cast the country in a humiliating bad light internationally.  It was a textbook example of how it (sometimes) takes foreign pressure to move Japan forward.

More attention has been given to the plight of children and their alienated parents since then, but application of the Convention is not satisfactory.  To make it satisfactory requires starting with acknowledging and treating the abducting parent (usually but not exclusively their Japanese mothers) as criminal kidnappers (a capital offense in some countries).  Active intervention to repatriate of the children followed by the prosecution and long imprisonment of the kidnapper are not excessive suggestions.

But I could be wrong.

​
Published in The Japan Times on Sunday, May 21, 2017 as "Custody rights remain huge problem."
​
I have written many letters on this topic over the years.  This is the second or third to be published.  My driving point  -  a point which so far has faithfully been edited out  -  is that the Japanese State is an accomplice to kidnapping, that by failing to prosecute the (mostly) women who do this, and likewise failing to enforce the legitimate custody decisions reached by foreign courts (which it is obliged to do under the Hague Convention) the State is aiding and abetting a  heinous crime and actually encouraging it by cultivating the belief in parent’s minds that if they reach these shores they are free and clear.  I regularly hint that the perpetrators be charged with a capital offense not because I want them to be executed, but because I want the crime and the abducting parents to be recognized for what they are.  It feels like only an extreme approach like that will succeed in this environment in educating people.  But if a few Japanese ex-wives end up being hanged for international kidnapping, well …

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Unforgiveable   Crimes

11/3/2016

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Thursday, November 3, 2016.
 
Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4 Shibaura, Minato-ku,
Tokyo 108-0023

The Thursday, October 20, 2016 story “Ethnic slur hurled at demonstrators” reported on ongoing protests in Okinawa against a planned American military base relocation there.  A police officer dispatched from the mainland city of Osaka to assist police work in the southern island was quoted shouting “dojin” (aboriginals, natives) to rowdy protestors.  In the context, the word was clearly a slur.

Declaring things "unforgivable," as Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga is quoted here, is the hyperbolic Japanese way to show extreme gravitas.  But it's silly and wrong, really, because in time most wrongs have to be forgiven, or at least closed simply to move forward with life.  If we make an account of all the things that have been declared unforgiveable then society would unavoidably be a dysfunctional, dystopian nightmare of suspicion, hate, vengeance and all manner of ill feelings towards our fellows.  And it's not, despite some people's claim that it is, which tells me that common people have more sense  -  greater moral sense  -  than the authorities who say such silly things.  Another favorite is the expression "cannot be avoided," favored by magistrates to casually shed themselves of responsibility for their own actions, like snakes, when they are handing down harsh punitive sentences.  Such expressions seem to show a paucity or lack of reflective consciousness and a moral conscience.  I mean, they are not intelligent things to say.  But I could be wrong.  Here's a motto for Japan:  in defeat, malice; in victory, revenge.  But that hardly seems a recipe for a happy, good life.

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Obama  in  Hiroshima, Atomic  Bomb  Apology

6/1/2016

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Wednesday, June 1, 2016.
 
Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
5-4, Shibaura 4-chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
 
Regarding the Tuesday, May 31, 2016 story “Obama visit highlighted how apologies differ in U.S., Japan,” Japanese are big on regret and "sincerity."  But regret is not an apology and sincerity is impossible to gauge.  I regret many things, but that doesn't mean I am apologizing for them. I regret that climbers die on Mt. Everest.  I regret that a seven year old boy was abandoned in a Hokkaido forest.  I regret that The Beatles broke up. I regret that the oceans are awash with plastic waste.
 
Apology is something else consisting of at least three components.  1) You clearly and without obfuscation admit what you did.  2) You clearly and without obfuscation admit that it was wrong.  3) You clearly and without obfuscation promise not to do it again.  Japanese government apologies for their heinous and criminal execution of the Pacific War consistently fail to satisfy these components which do not relate to the Japanese notion of "apology."  This is why so many in the world, particularly in Asia, say that Japan has yet to apologize for the war while Japanese insist they have already  apologized copiously.  In addition, clarity does not seem to be a Japanese forte. The U.S. does not need to apologize for the A-bombings of Japanese cities.  Japan itself is responsible for bringing the war to that point: Japan started the war in the Pacific; Japan waged it in a notoriously criminal and heinous fashion; Japan stubbornly refused to give it up long after its cause was lost.  The proposition that a sea detonation would have demonstrated the weapons' power, swayed the Imperial government to surrender and make the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unnecessary stupidly underestimates human psychology and mis-takes human behavior.  Who are these people who periodically say this stupid thing?  People will fight and die for what they believe in even if what they believe is demonstrably wrong.  So there.  Apologies for the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ought to come from the government of Japan, not from Washington, D.C.

But I could be wrong.


Published in The Japan Times on Sunday, June 5, 2016 as "Apologies by Japan always ring hollow." 

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Daylight  Saving  Time  Japan

5/2/2016

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Wednesday, April 27, 2016.
 
Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4- Shibaura,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
 
Regarding the story “Making hay while the sun shines:  Should Japan adopt daylight saving time in summer?” (The Japan Times on Sunday, April 24, 2016), I grew up with DST but I never understood the point of it. I still don't. That's not for any lack of patient explanation. I've listened to/read the same explanations again and again, but they seem like the effete reasoning of people educated beyond their intelligence with questionable, negligible or unreal applications in the real world. The explanation of the opportunity to spend more quality time with my family feels like the lamest reason yet. I don't like full daylight at 4:30 a.m. but so what? I live with it - and live fairly nicely. Arriving at a Japanese workplace a couple hours earlier to take advantage of the daylight, with the intention of leaving work a couple hours earlier as compensation probably would not work in this country. Japanese companies would still expect their employees to stay until the usual closing hour, ignoring and abusing the DST goal, and illegally taking advantage of its workforce in the bargain. But I could be wrong. By the way, I rather like dusk at an early hour. Creeping darkness at 3:30 p.m. in the winter time is spooky and neat. As an adult I have to be awake in the daylight to work, make money and live, but the night time hours have always been my favorite. Concealment. Freedom.
 
 
Published in The Japan Times on Sunday on Sunday, May 1, 2016 as “Daylight saving time best avoided.”


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Leslie  Van  Houten

4/20/2016

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Saturday, April 16, 2016.
 
Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
4-5-4 Shibaura,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
 
About the Associated Press story “Ex-Manson cult member may get parole, tells of 1969 murders in graphic detail” (Saturday, April 16, 2016).
 
I do not understand parole.  I don’t particularly care for it, either.  I think if a government is going to presume to sentence people to terms of incarceration (or worse) then it ought to have the courage to abide by its policy and judicial rulings.  I understand that incarceration is expensive and that there is a case for paroling inmates who are rehabilitated, who are deemed to pose no threat, or minimal threat either of recidivism or of danger to society.  I understand it, but I don’t care for it.  What I care about is the egregiousness of the state in the first place, and the conviction of one’s policy to honestly and fully apply it in the second case.
 
American mythology eulogizes and rewards personal transformation, rehabilitation, self-help and resilience, individual motivation and perseverance.  At least, that’s what its advocates claim.  Leslie Van Houten might have been rehabilitated/transformed in prison so that we do not know the woman she is today as her lawyer, Rich Pfeiffer, says.  But I know that Van Houten is a murderer.  That hasn’t changed.  I might be able to accept a reduction in her sentence  -  even a parole  -  as soon as she un-does her  crime.  As soon as the La Biancas whom she murdered are returned to life, health, wealth and happiness, then I might find it possible honestly to consider the merits of parole or a reduced sentence.  I am waiting.
 
It’s not that I am mean, unyielding, stern, unforgiving and cold.  On the contrary, I am very forgiving and warm.  This is just how I express my love for my fellow men.
 
If Van Houten is paroled I look forward to hearing of her being hunted down by the La Biancas’ survivors, just as I hope Mark Chapman would be hunted down by John Lennon fans if he is ever paroled, or Jon Venables and Robert Thompson if their protective identities are ever penetrated.
 
Being forgiven means the removal of malice, not the erasure of guilt or culpability.  Forgiveness does not mean absolution.  Punishment is a virtue.
 
But I could be wrong.

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Guelph Mercury - End   Print   Edition

2/2/2016

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Wednesday, January 27, 2016.
 
Guelph Mercury,
8-14 Macdonell Street,
Guelph, ON
CANADA
N1H 6P7
 
I saw on the Internet that the Guelph Mercury will abandon its print edition.  I noticed it during a casual search for other information, not as the result of a pointed inquiry.  I thought it might be a joke, or a mistake, so I switched to the Mercury online and learned that it was true!  I hate that.  It’s teeth-gritting time.  White knuckles-and-cursing-stupidity-masquerading-as-malice-under-my-breath time.  Even more so for the people who work there, I suppose.  Maybe newspaper readers in Guelph will now switch to the K-W Record, increasing that paper’s print sales.  The papers are owned by the same parent company, so the revenue stream is guaranteed.  It might boost other print media in the city, plus open the door for some clever Guelphites to launch a new print paper to meet whatever demand remains.  I do not believe the appetite for print news will evaporate.  It’s a question of demand meeting the threshold of fiscal viability.  It’s frustrating to think that a city of Guelph’s size  -  and a university town to boot  -  comes to this:  this disregard for printed words.  Or, maybe it’s all a good thing.  Change is the only constant and being cast as a stick-in-the-mud is certainly a bad image.
 
My feeling is partly about the loss of something familiar that I grew up with.  But it also partly stems from a respect for the reality and durability of paper that silicon chips cannot match.  It’s partly my affinity for property and my sensuous personality.  Print media like newspapers and books can be owned and possessed in a manner that digital media cannot.  Finally, the way things feel, smell and look are an appealing feature of their reality.  Without a community newspaper Guelph loses a bit of credibility and appeal.

Published on Friday, January 29, 2016 as “Frustrated by Guelph’s disregard for the printed word.”


 

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