Let Them Name You… and They will Come?

Down and out Yubari, the bankrupt Hokkaido city immortalized by NYT elegist Normitsu Onishi, is selling naming rights left and right. First came the municipal civic center (most likely a lightly used composite of a concert hall and smaller meeting rooms) and…public toilets? Whatever.* According to this Asahi piece, Yubari is extending the idea to the local baseball field and other athletic facilities**. But why stop there? Why not SELL THE NAMING RIGHTS TO YUBARI?

Seriously. It’s not as if precedent is lacking. The city of Toyota was named in 1959 for Toyota Motors, not the other way around. And Toyota (the Motors, not the city) didn’t pay a yen. Likewise, the city of Tenri got its name in 1954 as the stronghold of Tenri-kyo, a pseudo-Shinto religion that has its origins during the late Edo era—over the less demonstrative Yamabe, the Tenri-ko’s choice. And, of course, Boston gets its name from the Boston Celtics.

Look, Hyundai, if you have the wherewithal to drop billions of US dollars worth on North Korea with little to show in return, you surely have the billions of Japanese yen—you really need just a fraction of that—to spare so that you can call a Japanese city, I don’t know, Chosun’s My Daddy? I’m Your Bitch, Korea? The possibilities are limitless.

Think about it, Hyundai.

* Dave Barry does have a sewage-lifting station named after him. A far as I can gather, he did not pay for this honor either.

** Between the public toilets and the baseball field, the Yubari authorities obviously have a sequencing problem.

Taro Aso Speaks Out on the Merits of Heirloom Turkeys

I try not to shoot fish in a barrel; it’s too cruel. On the other hand, I’m too busy/bored to…oh, what the hell…

One-third of LDP Diet members have inherited their seats from close relatives (mostly dads). This proportion is sure to rise after the upcoming Lower House election, as vulnerable first-term Koizumi Kids bear the brunt of the voters’ ire. The “merely” one–fifth heirloom DPJ has promised to bar heirloom turkeys from swooping in after the upcoming election, and the more fearful LDP folks are making similar noises. So leave it to our Prime Minister to weigh in on behalf of his fellow Tokyo courtiers holding sway over their distant fiefdoms:

”A frog’s offspring are frogs, as they say. It is important to grow up looking at your parents’ backside. One becomes a farmer, a carpenter, a plasterer, following in one’s father’s footsteps. That should be properly evaluated.”

Let’s see:

Exhibit A: Shinzo Abe
Exhibit B: Yasuo Fukuda
Exhibit C: Taro Aso

I rest my case.

Sorry, MTC, for stealing what’s obviously your kind of material. In the meantime, let’s all watch our own backsides in the upcoming election, so we don’t…but let’s not go there.

Hindu Come, Hindu Go

“…We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers…”
Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, 20 January

“…and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers…”
Barack Obama, Al Arabia interview, 27 January

“…America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, the highly syncretistic hovering somewhere between somewhat superstitious and mildly religious, and non-believers…”
Barack Obama, on his official visit to Japan

Normal blogging to resume later.

Leonard Pitts, On Flying While Muslim

Leonard Pitts shows humor works best in cold fury. It helps to write well, which goes along way to explain why he has a column while I only have a blog. My only conceit here is that I seem to be the only person who has noticed that the airline did not apologize to the Muslims.

Airline Issues “Apology” to American Muslims

AIRTRAN AIRWAYS OFFERS APOLOGY TO CUSTOMERS ON FLIGHT 175 YESTERDAY

We sincerely regret that the passengers on flight 175 did not have a positive travel experience on January 1, 2009.

While ultimately this issue proved to be a misunderstanding, the steps taken were necessary.

Alert passengers reported to the flight crew what they believed were inappropriate comments allegedly made by one of the passengers onboard, and the flight crew notified the federal air marshals that were assigned to the flight…After deplaning the remaining passengers and performing a sweep of the aircraft and rescreening all passengers, crew, checked and carry-on baggage, the flight departed two hours late without the nine passengers who were detained for questioning.

We regret that the issue escalated to the heightened security level it did on New Year’s Day, but we trust everyone understands that the security and the safety of our passengers is paramount and cannot be compromised.

We apologize to all of the passengers – to the nine who had to undergo extensive interviews from the authorities and to the 95 who ultimately made the flight. Nobody on Flight 175 reached their destination on time on New Year’s Day, and we regret it.

And with this letter from AirTran, CNN claims “AirTran apologizes to Muslim family removed from plane”? And wait, there’s more to it:

One family member, Kashif Irfan, said Friday he was "very appreciative and surprised" by AirTran's apology. "It's a very generous gesture," he said.

“[A]ppreciative”? “[G]enerous”? No multimillion-dollar law suit? No wonder AirTran isn’t apologizing for kicking them off the flight. They weren’t real Americans.

---

Now this Arab guy, he gets it. And he’s only a resident.

Is Dave Barry Back?

Since I logged onto my blog against my best instincts (easier on the old bones than yard work)…

Dave Barry never completely went away. But he took an indefinite leave of absence from his weekly column three years ago and has since restricted his work to Christmas gift guides and year’s-end reviews, as well as coverage of the odd political convention or Olympics and a couple of well-received books. In the meantime, the Miami Herald has been printing Dave Barry reruns. But on December 28, he published a brand new piece, These Cars Can’t Be Tuned, which looks every bit like a regular column and nothing like the occasional pieces that he has continued to do. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, but I won’t be surprised if it turns out that he had chosen this non-announcement to resume writing regularly.

It Takes a Thief to Catch a Thief in Atlanta

Yes, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one in three Atlanta Police Academy graduates have criminal records. The idea for the initiative came from two PhD candidates in Japan studies at Emory University, who found out that the Tokugawa Shogunate was able to maintain law and order for three centuries only because of its extensive use of former criminals as rank-and-file policemen known as okappiki//goyokiki/meakashi.

...

Okay, so I lied.

ADD: But not by much. Follow the links.

True Tales: AIG Blog Relations Builds Cyberbridge to Nowhere

Somehow, GlobalTalk 21 found its way onto the AIG Blog Relations mailing list a little over a week ago. Since then, I’ve been getting messages like the following:

We apologize for sending this to you as a mass e-mail distribution, but we thought you would want to receive this as soon as it came out, since you and your readers have been following this story closely.

Below is an announcement that AIG released minutes ago at 7 a.m. EDT. For more information, you can listen to AIG Chairman and CEO Edward M. Liddy's investment community conference call today, October 3, at 8:30 a.m. EDT at www.aigwebcast.com.

Contact: Charlene Hamrah (Investment Community)
212-770-7074
Nicholas Ashooh (News Media)

Now dangnabbit, wouldn’t you know when I click the link, I need a “User Name” and a “Password” to get through? For what it’s worth, Ali Baba and Open Sesame won’t work.

Blog relations, of course, is the least of AIG’s worries.

But What Are You Going to Do about the Ten Trillion Yen Hole, Mr. Ozawa?…oh… Well, Mr. Aso?…oh…

According to Ichiro Ozawa’s opening “statement”, the DPJ price tag for its new program in the works now comes in at 20.5 trillion per year in its all-options, fourth and final-year version. I assume that this is a pretty honest reckoning for now, give or take a few hundred billion, although the long-run effects of some of the items, such as the elimination of the gasoline tax surcharge (2.6 trillion) and the medical care makeover (2 trillion), are hard to control and therefore difficult to predict. The numbers do not add up to 20.5 trillion because some big ticket items are missing, such as the DPJ promise to halve corporate tax rates for small and medium enterprises. Where all this money is going to come from is vaguer, although they do conveniently add up to 20.5 trillion. According to the Yomiuri, it consists of:

4.8 trillion: Coming down on special tax breaks (business) and income tax deductions (individuals)
0.7 trillion: Selling off government property
6.5 trillion: Taking net revenue and reserve cash from the Fiscal Investment Special Account (FILP-SA) and the Foreign Exchange Special Account (FE-SA)
4.3 trillion: Cutting subsidies
1.8 trillion: Reforming government procurement (and otherwise reducing government waste?)
1.3 trillion: Reducing payments to national public servants

Some comments while I wait the announcement of the entire package:

On the expenditure side, the 2.6 trillion gas tax reduction and the 1.5 trillion loss in highway toll revenues add up to a 4.1 trillion gift to private car owners and businesses. Do the Socialists and, yes, Communist really want to support that? On the revenue side, the DPJ’s global warming countermeasures tax (DPJ 2007 Manifest 4.1, first paragraph) should counterbalance the gas tax reduction, but it’s missing from the revenue estimate. Does the LDP want to mention that? But that’s small change compared to:

The DPJ is going to dig into the two cash-cow special accounts for 6.5 trillion, or almost 1/3 of the 20.5 trillion bill. According to MOF, in FY2006, the FILP-SA and Foreign Exchange-SA had surpluses of 2.5 trillion and 2.1 trillion respectively)*. This is in the same ballpark as the 4 trillion that I dimly recall Yoichi Takahashi—ex-MOF official, Koizumi-reformist brain-trust member, and one of the pioneer treasure hunters—saying could be safely taken out of the two special accounts on an annual basis. Give the benefit of the doubt to the DPJ and assume that the government can count on a combined four and a half trillion surplus each year; that still leaves a 2 trillion shortfall to be made up by digging into reserves. Kudos to the DPJ for owning up to that, but how long can it do that on an annual basis before these most fungible of “buried treasures” are gone? Actually, if the fiscal conditions expected at the start of FY2008 continues unchanged, a business-as-usual scenario is likely to eliminate these “buried treasures” altogether by FY2011 (three years into what would be the DPJ four-year-plan) unless annual government borrowing is increased by 10 trillion.

Talk about an elephant in the room… I think I need a drink.

ADD: I just realized that the need for more debt issues depends on the maturity schedule of the existing ones. I can rest a little easier. A drink (or two) sure helped. Still, the matter needs to be looked into over the next four years (and beyond). I’ll try to remember to look for the relevant data when I have the time.

* See this post. The relevant MOF links are in the footnote at the bottom. The arithmetic behind the vanishing “buried treasures” can be easily read off the post.

Mr. Sasagawa’s Did He Really Say That Moment

According to LDP By-Laws, “The General Council deliberates and decides all important matters concerning the management and Diet activities of the [LDP].” As powerful as its mandate looks on paper, though, in fact the General Council is sen as something of a rubber-stamp institution. Thus, its Chairman is considered the least powerful of the Big Three (the other two being the Secretary-General and the Chairman of the Policy Research Council), and LDP Presidents/Prime Ministers (usually) have at times used the appointment to reward hardworking if not quite stellar denizens of the party sub-leadership. In fact, when Yasuo Fukuda tried to put faction leader Makoto Koga there, Mr. Koga thought so little of the post that he refused to take it and instead requested and got the Head of the Election Strategy Headquarters, elevating it to Big Four status in the process. In August, then Prime Minister Fukuda elevated Takashi Sasagawa to the GC Chairmanship, likely as a sop to the Tsushima faction. Prime Minister Aso decided to keep him on.

Mr. Sasagawa seems to be just the kind of inoffensive, long-serving chap that you want for the GC Chair. A septuagenarian like Mr. Fukuda, he is something of a social progressive; he favors allowing both spouses to keep their pre-marriage surnames and generally supports legislation upholding women's rights. He also thinks teenagers should be allowed to ride motorcycles. He also favors normalization of relations with North Korea, a dead giveaway of a liberal outlook on foreign policy. His permissiveness extends to grown-up men, where he was instrumental in bringing back 11 penitent Post Office privatization rebels back into the LDP fold. (Note that 10 of the 11 Lower House members were men.) So all this meant that the following thought of his on the collapse of the financial bailout bill in the U.S. Congress came as a great surprise to this blog:

”The House Speaker is a woman. I think it’s a little different than a man, her leadership. That’s why it fell apart.”
下院議長は女性。ちょっと男性とはひと味違うような気がする、リードが。それで破裂した。

In his defense, he does not spare himself, for the richest member of the Diet—we know that because disclosure rules allow us to satisfy our curiosity—went on to say:

”We should make it tax-free when young people buy stocks. It is not appropriate to make it tax-free in the case of old people who have money.”
若い人が株を買ってくれたら非課税にする方がいい。お年寄りで金を持っている人が非課税なんておかしい

It’s been an eventful day for me already, and I have many more things to think over, find workarounds, etc. before I can go to what I believe to be my just, heavenly, reward—dinner with an American friend that I haven’t seen for years and her colleague. In the meantime, in this the most cloudy of days, I shall enjoy the little ray of sunshine that Mr. Sasagawa has interjected. Thank you, Mr. Sasagawa.

Matt Drudge Links to JapanToday: A First for Japanese Websites?

Matt Drudge has linked to a Kyodo wire by way of a JapanToday post on Lehman Europe’s sale to Nomura for two dollars. It’s… taking… a… lot… of… time… to… download…

Congratulations, JapanToday, you've made it; it’s like Ai George playing Carnegie Hall.*

* Too furui!!

Love Trains, East-West

So much for New York's version of Denshaotoko.

And Now from Some Comic Relief from the US Space Program

Moon-walker claims alien contact cover-up

Seriously, I’m much closer in age to Dr. Mitchell than I am to you, so I’m thinking, one of these days… hey, what’s that light in the sky?

Middle School Girl and Brown Bear: One-off Homage to Late, Great WaiWai

You can't beat the headline:

Stop It! Middle School Girl Mistakes Brown Bear for Little Sister, Repels It with Kicks.

BeatTop that, Gogo Yubari!

Holy Parliamentary Groups, Batman!*

* Political Trivia Alert

The wonderful people toiling away on the Japanese-language Wikipedia website have come up with a comprehensive list of Japanese parliamentary groups, mostly non-partisan, that Diet members belong to. The list is by no means complete—for one, it fails to include the U.S.-Japan Parliamentary Friendship League—but it has managed to track down 238 of them. That’s almost one for every three Diet members.

The non-partisan Pekin Orinpikku wo Shiensuru Kai, or Group of Diet Members Who Support the Beijing Olympics, should have a very short shelf-life. But while it remains in existence, it boasts an impressive list of members, with Prime Minister himself as chairman. In fact, almost all the A-list politicians seem to be there, including Taro Aso of Arc of Freedom and Prosperity renown. But Shinzo Abe is conspicuous by his absence, particularly since all the other ex-Prime Ministers, including Jiang Zeming nemesis Junichiro Koizumi, are top-listed as “advisors”*. Also missing is Shoichi Nakagawa. And Takeo Hiranuma.

While we are on the trails of the right-wing nationalists, let’s take a look at the Minna de Yasukuni Jinja ni Sanpaisuru Kai, or Group of Diet Members Who Go Together to Yasukuni Shrine to Pay Respects. The Yasukuni caucus is somewhat less inclusive than the Beijing boosters, since the Communist and Socialist Parties have chosen to sit this one out. Instead, it boasts an impressive array of notable right-wing politicians such as Takeo Fukuda, Taku Yamazaki, Makoto Koga, and Sadakazu Tanigaki.

Each one of these parliamentary groups—even the Supirichuaru Giin Renmei,or Spiritual Parliamentary Group, likely more Deepak Chopra/Sylvia Brown than Mahatma Gandhi—must have its uses. Still, I cannot help but wonder if some are more equal than others, which leads me to ask myself, Which one of these would I join if I had to join one, and only one? And as my eyes finish scanning the list, the decision is a no-brainer—the Chiariidingu Suishin Giin Renmei, or Cheerleading Promotion Parliamentary League (sorry, no separate Wikipedia entry on this one), wins; it isn’t even close.

* One ex-Prime Minister, Yasuhiro Nakasono, is not a member, since he was forced into retirement under LDP rules by Mr. Koizumi.

Politics as Usual in Inakadate Village? You Decide

In 2007, the annual tanbo aato (rice paddy art) festival drew 240,000 visitors to Inakadate (literally, Rural Estate), a rice farming village on the chilly plains of Aomori Prefecture with a population of 8,333 residents (2008 May 1, estimate). Inakadate is not any old village, however; it has been watched with envy by other municipalities since 1993, when it started copying mainly Japanese art on a wide swathe of rice paddies near the village municipal building (itself surely as in so many other rural municipalities an uncommonly large edifice, it Inakadate’s case designed to look like the main building of a Japanese castle) by using a variety of differently-colored rice. Other municipalities have watched Inakadate with envy since the inauguration of the event and tried to copy its success, to little avail; Inakadate remains firmly entrenched as the art capital of the rice paddy art nation.

The Inakadate Village Development Promotion Consultation Committee, chaired by the village mayor, is responsible for the event. But planning, planting, growing, and maintaining the 5 hectare (that’s² 538195.520 ft, for all you Americans, Burmese, and Liberians reading my blog) piece of rice art apparently is an expensive undertaking, or perhaps the entrepreneurial mayor Takao Suzuki, just decided that it would be a good idea to replenish the village coffers. In any case, this year, the Committee convinced the Aomori Prefecture newspaper Too Nippo and Japan Airlines (Japan Airlines?) to pony up 2 million yen to put their logos on the painting.

Unfortunately, as the Asahi reports, the owner of the farming rights to the land, former mayor Takashi Sato, objected, “I didn’t receive prior consultation, corporate advertisements cannot be allowed.” Mr. Sato must have been providing the land free of charge, for the Committee had no choice but to pull up all the offending rice plants today. The little blue dots that you see in the photo taken at 10AM are the people erasing the ads.

Now Inakadate was not really pushing the envelope here in inviting sponsors, but Mr. Sato does have a point. It may not be fair to compare this year’s generic rendering of Diaikokuten, one of the Seven Lucky Gods and responsible for good harvests with the gigantic replica of the breathtaking view of Mount Fuji by the great Hokusai on the Wikipedia site, but I think that it looks better without the commercial. Let me put it this way: How would like to see every painting in the Louvre adorned with the IBM logo?

Still, Mr. Sato may—ah, that dreaded “may”—have had something more than aesthetics and the spirit of Avery Brundage in mind when he objected to the corporate logos. In 2004, Mr. Suzuki had denied Mr. Sato’s bid for a third straight term as mayor of Inakadate. There must be some bad blood between the two. And the next mayoral election comes up later this year in October.

Wait. The backstory does not end there. Mr. Suzuki may not have run for mayor but for an earlier, freak political event. In 1999, Mr. Suzuki was the President of the Village Assembly when he was arrested for accepting a bribe from fellow assemblyman Junji Abe. According to a Too Nippo report, Mr. Suzuki was accused of accepting money from Mr. Abe (a few hundred thousand yen according to the report) in return for allowing him to succeed him as President, but double-crossed him anyway and won reelection by a vote of eight to seven. Online records are scant on this issue, but one online report that I have been unable to relocate says that the two men were found guilty in 2001. If true, my guess is that Mr. Suzuki must have received a suspended sentence and, instead of appealing the verdict, decided to accept it and wait the two to three years to get his record cleared. He then ran for mayor, successfully, as it turned out. In short, if the bribe had not been uncovered, it is likely that Mr. Suzuki would still be President of the Village Assembly and Mr. Sato would be serving out his third term as mayor and head of the Inakadate Village Development Promotion Consultation Committee, and none of the current mess would have occurred.

So, what’s the point of all this? The moral fof the story? The implications, the lessons for the national body politic that this blog ever aspires to elucidate?

Dear readers, none whatsoever. If that makes this post another one of those Japan-Is-Weird Tales, the kind that I decry on every other occasion, then, so be it. And to anyone who has any complaints, I pass on this wonderful colloquialism that I learned from a dear friend just yesterday: Bite me!

PETA Sets Itself Up

... for turning-over-new-leaves jokes...

The New York Stephen Schwarzman Public Library? Why Not? And Why Stop at the Samsung Washington Monument?

I know it’s the American way, but it’s surprising to see how widespread the practice of pay-to-name has spread across to the four corners of that great nation and how it is now threatening one most public of New York public institutions.

Naming buildings, bridges, warships, and other colossal artifacts after famous men has been a traditional American practice. (In Mexico, they name them after generals, more often than not failed.) And wealthy Americans have always endowed public edifices and even entire institutions in exchange for leaving their names to posterity, instead of their unworthy, bickering children and battleaxe spouses. As for corporations, selling the brand is what separates the Cokes and Gillettes from the also-rans. So perhaps it should be no surprise that enterprising minds have combined the two and added corporate advertising to the mix to coax the newly-superrich and mega-companies to cough up their moneys to celebrate/vend themselves in perpetuity.

But eternity lasts only so long—only as long, Ozymandias, as the monument stands. And this is where I come to the rescue:

I, Jun (no middle name) Okumura, (dubiously) Esq., am hereby seeking investors to set up a for-profit institution to sell and trade naming rights for sovereign states and international institutions. At this exchange, the naming rights and their derivatives will be sold in perpetuity or for limited periods, just like prayers for your soul at the old Catholic Church or the typical Buddhist temple. The naming rights, of course, shall be exclusive, and protected by the good people at Blackwater and, if it becomes absolutely necessary, the WMD systems of our Great Leader .

Naming rights to UN institutions should fetch a particularly high premium—after all, do you ever hear of a UN institution being liquidated after it has served out its useful life?

As for sovereign states, the days of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy are over—if nothing else, states will multiply, not consolidate. Rest assured, the first cashed-strapped nation to sell its name shall remain standing, long after the Eiffel Tower and the George Washington Bridge (BTW commemorating two men who shamefully paid not a single penny for their not-quite immortalities) have returned to the lands and waters from whence they were raised. And that nation, you have my guarantee, will be named…

…

Yes, you guessed it, the Banana Republic of…

My Take? No Harm, No Foul

Read.

Oh, to be young again.

Not that I ever did anything like that...

*sigh*

When Does History Become History? And for Whom?

Watch this. Obviously, you can’t do this joke with the war in Iraq. But the Korean War?

For Daily Show viewers, it evidently works, but for Fox News viewers, surely not.