Ahhhh. Finally something like autumn has arrived. No frost on the pumpkin, but except for Sunday night when I was hunting mosquitoes in the mansion, it has cooled enough and enough leaves have turned to make it seem like October back home.

Luckily for me, autumn brings learning opportunities and I needn't go to school to experience them. Why just yesterday a fellow as telling me about how Japanese enjoyed walking under under the canopy of ginkgo trees. Then he moved on to maples and how Japanese like the red leaves of those trees. I was both happy and confused as since I enjoy those things too, I am apparently turning Japanese. Except that I also enjoyed them before I came to Japan----as do most folks I've ever known. Except my for wife who often responds with something like, "It's just trees." I was worried that I might have confused my friend too, for when he mentioned Japanese liking maple leaves, I thought of the Canadian flag and said, "Oh, Japanese are like Canadians."

Then this morning I read some learned (?) discussion concerning the internationalization (or lack of) of Japan. I discovered that in addition to the many famous entertainers and athletes of non-Japanese background, there are also a lot of restaurants serving foreign cuisine in Japan. Now if that does not show internationalization, I don't know what does.

I was also educated that the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism who wrote the UN report about discrimination in Japan was apparently some sort of lackey for minority interest groups in Japan. These sneaky devils led him around for 9 days or so showing him only what they wanted him to see, and they, unlike some fellow from the government or perhaps even academia, had political interests at heart. Even worse, the Special Rapporteur could not speak Japanese and had to rely on his deceitful escorts. I am not sure if that is unusual, for I doubt that the fellow could speak Swahili if he went there on an investigation, but then again, this is Japan and we must apply different rules and standards here. Always.

I can not be sure what I should think of this until I consult an unbiased, unfettered by personal day-to-day experience person of letters who can explain everything to me in an abstract moonbeam sort of way that seems to have no connection to reality. I certainly cannot trust my own lying eyes as I am a member of a minority group with a vested interest in not being discriminated against.

But best of all, Diane Sawyer took ABC and Hot Stud Reporter David Muir to China investigate just how China is poised to overcome the US in every possible way pretty darn soon if we don't take hints from ABC news. ABC promised to have several of these reports on what China does differently than the US and what we should learn from it to keep from being surpassed in the next few weeks. Wonder if Diane and babe-magnet Dave took a listen to Joseph Nye below (or did any relevant research) before they flew over to China to give us the latest version of the 1980s Japan threat. Doesn't the ABC interview with Thomas Friedman sound almost word-for-word like what was being said about Japan 20-25 years ago?

Then, what would be the point?

UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China and Russia are all but certain to stymie a U.S. push for new U.N. sanctions on North Korea if it fires off a rocket, leaving tighter enforcement of existing penalties a likelier outcome.

Wouldn't it be just as effective for the Security Council to threaten to throw spitballs at a photo of Kim Jong Il?

What a relief!

The New York Times is reporting that if North Korea launches its latest missile (we can be confident that it will) it will be taken before the UN Security Council!

There. That will show Ol' Kim Jong Il. Sort of a "Go ahead punk, make my day" threat. BAHAHAHAHAHA! April 1 is near, isn't it?

A great sense of humor

In a new report to the United Nations, the government outlines the situation of ethnic minorities and foreign residents in Japan, claiming it has made "every conceivable" effort over the past several years to eliminate racial discrimination....

...The government has long held that Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees equality under the law, makes any antidiscrimination legislation superfluous, a point reiterated in the report.

"Japan has taken every conceivable measure to fight against racial discrimination," the report's introduction says, later adding that apartheid is unknown in Japan...Japan Times

Are we talking about actual apartheid or legal, open discrimination often encouraged and supported by the government if not originating from it?

Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a woman who had just recently married a guy from Europe. She was shocked* to discover that the landlord of an apartment they wanted to rent refused because he was a non-Japanese. She was able to get another apartment after finding an additional guarantor (2 in total) that the landlord required because her husband not Japanese. The first landlord refused to rent because he claimed to have rented to a non-Japanese before who did not pay the rent. Therefore, anyone who is not of the pure Japanese blood is untrustworthy.

Her husband is fluent in Japanese (JLPT 1 fluent---also in actual non-test usage) and intends to get Japanese citizenship as he believes that this will help him get a better career. She is skeptical, saying "He's still just a white boy."

What kind of idiots and liars are coming up with this nonsense to BS the UN? Does anyone on earth actually believe it? (Yes, many apologists do, or want to. Others excuse it because it is not as open as in country A, B, or C.)

12:25 *She was not shocked because non-Japanese are discriminated against in housing and other areas, but because she and her husband were being refused housing even though the rental agreement would have been in her name.

Thinking of getting drunk in Roppongi? Justice in Unique Japan

Hatoyama: As the Japanese place so much importance on the value of life, it is thought that one should pay with one's own life for taking the life of another, whereas Europe is a civilization of "chikara to tousou" ("force and strife"). So, conversely, things are moving against the death penalty. This is an important point to understand. The so-called civilizations of "chikara to tousou" are the opposite of us. From incipient stages, their conception of the value of life is weaker than the Japanese. Therefore, they are moving toward abolition of the death penalty. It is important that this discourse on civilizations be understood.

...the philosophy here espoused by Hatoyama and other senior Liberal Democratic Party conservatives, including former Education Minister Ibuki Bunmei (now LDP secretary general), is heavily influenced by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, and affiliated scholars like environmental archaeologist Yasuda Yoshinori and comparative economic historian Kawakatsu Heita. “Yasuda is the most prolific proponent of the environmental determinist school of thought, according to which Japan is a "civilization of beauty and compassion," in contrast with Judeo-Christian and Islamic states, and even China,” writes Wetherall. “His books are standard reading for romantic nationalists.”

Well, then folks in Texas must place more importance on life than most others on earth if you consider the number of executions. So must China. An old quote from someone whom many non-Japanese consider an idiot, but I suspect is not an especially uncommon belief in Japan.

Those UN [from the UN Committee on Torture] comments echo earlier reports by the Japan Bar Association, Human Rights Watch, the International Bar Association and other UN panels that say Japan’s treatment of criminal suspects is unfair and leads to coerced confessions. In about 99% of criminal trials, defendants are found guilty, and in the bulk of cases, the defendant has confessed to charges. Lawyers are not allowed to be present during interrogations, either before or after indictment. Suspects often allege psychological and sometimes physical abuse.

You don't want to be arrested in Japan. You want no trouble with the police. There ain't no innocent until proven guilty. You are screwed as soon as you are arrested. So is your lawyer it seems:

....lawyers – the last line of defense in this potholed legal landscape – are not immune from harassment. Tokyo lawyer Yasuda Yoshihiro was arrested in 1998 and held for 300 days...

but the judges will make sure justice is upheld:

...Takano Takashi, a lawyer and professor at Waseda University’s school of law. “I’ve seen many judges sleep during trial.”.... after 25 years practicing law, just five of his clients have been completely exonerated. “Some lawyers go their whole lives without winning a case,” he explains.

If you get arrested, guilty or not, just bend over and kiss your own ass goodbye. Now you know one reason Japanese crime is relatively low. You also know why people are so reluctant to involve the police or other authorities in matters, even relatively serious ones. Now do you really want to take any chances here?

All quotes from Certain Justice. Japan’s Detention System and the Rights of the Accused by David McNeill. Japan Focus.

Ministry of Justice Human Rights hearing

Somehow, the Ministry of Justice in Japan and the term "human rights" don't seem to fit well together, but Debito Arudo at Trans-Pacific Radio writes of a MoJ sponsored Human Rights meeting he attended earlier this year. Seems the right-wing nutjobs attended and were able to disrupt the meeting with little to no interference from the MoJ bureaucrats running the show. Even more interesting is what happened as the meeting ended which shows exactly how many Japan---and non-Japanese view discrimination in Japan:

The last straw was when one of the attendees referred to a famous Korean born to a Comfort Woman as a “bastard child” (shiseiji). Our side demanded the representative from the Ministry of Justice do something. It was within his ministry’s mandate to silence hate speech. He remained silent.....

....It almost came to blows. Even then, no security was called, and nobody was asked to leave. The meeting was brought to a close a half-hour early.

But here’s when it got really interesting. I was about to leave when one of disrupters actually came up to me with a smile and a friendly tone of voice. He turned out to be an assemblymember from Hino City, near Tokyo, and was quizzical as to why I was here.

After all, this is his view: White people in Japan have it good here because of Japan’s inferiority complex towards them. So discrimination cannot happen towards them. It only happens towards the lesser peoples of the world, and they’re only here taking advantage of the Japan we Japanese built up. They shouldn’t be here asking for anything. Therefore I as a superior Caucasian should have nothing to complain about.

I have seen and heard this attitude a lot. Several years ago, after Shitaro---oops, how childish of me---Shintaro "Blinky" Ishihara went into one of his bigoted rants about the Chinese and (shockingly) it was covered by the foreign press, a Japanese apologist wrote to the International Herald Tribune and explained it away because Blinky was talking about Chinese. Not Americans (synonymous with white folks in Japan, though many will tell you a few repressed minorities live there as do the rich Jews who control the country). Therefore, there should be no problem for white folks since it was the Chinese who Shit (hand slipped, sorry) Shintaro was insulting and demeaning.

Abe's Beautiful Country

With no non-Japanese and without too much of them thar evil foreign ideas about human rights.
The uneducated Education Minister Ibuki got chewed out by the UN's anti-racism head the other day for sorta seeming to be a racist idiot. Ibuki actually said more:

In his speech about "education resuscitation" in a meeting of a Liberal Democratic Party chapter in Nagasaki Prefecture, Mr. Ibuki said the Yamato race has ruled Japan throughout history and that Japan is an extremely homogeneous country. He also expressed the idea that there should be limits to the enhancement of human rights. Likening human rights to butter, he said, "However nutritious butter is, if one eats only butter every day, one acquires metabolic syndrome. Human rights are important. But if they are respected too much, Japanese society will end up with human rights metabolic syndrome."(From the Japan Times)

This is what Abe, who appointed this retro-bushidoist and has said he sees no problems with any of Ibuki's comments, and his buddies like Fujiwara Masahiko (aka baldy with the hideous combover) want. This is the beautiful country. The words, books, and actions of these extremists all point toward an inward, nationalistic, undemocratic Japan. They may not get all they want, but the direction that the elite want to push the country is very obvious. Don't worry, the US will be dumb enough to help as will most of the rest of the non-East Asian world. They'll all ignore it. Were it going in in Germany or Austria, hell would be raised.

But we don't really expect much more of Japan anyway.

No, of course it's not racist! Japan has no racism!

"Hey nigger!! Don't touch that Japanese woman's ass!!"

[Shigeki ] Saka (editor of Kyogaku no Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu ---Shocking Foreigner Crime: the Underground File) said that while he knew the term "nigger" is racist, he reckoned it would have a different nuance written in Japanese. "We used it as street slang, writing it in katakana. But if we had known that we would get such a huge reaction from foreigners, we might have refrained from using it," he figured. (From the 26 Feb 2007 Japan Times.)

This is Japan and there is no racism in Japan. I wrote more about this magazine here.
To their credit, the convenience store Family Mart pulled it off their shelves after they determined it to be discriminatory.

Saka claims that he (being a pure Japanese which makes him by nature incapable of being the racist that he obviously is) means no discrimination against non-Japanese. He also said it is not extreme in tone---read the first sentence again and see if that sounds extreme to you.

The secretary general of the UN's International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism, Hideki Morihara, says the magazine is only part of the problem and puts much of the blame on the Japanese government---which is where it belongs. Of course, the Japanese media, being nothing but mouthpieces for the Japanese government in most cases, is to blame too.

How much of this report will be printed in Japanese newspapers? Would it be the same, or would it put a different slant on the story? If not, it would be a bit of a surprise.

The Japan Times is not that good of a newspaper, but it is more independent than many since it is only printed in English, and is not in the kisha--press clubs---that the government uses to pressure and control the media.