Japan as #3: the benefits of hiring out national defense

Japan has come in as number 3 on the totally reliable, accurate, and based in reality Global Peace Index.

This rigorous scientific survey measures such things as such as "conflicts with foreign countries, numbers of murder cases, risks of terrorism, the level of respect for human rights and military expenditures." Japan Times

There are a total of 23 areas evaluated. I am not sure if one criteria would be: "Said country should have a lop-sided---or one-sided---"security treaty" which is somewhat weirdly referred to as an "alliance" with the country with the world's most powerful military. That would help in the area of reduced military expenditures, conflicts with foreign countries, and possibly the risk of terrorism, and it might have been enough to propel Japan ahead of warmongering #7 Luxembourg. I wonder, is the US penalized for providing personal and arms for the military security of Japan? A read of the Results and Methodology PDF at GPI's site might lead one to think so. No mention of the US military role in Japan's defense.

Would other criteria be: Does said country respect the human rights* of those of different ethnic/racial/national backgrounds? Has said country signed the Hague Convention Treaty on International Child Abductions? Not sure how those would affect the level of respect for human rights. Perhaps Japan improved four notches because we don't hear right-wingers in the government nor Hobbesian Bushidoists like Fujiwara Masahiko railing against too many human rights as much as we did a few years ago under the LDP.

A check of the GPI website shows a few other interesting tidbits which makes one wonder if the creators of The Onion are not behind this whole thing**. The main findings show that the most peaceful societies contain the following attributes in addition to the above:

• A well-functioning government
• High levels of freedom of information
• Good relations with neighboring states (We can see why Japan has improved in this area compared to the Koizumi/Abe eras.)
• Acceptance of others

(A a partial list from page 1 of the 2010 GPI Fact Sheet PDF available at the site.)

The lack of a refugee population also seems to raise the peace index of a country. Very helpful for a country like Japan that allows almost no refugees in.

A number of famous people have signed on as "Endorsers" of the GPI agreeing that: ..."without a world that is basically peaceful, it will be exceedingly difficult to solve many of the intractable problems facing humanity today." How insightful is that?

*The Results and Methodology PDF at the site uses "Levels of disrespect for human right (Political Terror Scale)" using a definition by Amnesty International/ and US Department County Reports (sic) and also refers to "Respect for Human Rights."

**It's actually The Economist trying to measure the ultimately unmeasurable. The folks at The Onion would have more sense.

Edited several times as author cannot write, spell, or proofread because he is from the US. He also added a few items that he thought was relevant.

Arudou's speech to UN Special Rapportuer on Human Rights

I hope to have a new post once a week for the time being, and occasionally finish and post a few still relevant drafts:

...we are not officially registered — or even counted sometimes — as genuine residents. We are not treated as taxpayers, not protected as consumers, not seen as ethnicities even in the national census....According to government polls and surveys, we do not even deserve the same human rights as Japanese....Debito Arudou Japan Times.

A well-written speech, at least from my point of view. Will it make any difference? I will wager no and pray* (without faith) that I am wrong. Doubt I will be though since we've been reading and saying the same things for years and years and years. The fact is that the whole issue is not important enough to most citizens to care much about except for the occasional sympathizing with affected gaijin.** I think Debito's final paragraph says it all, especially the plea for help outside of Japan. Don't expect much inside.

*Are an agnostic's prayers answered?

**An innocent, neutral term that simply means gaikokujin. We know it is innocent and neutral because many people use it all of the time mostly, but no longer exclusively, for those of certain non-Eastern ethnic origin.

Just what are human rights in Japan?

I was a bit surprised (just a bit, not a lot) when I read reports of the Supreme Court's comments in its ruling on the Nationality Law recently when it stated that citizenship was necessary for receiving basic human rights in Japan. One would assume that any modern democracy would want to guarantee those to any human being in its society---tourist, resident, bum, whatever. What kind of government would assume that denying human rights to anyone in its borders was acceptable?

Colin P.A. Jones writing for the Japan Times was apparently somewhat intrigued by the Court's wording too:

For those who thought that the sole criterion for enjoying basic human rights was, well, being human, Japan's Supreme Court apparently has a different view. Both because this type of phrase is repeated several times and because the opinion cites several human rights conventions (including the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child) in arriving at its conclusion, it is hard to believe that it is just a judicial "oops." Do human rights mean something different in Japan?

I think they do, at least for some of the elite running the government. They often seem to view human rights as something selfish that the peons whom they lord over should not press for too much.

Jones goes into detail here as to what human rights may actually mean in Japan.

Another whining foreigner, James Fallows,

who was one of the so-called "revisionists" to the E. O. Reischauer et al sugar-coated version of modern Japan in the late 80s and early 90s when he wrote for Atlantic magazine (he still does) visited Japan over Thanksgiving. Unlike some of our resident apologists, he did not especially appreciate Japan's new policy even if America does it too. My god, does he not know that if the USA does it, right or wrong, that it provides justification for everyone?

Japan's way of ushering in the Thanksgiving holidays has been to institute mandatory fingerprinting and photographing of all foreigners entering the country. Let me put this bluntly: this is an incredibly degrading, off-putting, and hostility-generating process. The comment is not anti-Japanese: when the U.S. does this to foreigners, it's wrong and degrading too (as many people, including me, have pointed out over the years). But Japan has just ushered in this procedure, and they deserve to take some heat for it....

....It’s one thing, and wrong enough, for the U.S. to apply similar measures in the panicky, immediate, “we’re for anything that is called ‘anti-terrorist’ ” mood of the 9/11 aftermath, which is when the U.S. began discussing similar “biometric” measures. It’s even worse to do it six years later, after a chance for cold deliberation about the prices society is and is not willing to pay to keep itself “secure.”

I learned of this from debito.org where I often find similar interesting material.

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.

Victory declared in getting a racist magazine

off the market. However, it was done mostly by non-Japanese. Strangely, although many claim that there is no racism in Japan (HAHAHA a joke?), it seems the Japanese media doesn't give a gave a damn.

There is some indication that the Japanese police may have been closely connected with the article. It seems to fit their policy/beliefs as it pertains to non-Japanese.

Japan Focus has an excellent article on this story describing in some detail about the racism in that magazine, the racist view toward non-Japanese, the Japanese media's reluctance to cover anything smacking of Japanese racism (Japanese are not racist because there is no racism in Japan---except the racism of non-Japanese who criticize anything about Japan), and how the mostly non-Japanese worldwide used the internet to embarrass the dealers (except Amazon Japan which viewed the sale of the magazine as a free speech issue) into removing the magazines.

The boycott and removal of the magazine from shelves of course, is not much of a victory. The ideas, beliefs, bigotry and racism that allows this kind of stuff to be published openly and freely is the problem. That most here do not recognize---or can't admit---that there is widespread racism---or at least racist beliefs among the public---and openly racist politicians and government officials is THE main problem. It's good that there was a small victory. However, since the Japanese-language press ignored the issue, there will be no debate, no reflection, no nothing by the Japanese public.
You've seen the 3 monkeys at the Tokugawa Ieyasu shrine in Nikko? Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil? We might say that is still very much alive in Japan.

The rather clueless editor of the bigot rag responded to all the criticism:

Shigeki Saka refused to apologize, claiming that he had become a victim of a campaign of harassment, censorship, emotional overreaction, and distortion by an "army of bloggers". He claimed that these puroshimin ("professional citizens", best translated as "do-gooders") had unfairly targeted him even though the only intention was to open a frank discussion on the "taboo" subject of foreign crime. He claimed, "This is not a racist book, because it is based upon established fact," with "no lies, distortion or racist sentiments."

He added that translating nigaa as "nigger" was "unfair", as the term is merely Japanese street slang, with "none of the emotive power in Japanese that the N-word does in English". Moreover, Japanese have also been victims of racial slurs in the past (citing epithets as far back as World War II), so what was the problem?

Hmmm. The "N word" has none of the emotive power in Japanese that it does in English? Probably not to the Japanese. Might be to others who hear it and don't understand that there is no racism in Japan.

A good rebuttal of Saka's absurd defense is at debito.org

Wanna see the whole book? A scan of it is available here for free.

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.

Another View of the Rightward Rush in Japan

A story about a Japanese high school teacher, Ms. Miyako Masuda, who does not particularly agree with the rants of the right-wing nutjobs that Japan was a victim of WW2. She was upset by a statement a year or so ago by a Tokyo City councilman, Koga Toshiaki, that Japan had never invaded Korea, so she wrote a letter to the South Korean president. One of the loony-bird rightist groups which supports the shrine honoring some convicted war criminals (among the other dead), discovered that she and her class had written the letter and complained.

Masuda is now ordered to spend her days in a small room studying public servant regulations, a serious humiliation she says. She in turn is trying to fight in court.

Masuda's experience shows the growing power of Japanese nationalists, and their
grass-roots influence in Tokyo, analysts say. (From HERE)

AND:

"I explain and teach the past. But I am now suspended as a history teacher for doing that, even though they say it is for administrative discipline."

Masuda's case has been picked up as a case of simple slander by the Tokyo media. A Japanese journalist with extensive experience points out that the Tokyo Asahi ran an item saying that Masuda was suspended for slandering the government officials and the publisher of the textbook. (From the original Christian Science Monitor article.)

The first link's owner also describes a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine that Japanese LDP politicians love so much. It seems less than an innocent little place to honor war dead. I hope to visit myself sometime so I can see how poor Imperial Japan was victimized by the evil Chinese, the West, and others. They never did nuttin' wrong! (But of course, Japan "regrets" some of the bad things it may have caused in the past. Why don't the Chinese believe that?)

Koga Toshiaki's statement: "It is not proper to describe a war of aggression by Japan. Where and when in the world did Japan ever invade? I'd like to ask, once and for all, when where and which country....

Free speech in Japan? Only if you are a right-wing neo-facsist emperor worshiper. Ahhh saving the world through bushido just like in the 30s.