Shooting at Japanese women with bamboo rifles

There's a lot of outrage on social media (and real media) about a certain "dating coach" and his let's call it unorthodox approach to seducing the ladies. I'm not going to link to his stuff here because you've probably already seen it and I don't want to bomb the guy with any more free publicity than I already have (not that I think anyone who would be interested in anything I write about on my blog would be at all the sort of person who would get anything useful from one of his seminars).

However, if you haven't had the joy of watching him at work, his advice for winning the hearts of Japanese women is basically to shout "Pikachu!" at them, then grab their heads and shove them into his crotch. At the end of the video, you see him doing it to a few clearly very embarrassed girls while bystanders look on with uncomfortable expressions.

Now obviously ordinary, non-sociopathic people are pretty much universally outraged by this how-to guide to sexual harrassment bordering on physical violence, but I want to talk here about something slightly different.

The most striking thing about the "dating advice" this gentleman dispenses is how useless it is in its ostensible function. You're not going to pick up anyone by grabbing random girls with your big meaty hands and forcing them to smell your sweaty balls, you're just informing them that you're an asshole. There may be specific social environments where the group's general familiarity with each other has led to a sort of general lowering of inhibitions and a shared understanding at play that something like that is funny and silly, but fundamentally it's just not effective dating advice.

The "dating coach" knows this, and so, if they're honest with themselves, do the fawning acolytes you can see hanging on his every word in the video. So what is it really about?

If you look at the reaction of the attendees in the seminar, their main reaction is laughter. They're like an audience at a comedy club, listening to a standup deliver racist and sexist one-liners and anecdotes that one after the other reinforce their most shameful prejudices and reassure them that they aren't alone. These guys probably aren't going to go to Tokyo and start thrusting their crotches into girls' faces: what they are getting instead is a cathartic validation of their own potency. They might laugh about it and make half-hearted plans to visit Tokyo together, high on the thrilling possibility that they could impose themselves thus on the supine Oriental ladies of Japan, but most of them will return to their lives of nagging self-doubt and making spiteful threats to women on the internet.

Even Mr. Dating Coach probably doesn't really take that approach. He's probably tried it just enough to know he can get away with it, but in the clips on the video, he's clearly doing it for the benefit of whoever's holding the camera. Those clips are demonstrations of his ability to impose his will on the female species, but I'm going to stick my neck out here and suggest that he has never got laid using that method.

No, what it is is a sort of ritual of male power, Mr. Dating Coach acting as a sort of priest, conducting a congregation of men who share a nagging sense of their own declining status. Together, they act out this pantomime of male dominance and female submission, like cargo cultists performing military drills with bamboo rifles in the hope of summoning back the airdrops that have long passed them by -- they are not there to learn but to experience fleeting reassurance of a status of respect and dominance that they feel they deserve but have never thought to earn.

The Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence and its "gynoid" servantgirl

Some quarters of the Japanese and overseas media got themselves into a flap recently over the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence's decision to spice up their rather dry in-house journal with an illustration rather than the usual raw text adorning the cover. Let's have a look at the illustration in question first and see if you can work out what the problem is:

It's an android servant girl with a typically manga-esque sweet, gentle expression, holding a broom in one hand and a book in the other, with a cable plugged into her back. The core issue behind the outcry is the cleaning robot = woman equation that the image seems to suggest, although the fact that it's in the form of a pretty girl with a subservient, submissive expression is a subsidiary but related issue that to some brings to mind a sort of dubious Stepford Wives male/female power dynamic.

First up, let's make clear that the illustration was drawn by a woman. Some people think this is significant, although I'm not so sure. Women are just as capable of expressing and embodying regressive ideas, something to which anyone like me who grew up in Thatcher's Britain should be able to testify. Nevertheless, that fact should be a warning against reading this debate on too much of a superficial level. We're dealing with embedded assumptions here, not something that can be claimed or dismissed without a bit of unravelling.

So let's take a look again at the picture and think a little about what it represents. The interior decor of the room suggests a rural cottage and this is combined with the faintly retro garb the android girl is wearing and the old fashioned broom (not to mention the fact that she's reading a book, which when you think about it would be a pretty pointless activity for an AI brain that could download and digest a book in a matter of seconds) to evoke without directly depicting times past. She is a modern equivalent of the domestic servants of times past, with the man-machine interface replacing the class relationships that lay behind master-servant interactions of the past.

But she's not simply carrying out her function like a robot, she's reading a book, an action symbolic of (if not always synonymous with) learning. She is upgrading her functions independently, and just as education has been posited as a springboard to transcending class boundaries, the image holds out promise of the android girl becoming more than simply a machine.

Now this is an interesting set of signifiers the image is sending off, and I'd hazard that this was the artist's original intention with the work. People dismissing it as a work of straightforward sexism are not giving the artist credit for her ideas and imposing a probably unintended set of meanings on it.

However, that's not the end of the story, much as I suspect a lot of people would like it to be. Look again at the girl's face. She may be demonstrating an independent capacity and willingness to learn and transcend her base functions, but there's nothing overtly threatening in it; her gaze remains blank and inscrutable. There may be some specific intention behind this, but given what a common trope it is in manga and anime depictions of femininity, chances are that the main rationale behind it is simply "because kawaii". This goes for the clothing and decor as well to a certain extent, it builds towards constructing the girl as a fetishistic object of desire, or to put it in otaku terms, it's moé.

Viewed through that prism, we can see how the image has internalised a great deal of the unthinking assumptions of the manga/anime world, most of which are socially and culturally conservative, especially in their depiction of women. There is no reason why the android needed to be depicted as an attractive young girl, but it wasn't a simple coin toss that could have gone wither way: there is no alternative universe where someone with a background in manga/anime fandom wouldn't have depicted a cleaning android as a young woman (a man would have been a butler).

The blank expression suggests a passive nature in contrast with the independent mindedness suggested by the book. In another context, this could set the book as a subversive item, undermining her submissive programming, but in the context of the moé, where (usually feminine) weakness is the key to unlocking fetishistic desire, it's more a statement of, "Aww, it's trying to learn, bless its little cotton socks!"

So context is the problem. In the context of anime or manga, where those sorts of assumptions go unchallenged, this image would be a very effective one. However, in a wider media context, those assumptions can't be relied on. Another Japanese artist, Sputniko! (her exclamation mark, not mine), whose life's work also deals with the interactions between technology and our daily lives, describes the image as, "a gynoid robot with hollow eyes" and noted that, "A black cleaning robot featured on the cover of a US academic journal would cause an uproar."

The reaction to Sputniko!'s comments on Twitter was highly abusive from some, and the anger generated by her criticism suggests that the image does indeed touch on issues of patriarchy and privilege, as well as providing yet more evidence, if any were needed, of the rage with which many people respond to statements that make them question why they are attracted to things that they like. Japan not being a nation that tends to equip its people well for such deconstruction of the semiotics of art and pop cultural images, many people here have responded with bafflement that something so self-evidently cute could ever be a bad thing, and it's hard to say whether that makes the issue less or more of a problem.

Another aspect of context is that the illustration appeared in the context of an academic journal, and it's clear that lots of the criticism from within academic circles has centred not on the gender issues so much as the appropriateness of using a comicbook style illustration on what is supposed to be a serious magazine. It's depressing in a way that even criticism of the work has to come from another side of Japanese conservatism, but in any case, it's important to note what other factors are in play. The poppification of science and academia includes a whole world of discussion all by itself.

So the illustration is an interesting one that I think successfully fills its remit of depicting an issue at the core of AI research and development in an attractive if rather limited way. It does have problematic gender issues though, which are issues inherent in manga and anime culture and reveal a wider problem in the way gender stereotypes are enforced through repetition in aspects of the media, leading to their unquestioning acceptance by many, including perhaps by the artist herself. The fact that the miniature storm over its publication happened at all is really reflective of the problems caused when otaku-dominated images (with their raft of moé signifiers) collide with a world from outside their closed circle of signs and signifiers.

Ikumi Yoshimatsu, talent agency "stalking" and women's rights

One of the big Japan stories in the English language media lately has been the case of Ikumi Yoshimatsu, the beauty queen who has taken the rare step of going public about a campaign of intimidation by Genichi Taniguchi, an executive of the talent agency K-Dash after she chose not to sign up with his company. Investigative journalist Jake Adelstein summarises the story very nicely here, but the specific complaints are detailed by Yoshimatsu as:

“Today I filed criminal charges against Genichi Taniguchi, a Japanese talent agency executive, who in December of last year grabbed me, forced his way into my dressing room and tried to abduct me. Since then, he has intimidated my family, sent private detectives to my home, tried to extort money from me and my company, slandered me in the press and has made threatening calls to my family, sponsors and business associates.”

Typically with these kinds of stories, the Japanese media has afforded it zero coverage. The main reason for that is that K-Dash is affiliated with the all-powerful talent agency octopus Burning Production, a company widely understood as an affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza syndicate and detailed as such in leaked police documents. News media in Japan rarely ever deals with scandals involving powerful talent agencies like Burning or Johnny & Associates for fear of being blacklisted from access to the bankable stars those agencies control.

Nevertheless, it's been reported widely in English language media, and Yoshimatsu herself has established a petition on change.org urging the Japanese government to revise the law to provide better protection for women against such harassment.

It's interesting that so much of the coverage, including the way Yoshimatsu herself frames the issue, centres around the idea of stalking and crimes against women.

Now the image we usually associate with stalking is of the lone weirdo harassing a woman he has a romantic obsession with, which is obviously a very different sort of case to the Taniguchi/Yoshimatsu case. The most obvious issue here is of the gangsterish business practices of the thugs who run still heavily yakuza-influenced talent agency system and the way the rest of the entertainment industry kowtows to them, collaborating in the blacklisting of performers who step out of line. This informal blacklisting can be seen in the way the female singer Ami Suzuki and the male rock band Glay were effectively erased from the entertainment world in the early 2000s after breaking from their former management companies, so it's not a practice that exclusively targets women.

However, there are I think good reasons why this way of framing Yoshimatsu's case makes sense.

Firstly, the international media has no context by which it can relate to the ins and outs of the Japanese entertainment industry. Readers would get that it's unfair, but it doesn't touch them and their lives. The issue of crimes against women is far more effective as an emotional hook to reel people into the story and give them a way of relating it to their own lives and experiences. Given the supine Japanese media's willful blindness to the thuggish, bullying behaviour of talent agencies, using foreign language media to shame the establishment into enforcing changes is an alternative way of putting the case (albeit one that I think overestimates the capacity of the Japanese media and entertainment worlds to experience shame) and one which is most effectively done by framing it in a way that international readers will best be able to relate to.

Secondly, there is a problem in Japan of inadequate protection of women from stalking and harassment, and relating this potentially high profile story to that issue both gives it more immediacy and also could do a lot of good by way of provoking much needed action. The case of Rie Miyoshi, stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend Hideto Kozutsumi in 2011 after the police refused to accept that a thousand threatening emails could constitute stalking is a particularly horrific example of the feeble levels of protection offered to women. Even if Yoshimatsu's case is clearly being driven by a different set of circumstances, relating it to the issue of protection of women could be a more effective way of getting action and might result in an outcome that would benefit not only Yoshimatsu herself but many other women throughout Japan.

Lastly, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, despite being an evil warmongering, proto-fascist piece of shit, has officially at least stated publicly that improving women's position in society is a priority to him. His wife, Akie Abe, has come out in Yoshimatsu's support, so it makes sense that if any action is going to occur, pushing the women's rights angle again seems like the most effective course of action.

The truth is that yakuza involvement in the entertainment industry is simply an issue too few people care about, and the talent agencies' hold over public discourse is too great for any headway on that angle to be possible. As an entertainment journalist, and as a human being who hates thugs and bullies, that is a source of much frustration to me, but on this at least, Ikumi Yoshimatsu appears to be a smart operator, so good luck to her and let's hope she makes progress where so many others have failed.

Abenomics and the nuclear debate

When the nuclear power plant in Fukushima started to go into meltdown after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, something strange started to happen to people. Men and women who had never before in their life thought about nuclear power except in the wooliest of terms (and I count myself among them) suddenly became experts, scouring the news media, Wikipedia, and whatever they could find on Google for information, and words like microsievert, bequerel and caesium 137 entered the daily vocabulary of millions of people looking for something to explain the crisis, reassure them, or simply justify their reaction.

It didn't really help though, and rather than illuminating the discourse, these words, facts, and often non-facts, became weapons in a dispute between people whose positions as proponents or opponents of nuclear power were already fixed. Here in Japan, it took on a more personal dimension, as a person's fear or faith became an identifying mark, a litmus test providing a window into a person's moral character, science as a set of dueling swords to be wielded in support of the most emotional, unscientific motivations.

And with the recently elected Liberal Democratic Party's economic policy, we're seeing a similar, if less widespread thing. Like the nuclear crisis, the post-2008 global economic crisis has started to make experts of all sorts of people for similar reasons, as they seek explanation or just to bolster their emotional prejudices. It may not be as dramatic as a nuclear meltdown, but terms like quantitative easing, expansionary austerity, and liquidity trap, with which few people pre-crisis would have had more than a passing familiarity, became far more commonplace.

In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's sweeping changes to the nation's economic policy, encapsulated in the ugly and misleading compound term "Abenomics" have acted as a lightning rod for comment in a similar way to the nuclear crisis. An article from Reuters on April 29th collected a number of criticisms, ranging from the wise-sounding but ultimately meaningless statement that "there are no simple solutions or shortcuts" to the utterly bizarre remarks by former finance minister Kaoru Yosano that, "Since ancient Greece and Rome, most policies that excited people ended in failure. The fact that people are pleased and in a festive mood seems to prove this policy won't work."

One of the catchiest soundbites to come out of the article was Yuuki Sakurai of Fukoku Capital Management's claim that Bank of Japan policy was like "shooting a sparrow with a cannon." It's a nice image, and again it sounds wise, although comparing an economic slump now more than twenty years long with a sparrow might seem to some to rather underestimate the scale of the actions required to deal with Japan's economic woes. In a way though, as with the nuclear power argument, its the debate over Abenomics that is what's really trying to hit a sparrow with a cannon.

There are apparently some claiming that it's the magic bullet to solve all Japan's economic problems (I have yet to see any evidence that this is anything other than a straw man used by critics, although it's probably fair to say that within the LDP, there will be party shills willing to parrot this line) and there are certainly many who seem implacably opposed to Abenomics in its entirety, and its within these arguments that the scalpel rather than the cannon needs to be employed.

First, what does Abenomics promise? Well, primarily, it seems to be a plan by the bank of Japan to target higher inflation rates and expand the monetary base, combined with promises of greater public investment. In theory, and economists like Martin Wolf at The Financial Times and Paul Krugman at The New York Times have been calling for policies like these for a long time, this combination of higher inflation and greater public investment, if sustained credibly, should be able to stimulate demand put the economy back on a growth track without resulting in catastrophic hyperinflation or Greece-style debt disaster. There's nothing intrinsically new in it, since the policies basically conform to the Keynsian IS-LM economic model that has been a pretty accurate predictor of economic events since the crisis (and this is why I say "Abenomics" is a misnomer), but it's certainly a big step by a major economy in the current climate.

So what doesn't it promise? Well, for a start, inflation targeting can only work if investors trust the Bank of Japan to continue its expansionary monetary policy until growth is well underway, something previous BOJ chairmen have consistently failed to do. Despite current chairman Kuroda's insistence that he will do what takes, it might fail if people simply don't believe him. Also, the policy has nothing to say about how the fiscal stimulus will be targeted. It's widely suspected that Abe's government will use it like a bribe to bolster their position in key electoral areas, and to put money in the pockets of their friends. In macroeconomic terms, this shouldn't matter to the overall economy, but individually, region by region, worker by worker, this is important. Also, there are issues like the increase in sales tax, which may stimulate consumption in the short run, but which is a regressive tax that will hurt the poor more than the well-off. And then there's the vague sounding promises of "structural reform," which is so often a buzzword for relaxing environmental regulations and limiting employment rights, especially in view of the recent praise Abe has heaped on Margaret Thatcher.

Abenomics also has nothing to say on the biggest problem facing Japan's economy, namely the growing shortage of Japanese. Without a sudden boost to the birthrate (not going to happen) or a more relaxed attitude to immigration, the Japanese economy is on a long term relative downward trend. More can be done to maximise the participation of women in the workplace, something that all parties claim to support, but concrete action on which is rarely forthcoming, but in the end, immigration is the elephant in the room.

Just as the nuclear debate turned into a binary for or against slanging match, leading to important discussions of the extent and enforcement of safety regulations, the unhealthy way energy companies, government and media are intertwined, and Japan's commitment to the longer term fight against global warming being lost, discussion of Abenomics is so often depressingly black and white, obscuring the real issues surrounding its execution and longer term economic policy.

Bad economics, anime and fantasy

Alright, so anime isn't the first place most people would think of turning for plausible economic narratives, but recent world events have triggered off a half-forgotten memory in me and got me thinking about anime anyway.

The issue I have in mind is the debate over the amount of US debt held by China and the extent to which this makes America China's bitch. The correct answer is (1) China has bought quite a lot of US debt, but the majority of it is still held domestically, i.e. the US is mostly in debt to itself,  (2) It gives China no influence whatsoever over the US because China needs that US$ denominated debt to maintain its own export-driven competitiveness, and (3) Even if China decided to take a hit to its own economy just to spite the Americans, someone else would just pick up the slack -- US debt yields are actually running in negative figures once adjusted for inflation due to the huge demand for government bonds in the face of uncertainty-plagued private sector investment scene. Basically, if China sold off all its US debt, it would no effect on the US economy except to raise the value of the RMB against the dollar, making Chinese exports less competitive and giving a small boost to the US economy.

OK, so that aside, why the relevance to anime? Well what this situation describes is precisely the moment when the plot of the 1998-99 mecha series Gasaraki stopped making any sense. Japan also holds a lot of US debt, and part of the plot of Gasaraki centred round an old Japanese Yoshio Kodama style figure, who stands up to the big bad Americans by threatening to sell off Japan's US debt. There then follows a rather cheesy scene where the Americans say that would hurt Japan too, and then the old guy claims that Japan's national character would save it, while America would descend into chaos, to which the American reluctantly agrees.

It's pure nationalist fantasy, but more than that, it's economic nonsense. Despite the slightly different circumstances (America is in a liquidity trap now, which explains the high demand for government bonds), it still makes no economic sense. Even if no one else wanted it, the Fed could simply buy up the debt, and as long as America had control of its own currency, it could just (inflation allowing) print more money to pay for it.

There is a historical precedent for debt being used as leverage over another government's policy though, but it's one going in the other direction, where the US threatened a large sell-off of British and French debt in response to the Suez Crisis, forcing a military withdrawal. The circumstances were very different in the case of the Suez Crisis though, for example Britain was still relatively recently out of the Second World War and was far more reliant on imports, which would have been devastated by a sudden devaluation of Sterling.

OK, so I'm a bit of a nerd about this, but in issues of economics and politics, I can't help sometimes being fussy about how these things work. When I play roleplaying games and every time I walk from one town to an other, I'm beset every dozen steps or so by increasingly fierce and violent beasts, I wonder how the economy can survive under such a serious threat to trade. I don't understand why the economy of Middle Earth isn't completely under the control of the eagles, since their ability to travel swiftly, even carrying large cargoes of goods, between the mining regions of the northeast, the agricultural regions of the west and the whatever-it-is-Gondor-produces region of the southeast would surely make them the wealthiest and most politically influential power in the world, especially given the well documented difficulties in traversing the Misty Mountains. Spice & Wolf would have been perfect for me, if only it had just got rid of the wolf aspect and simply been a documentary about medieval trade in a fictional universe.

I suppose the problem I had with Gasaraki, a show which otherwise made an admirable attempt to deal with sensitive political issues in a mature, balanced way, was that it transparently used nonsense economics to further a nationalist agenda, whereas your usual, run-of-the-mill fantasy or sci-fi simply ignores economics because it's primarily interested in telling an escapist adventure.

Debating the "comfort women" issue in Japan

Over the past couple of days Twitter has been abuzz with debate over the recurring issue of "comfort women" -- the predominantly Korean women coerced into prostitution by the Japanese army during the Second World War -- and their claims for acknowledgement and compensation. This time round, Hiroko Tabuchi of The New York Times was on hand to provide translations of some of the arguments against the women's claims and their comments reveal part of the uglier side of Japan -- the part that those of us involved in one way or another with trying to give Japanese culture a boost always find thoroughly dispiriting.

Before I get into the arguments, though, a warning. I use terms like "morality" and "national conscience" in here, which I'm not entirely comfortable with and which I usually approach with extreme caution in other people's writing. However, for want of better words, I'm forced to use the inadequate tools with which my vocabulary has provided me in the hope that I don't lose too much in terms of clarity.

First, I'm not going to debate the fundamental facts. There are primary documents available to peruse on this site, and if someone still wants to just flat-out deny that anything happened… well, if someone really doesn't want to believe something, they'll always find a way of not believing it. This blog is predicated on the reality that forced sexual slavery carried out on behalf of the Japanese army did occur. That's my position, that's the position of most reputable historians from what I can gather, and that's the position of the firsthand data so take it or leave it.

What I'm going to focus on instead is some of the arguments that fly forth from the denialist side whenever this issue or similar ones relating to war crimes, even painstakingly documented ones, come up. There are obvious similarities with Holocaust denial, Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, and all manner of other crimes.

Because people in many countries are in some degree of denial about atrocities in their own past -- Britain and France have ugly colonial legacies and America has its own violent horrors in its westward expansion -- and taking a look at the arguments made in these various cases it's clear that the process of denial takes similar paths.

One of the most common arguments is precisely that: the fact that many countries have done horrible things in their pasts. There are three parts to this dynamic.

1. It's an argument that seeks to mute the impact of a crime by spreading the blame. It doesn't seek to legitimise the act so much as muddy the waters, to give the impression that in "other times" things were different and to give the impression of a moral grey area. By making the issue appear too morally complex, most people will either back off, or…

2. It forces critics from overseas onto the defensive. "But what about YOUR COUNTRY? What about what YOU did?" goes the cry. This argument forces the opponent to either admit moral equivalence or go on the defensive, thus evening out the field of battle as it were. This sort of argument is known as "whataboutery" and was first coined (I believe) due to the constant use of these "what about…" arguments in debates over sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

3. It implies that their country and their country alone is being unfairly victimised. "Why are WE being picked on when other countries also did bad things? Why are you not picking on THEM for what THEY did?" This argument attempts to usurp the mantle of victimhood from the actual victims of the crimes, as well as subtly implying an agenda that seeks to attack the speaker's own country for unspecified but probably nefarious reasons.

All of these points are attempts to divert the argument away from any discussion of the actual events and the evidence and testimonies of the victims, and the answer to all three of these points is basically always going to be a variant on, "Yeah, but we're not talking about what those countries did," followed by a repeated assertion of the actual issue under discussion.

There are also a couple of specific arguments particular to Japan and the comfort women issue that I've seen come up.

One is that the South Korean government is just using it as a stick to beat Japan with for political gain, particularly at election time, and that no matter what Japan does, they're never going to back off. This is a tricky argument because on the one hand, it's clearly true, but on the other, it's another attempt at distraction because it really doesn't matter.

It's an argument that only makes sense if you think that the only reason for Japan to acknowledge, apologise to and compensate women who were forced to work as sex slaves for its army would be in order to gain something in return (in the form of increased national good will or whatever) rather than out of any sense of basic justice and morality. Put another way, it shouldn't matter as far as Japan and its own national conscience is concerned that South Korean politicians are using the issue for political gain -- that's Korea's own ethical issue.

Another argument I've heard is that the comfort women were employed by private brothel owners and weren't being run by the military, so as a result, the Japanese government has nothing to apologise for. This legalistic argument is more blatantly desperate and seems designed mostly to satisfy the conscience of the speaker. Perhaps it's an appeal to the neoliberal capitalist in the listener, but it's hard to find anyone else really being convinced by it.

In capitalist terms, if the military has a certain level of demand and the supply is limited, the supplier is clearly going to be under enormous pressure to meet that demand. If the military decides to look the other way and not question the legitimacy of the source, the military is a co-conspirator just as any company caught handling illegally-obtained goods would be.

To take another example, my home town is Bristol in the United Kingdom. Growing up in Bristol, one of the first things I learned about local history was that the city's wealth in the early colonial era was built largely off the back of the slave trade. Initially, corrupt magistrates would manipulate petty criminals into going to the American colonies as indentured servants, taking a cut off the unscrupulous traders' profits as they sold the prisoner's contract to plantation owners across the Atlantic. Later, when demand became too high even for these practices, the trade expanded to the transport of black slaves from Africa. In all these cases, these were private transactions, not government policy, and yet the city of Bristol and the country as a whole were responsible every bit as much as the wealthy businessmen who profited off the slave trade.

It might be fashionable in these post-Wall Street Crash and post-Blackwater days to argue that governments aren't responsible for what happens under their watch, but when they set the rules that allow injustices to occur, they are responsible as if they pulled the trigger or wielded the baton -- or the whip -- themselves.

The most common argument, however, is the one that goes, "It was a long time ago. I didn't do any of these things. Why should we still feel the guilt for these crimes committed by past generations?"

This brings up the awkward morality of the Old Testament "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation", which I'm going to just lay aside here, partly because the Old Testament is full of crap no one needs to listen to, and secondly because this is a quote from a self-confessed "jealous God" who was probably a bit upset at the time. It's pretty obvious, I think, that we don't need to punish children for their fathers' crimes in every situation.

In the case of the comfort women, there are two points that put this argument on shaky foundations though. The first is that many of these women are still alive now, and who is going to acknowledge, apologise to and compensate them if not the country in whose name their mistreatment was carried out? Secondly, many of the men who carried out this mistreatment, whether directly or indirectly, are still alive, and many of them (and their families) have done very well thank you very much since the end of the war.

It's certainly an argument you can make that as modern Japan didn't commit these crimes, it shouldn't be held responsible for paying. However, I think that as these arguments so frequently find themselves accompanied by denials and diversions of other sorts, the people making them secretly know that if the comfort women's stories are accepted as true, the moral weight of acknowledging and compensating the victims would indeed lie on their shoulders. To play a little whataboutery of my own, one needs only to look at Germany to see a very different approach (the Contingent Refugee Act of 1991, for example, removed many immigration barriers to Jewish people, leading to a large influx of Jewish people from former Soviet states that had previously been ravaged by the Nazis).

Some of this is no doubt down to straightforward, ugly nationalism, but many of the people who come out with these kinds of responses are perfectly ordinary, not particularly politically motivated individuals. I'm inclined to put some of the blame on films like Isao Takahata's traumatic animated feature Grave of the Fireflies -- a very effective, alternately horrifying and beautiful film, but also a deeply manipulative one -- for colouring many Japanese people's image of the war with deep hues of victimhood, focussing attention and images of the war almost entirely on the suffering endured by children and families at home and, along with sanitised schoolbooks, providing little wider sense of the Japan's role in the war as a whole.

There's also the tendency of those of us from the West to view national trauma as something to be purged through a kind of bleeding of the national conscience. A sort of therapeutic introspection to purify the national soul, whereas Japan perhaps prefers not to hang out its dirty washing in public. It's a different way of dealing with trauma, and one shouldn't be too quick to dismiss it. In this case, however, there are real victims, still living and breathing, and still desperate for acknowledgement.

Worldwide, Japan is one of the countries viewed in the most positive light by foreigners, and attitudes like these are a rare stain on its international image. More importantly though, regardless of how it benefits (if at all) Japan and perceptions of it in the world, it should be a matter of basic decency and sense of justice that this cycle of denial is broken.

Ideology, Terror and making fantasy relevant

One of the dangers of fantasy or science fiction writing is for the author to imagine an alternative world too much through the filters of the prevailing attitudes of his or her time or social circles.

For a science fiction writer, it's often necessary to stay in closer touch with the here and now, since much of sci-fi involves extending current trends into the future and developing them to their logical conclusions. The trick there is to recognise how attitudes will differ while making sure that the path by which society got to that place remains visible and relatable to the present day.

Fantasy has a couple of characteristics that make it a bit different. Firstly, it's much more about world building, in that the author doesn't have a set of established historical, geographical and cultural data that readers share and on which he or she can build the story. The fantasy author must build the entire geography, history and set of cultures from scratch (by and large they will pick and choose fragments from history and legend, but they still can't rely on the reader's familiarity with the background). Secondly, fantasy is a fundamentally conservative genre. Settings are largely based on historical or mythical themes, science is primitive or non-existent, society in a fantasy world usually has to deal with different challenges to modern industrial or post-industrial societies.

The result of these two factors means that the social and political world of a fantasy novel would likely be utterly alien to a modern day reader. The values of the people in it would reflect different social priorities and any insertion of the attitudes of the writer's own time will look clumsy at best and utterly shatter the fourth wall at worst. The ending of Philip Pullman's otherwise wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy with its "Republic of Heaven" premise is a classic example of this, because Pullman's own modern day liberal-left sensibilities jar with the alien world(s) he's spent the past several hundred pages constructing.

Obviously that doesn't mean that fantasy can only be written by right wingers. Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is legendarily awful in large part because he can't let go of his own Randian wingnuttery. Where Pullman perhaps unwittingly allows a glimpse past the curtain, Goodkind places the ideological stage machinery front and centre. Pullman also has the advantage that his fantasy is rooted in a more fluid, technological universe in which social and political change are ideas that are by no means anathema to its existence. It doesn't quite work but it doesn't fail so utterly and completely.

But if you're writing about an archaic seeming world with a largely rural population, who the fuck is going to care about ideas like liberty, democracy and self-actualisation? Could an ancient or medieval society, even a magical one, even function along those lines outside of the city-state setup? Inserting those values into a fantasy novel is like giving Frodo Baggins a Segway to help him across the Plains of Mordor. 

We have of late been living in a society where those values are taken for granted though, and it's easy for them to slip unquestioned into our literature (and especially our Hollywood-dominated cinema). It also means that the values of the bad guys, which were born out of 19th century antipathy towards despotism, 20th century fears of fascism and communism, and 21st century anxieties about religious fundamentalism, also too often pass unquestioned. In fact Lord of the Rings itself never even bothers to explain what life under the rule of Sauron would be like. He's evil and that's that, just go ahead and imagine your worst nightmares (which at the time basically meant Hitler).

Taking on and providing analogues to real world political and ideological conflicts isn't a bad thing of course. The West's model of liberty and democracy and the sense that the march of these ideals is inevitable and unstoppable is challenged by places like China that have far less interest in democracy and yet seems to be doing very well thank you without it, so there is great value and probably more than a little interest in exploring alternative models of society in order to question and probe our own model. As I mention earlier, those kinds of questions are part of the job description of a science fiction author, and while it's a thornier problem for fantasy authors (given that escape from the real world is pretty much their raison d'etre) it can be done, particularly if the writer is skilled at mining historical sources for relevant but also convincing allegories.

That isn't often what the writer's looking for though. The writer is usually, whether they realise it or not, looking for a quick fix: a Big Bad that will get the audience on their side. They may think they're being challenging by dealing with an "issue", but they're not really challenging anything, and both the writer and audience are able to feel comfortable in their horror and revulsion. It's easy to look at the systematic murder of groups of people or the ethnic cleansing of populations and say, "No matter what your explanation, that's just wrong." Moral certainties like that are comforting.

Cultural relativism can be understood as an automatic and even necessary response to a world that is becoming more connected, and more and more information and conflicting values are forced to coexist in the media and especially online spheres. Trying to reconcile all those different ways of thinking, sets of values and traditions is going to drive you insane, so it's natural to look for an out: to say, "Oh well, different horses for different courses." It's a kind of tolerance of others' differences, but it's also a distancing mechanism. It's a way of saying, "That's nothing to do with me."

The flipside of that of course is that pretty much everyone has a line they draw somewhere, where they say, "No, enough is enough. That's just wrong." At some level, your tolerance for other people's differences has to give way because you feel something they do or think has intruded on your own ethical, moral or ideological territory. For some people, for example a religious fundamentalist, this line is drawn widely and they feel very offended and put upon, sometimes to homicidal degrees, by all kinds of things other people do with their lives. But for almost everyone, there are moments where your own values, your own sense of identity, pushes you to intolerance.

These moments can be interesting for a writer, and the minds of people who do things we find unacceptable are fertile grounds for literature.

Most people who commit atrocities aren't like Sauron. Most people would agree that even the worst crimes against humanity are often committed by people who think they're doing right. What gets less attention is the fact that a lot of horrendous crimes are not only committed in a spirit of righteousness, but they're also quite logical.

Robespierre and Saint-Just were quite rational in their application of the Jacobin Terror and while the period is frowned upon by modern liberals, a look at the history of revolution and counterrevolution in many countries suggests that a period of terror to rigorously instill revolutionary values (Zizek takes it further, adding the idea of "divine violence", although the philosophy isn't as much of a concern to me here as the practical side) is an entirely logical response to the danger of reassertion of the old regime or the creeping return of their remnants through the weakening of revolutionary zeal. Similarly, the murder of the Russian royal family and the destruction of their remains was a logical response to the reality of such figures' symbolic power -- revolutions had failed in Russia before, and the punishments of the perpetrators had been severe. In both cases people did horrible things that nonetheless made perfect sense in terms of the situation in which they occurred and what the people were trying to achieve.

There is much controversy over the issue, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that from a moral perspective, it's very difficult to defend Israel's actions in Palestine. Nevertheless, one could argue that from a strictly rational point of view, Israel doesn't go nearly far enough. What kind of Palestinian state could ever emerge from that situation that would be anything other than pathologically hostile to Israel? We may see Palestinians as victims and instinctively sympathise with them but Israel's own history shows us how easily oppressed can become oppressors. In the mind of someone like Benjamin Netenyahu he is not committing crimes, he is Doing What Has To Be Done. A more ruthless man might do more, as America did to its native population without apparently seeming to even notice it.

We live in a world where "terror" has become an evil in itself, a binary opposite of "humanity", but this is a function of our own comfortable lives and society (and one Robespierre and Saint-Just would have disagreed with fundamentally). For us there is no greater evil than the disruption of our peaceful existence. How easily might we slip into a new fascism all of our own if that comfort were threatened? For me, one of the most interesting and valuable avenues that the science fiction or fantasy author can explore is the minds and rationales of the people with whose values and actions we disagree or reject. Not in the sensitive, liberal-minded and relativistic way of "tolerating" them from a distance but to really get inside the heads of those who trespass upon the ideological ground that makes up our identity.

In this sense, fantasy, so often intellectually the idiot sibling of science fiction, can in fact provide a more subtle, allegorical comment on the world, challenging contemporary assumptions about The Way It Is and taking us ideologically on tangents from the straight lines that science fiction tends to draw into the future. Of course most won't do that, and undoubtedly many writers and fans in the genre are attracted to it precisely for the way it presents us with an established social hierarchy with simplistic and small "c" conservative values.

Even then, however, there is something interesting in showing us the thought processes and logical steps a king goes through in his decision to go to war or levy a tax, and then letting us see the effect that has on the peasant farmer. Does the farmer dream of change? If so, what sort of change can he envisage? As I said before, a modern liberal democracy would probably be low down on the list. Another, better king might be more like it, because this imaginary peasant's sense of the natural order of things would likely be just as limited by his experience as ours is by our own world. Where we usually hold fantasy at a distance like good social relativists -- "it's another place, they live differently there." -- and where bad fantasy writing allows modern ideas to unwelcomely intrude, an alternative model of fantasy literature can induce the reader to examine their own ideas by introducing recognisable problems into the world of the story but having the characters tackle them using a totally different set of ideological tools. Our response -- horror, pathos, amusement, anger, whatever -- is influenced by our consciousness of the gap between what we see or read happening and what our instincts tell us should be happening. Thus the writer is able to address contemporary values or issues by their very absence, sidestepping the awkwardness of inserting them into an arena where they don't necessarily belong.

Fukushima vs. the Romance of the Telescope

Last summer I was taking a train across Europe with my wife. It was a minor dream of mine that I’d found myself suddenly able to realise: To take a trans-Europe express whilst listening to the album Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk. It was a silly dream, and taking a thirteen-hour train ride from Berlin to Paris, followed by several more hours on trains before we arrived in Bath, instead of just flying made it an extraordinarily inefficient use of time, but what use are dreams, even dumb ones, if you don’t seize the chance to make them real?

As we moved out of the Berlin suburbs into the countryside, one of the most striking things was the way the farmland was spotted with wind turbines. Wherever you looked, you saw these vast, white electricity-generating windmills scattered across the fields, in between the occasional cluster of old farm buildings and cottages.

Now I know there are lots of issues about wind power – the unpredictability of generating capacity from day to day, the hidden carbon cost of building them and then the gas power required to back them up during periods with low wind, the supposed noise pollution problems, the visual impact on the environment, and the cost in government subsidies that presumably explains why German farmers were so eager to have them on their land in the first place. Nevertheless, there was something powerful about the image that I couldn’t put into words. Something I don’t feel when seeing electricity pylons, something to do with the clean, smooth simplicity of the design, standing proudly artificial in nature’s midst (we’re pretending that farmland counts as natural here, and I hope you’ll forgive me) while at the same time working together with nature’s most elementary forces to create energy. The economics and hidden problems aside, the image itself just felt right. I turned to my wife, motioned to her to look, and she said in two words what I had been unable to say:

“ちょうサイバー” (“Very cyber!”)

Which brings me onto what I really wanted to talk about here, which is the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the anti-nuclear protest movement.

One of the problems I’ve had in processing the impact of Fukushima and the subsequent protest movement, I’ve come to realise, is that it cuts through two powerful prejudices that I have. These are things I strongly believe and can back up with cold, hard reasoning, but I call them prejudices nonetheless because they are principles that I feel emotionally, in my gut before I even think about bringing reason to the table. The first is my instinctive support for any protest movement that goes up against a conservative establishment. I’m a lefty and I feel an instinctive sense of solidarity with any left-wing or left-aligned political or social movements. When I see policemen in Shinjuku battering protestors, or yakuza-backed fascist groups staging counter-demonstrations designed to intimidate and warn off ordinary people from joining in, I get a deep red mist. When I learn about politicians, media and big business collaborating behind the scenes, cutting corners on safety, collaborating to conceal information and spread lies, when I see the establishment’s ranks closing to protect its own interests at the expense of ordinary people, and when I see public figures who try to do something about it demonised and driven from their positions, I feel automatic support for whoever it is that could get such contemptible people so scared and angry.

People sometimes ask, “Where is Japan’s ‘Occupy’ movement?” Certainly when people here tried to stage sympathetic protests last summer, they passed largely unattended. However, in many ways Japan’s anti-nuclear movement is already their Occupy Wall Street. Like “Occupy”, it is a protest that cuts to the heart of the incestuous, undemocratic and destructive relationship between business, media and government, and like “Occupy”, it is an outpouring of public anger that could only come from people who have finally felt a real-life, tangible impact on their own lives as a clear result of this dysfunctional collusion within the establishment. With this, I can’t help but feel sympathy. It’s something I believe strongly on an intellectual level, but it is something that first and foremost I feel emotionally. It is a prejudice – a correct one, I believe, but a prejudice nonetheless.

However, on the issue of nuclear power, my left-wing sensibilities come up against another prejudice of mine. I am an unashamed lover of science fiction – no expert, admittedly, but I definitely lean geekwards – and my feelings towards nuclear power itself are emotionally influenced by my sense of wonder at the science itself. It angers me when people on Twitter and other places insist on referring to nuclear energy as “nukes” – a slang term associated primarily with nuclear weapons (like referring to a kitchen knife as a “shiv”, it strikes me as disingenuous – both can cause harm, but only one is designed for the purpose and it seems unfair to conflate them).

On an intellectual level I might ask myself about the wisdom of building nuclear power plants in an area with as much seismic activity as Japan. Nuclear power has with it a lot of the same financial, local and visual impact issues as wind power, coupled with massively more serious pollution, waste disposal, health and safety issues. I’m not going to argue those points. Still though, like wind power, the wonder of it – the romantic image of mankind harnessing the awesome power of the atom – takes my breath away.

Now given the very real suffering of people just a couple of hundred kilometres from where I live in Tokyo and the (I’m going to stick my neck out and guess probably less real, although the government/media/TEPCO axis do little to reassure on that) fears of many in the Tokyo/Yokohama area, such airy, wistful ideas will seem frivolous, facetious, even irresponsible. I accept that my reasons as outlined above are not good ones. As I say, this is a prejudice and my purpose in examining it is to find the emotional source of my instinctive reaction.

But once again, I believe, after thinking and taking into account what I know to be my instinctive biases, that I do still support nuclear power, although whether I support its continued long-term use in earthquake-prone Japan, I am far less sure. The devastation to the Fukushima region is horrifying, but nothing compared to the devastation to the whole world being wrought by our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Many of the problems at the plant and most of the possible dangers to Tokyo seem to come primarily from human failures (and I use this term deliberately – TEPCO etc. should not be allowed to pass off their oversights and systemic corruption as mere “errors”. They, the government and all who colluded with them and continue to do so failed as human beings on this), not failures of the science of nuclear energy itself. At least the fears that sent ultra-wealthy Japanese scampering for Hawaii and Hong Kong, and caused such bitterness and division within Tokyo's foreign community seem not to have been as serious as many worried they were at the time. To hate the corruption but love the science – yes, I am such a naïve romantic.

But whenever I think about nuclear power, or indeed wind, solar, any exciting new technology, I always find it is the sci-fi romanticist in me that leads my thoughts, that chooses their path, with the rational part of my mind following behind saying, “And that could also have useful social implications,” and things like that. When I see protests calling for an end to nuclear energy, I cheer on their attacks on government and industrial corruption, but my stomach knots with fear. What will happen if these protests result in funding cuts for research into fusion power? In my mind I see spaceships with massive fusion reactors bound for Mars and a little bit of me thinks, “This! This is what you’re protesting against, you fools! Can’t you see how beautiful it is?”

In truth, since very few of us, including the journalists we rely on to explain these things, really understand enough about nuclear physics, nearly all of our reactions to the Fukushima crisis are driven by such instinctive and emotional factors. The fear of deadly, poisonous radiation that can be neither seen, heard nor smelt is a powerful factor, the distrust of government, media and big business may lead some to feel that the science itself is corrupted by association, or perhaps that humans are too intrinsically corrupt to be trusted with such power. In these emotional responses, we can see folkloric themes play themselves out. The Biblical themes of Original Sin, or the Tower of Babel are powerful stories that evoke our fears of human weakness or hubris, the tales of Prometheus or of Faust can inspire hope or fear in the search for knowledge, fairytales are infested with shadowy evil that slips unseen and unheard through your window at night. Science-fiction embodies all these themes, as well as spinning its own myths about the power of technology to shape the future of mankind. Even when we are presented with the facts, but especially when our knowledge lacks, these age-old and not-so-old themes still carry emotional resonance.

In this way, just as it is irrational to let fear of the unknown or poorly understood dictate our response to Fukushima, so it is also irrational to think that merely by supporting "science" one is being scientific. We pick through the snippets of information in the media, desperately try to recall our school science education, skim Wikipedia articles, and we may think we understand, but unless we are prepared to wade through thousands of pages of data and read dozens of scientific papers, unless we're prepared to deal with the information at our disposal scientifically, all we're really doing is sifting through mountains of stuff that we don't really understand, looking for things that "feel right" (i.e. that confirm our pre-existing, emotionally driven prejudices). Someone like me may well want to argue that by taking the part of science, one is arguing a more positive and utopian ideal, but that is all I am doing.

In a sense, this is simply a long way of saying that it's probably for the best that I'm not the person in charge of determining energy policy for Japan over the next fifty years. On the other hand, I don't think that upon recognising our biases over this issue we should disavow responsibility either. It is such a lovely feeling to be able to say, "If only an expert could handle this stuff, then all these stupid politicians who we elected wouldn't be able to mess things up," but our prejudices often lead us to be selective about which "experts" we choose to believe. I do believe that we don't give enough respect to scientific data, and believe that peer-reviewed science should carry more weight in public life than the populist ranting of news media, the moralistic fantasies of religion or the cynical lies of industry lobbyists. Still, these feelings that I have been characterising as prejudices are also rooted in stories that contain genuine insights into human character and the consequences of human actions. Without being dogmatic about them, they are useful tools in enabling us as people to make judgments about the kind of world we are in and the kind of world we want to make.

The events at Fukushima are a tragedy, and the nuclear industry should clearly be (and I hope it is) asking serious questions of itself rather than simply circling the wagons in anticipation of resuming corrupt business as usual. But my fervent hope is that in its aftermath, we aren't left with a world where we look at technology with only cynicism and fear. For this sci-fi geek at least, technology should be a source of hope for the betterment of mankind, we should be able to separate the corruption of the government-media-industrial triad from the promise offered by science, and I hope we are able to deal with the problems, the risks, and the harsh practicalities of technology without losing sight of the dreams of science, of the romance of the telescope.

Tohoku, Fukushima, and the social contract

There has been a lot of comment around the world on the Japanese people’s response to the March 11th triple-disaster, mostly positive, with observers from The United States to the traditionally Japanophobic China praising the order and resilience of Japanese people in the face of the almost unimaginable catastrophe that hit large parts of the country.

Trying to unravel what lies behind this orderly response is more problematic. Some web comments in China bemoaned how far their own country was behind their eastern neighbours, making declarations along the lines of “this is what it really means to be a developed country”. Some people in the West shook their heads and muttered, “automatons” or “zombies”. Many people in Japan noted the discrepancy between the way Japanese media downplayed the crisis, relying on government statements and officially established facts, while many parts of the Western media sensationalised the crisis (yes, I’m looking at you, The Sun).

However, I think what it mostly comes down to is the idea of the social contract. Responses to a disaster are calm and orderly when people feel that there is a social contract between them and the establishment that is being respected. In New York after the September 11th terrorist attacks and London after the tube bombings, people mostly responded in a similar way to the way Tokyoites responded to March 11th. These are large, wealthy cities, with strong infrastructure and government institutions that may not always be liked, but which are on the whole trusted to deal with a crisis. In all three of these cases, the people trusted their city as a whole to deal with the problems in a calm, orderly manner, and as a result, they themselves responded in a calm, orderly manner.

Now take New Orleans, a city rife with economic and racial inequality, where right from the moment the crisis started to emerge, the signs were there that the social contract was not being respected. The wealthy, largely white part of town occupied the safest ground, the levees had been neglected, and the evacuation still left many of the poorer residents behind. When the city was flooded, the Bush government initially refused to intervene, politicians squabbled over responsibility, and the news media demonized the starving, neglected evacuees who resorted to looting. Where the establishment doesn’t honour the social contract, the people have no security to cling to.

The people in Tohoku, and Japan generally, still have that sense of a social contract, and despite the much publicised failures of government response after the Kobe quake of 1995 (of which current Prime Minister Naoto Kan was vocally critical), and despite many lingering administrative problems, there is still a sense that society, both at the top and the bottom, is united by shared social bonds.

What is interesting, is the response of people in Japan to the Fukushima situation. Here, it is increasingly becoming clear that the government and TEPCO have consistently lied and concealed information from the people. That the dishonesty and corruption between business and government is deeply rooted and has been to the detriment of the people with whom they had this unwritten contract. When LDP lawmakers can gather to form a nuclear industry lobbying group with the crisis on their doorsteps still ongoing, when figures are starting to emerge on the extent to which former politicians have been gifted lucrative positions in energy firms in return for passing helpful laws, and when the Japanese media refuses to report on the biggest protests of any kind seen in the country since the 1960s, people start to feel that their social contract is not being honoured. Instead of “us” in this situation together, it becomes “us”, the victims, and “them”, the establishment.

If the Japanese government wants to retain the trust of its people, it needs to be very careful how it deals with TEPCO and Fukushima, because something quite fragile is at stake.

Railway Etiquette and the Lighter Side of Virtual Dating

An article I wrote was published today in Tokyo-based English magazine Metropolis on the subject of the DS dating simulation game phenomenon that is Loveplus, or more accurately Loveplus+, in view of the latter's release tomorrow.

Read that?

OK, now first up, Metropolis' "Pop Life" column isn't the kind of place that encourages long, rambling discourses on sociological and postmodernist topics, but some of the stuff that came up in this article touched on one of my pet issues, and I think intersects interestingly with some aspects of modern Japanese life.

In his 1997 book The Plague of Fantasies, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek says:

The need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order (materialized in the so-called unwritten rules) thus bears witness to the system's vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s -- to take the most extreme example -- it was not only forbidden to criticize Stalin, it was perhaps even more forbidden to announce this very prohibition: to state publically that it was forbidden to criticize Stalin. The system needed to maintain the appearance that one was allowed to criticize Stalin, the appearance that the absence of criticism [...] simply demonstrated that Stalin was effectively the best and (almost) always right.

In other words, it is the peeling back of the facade, by revealing the true process that underlies the lie, even though we all know it to be a lie, that is the crime.

What has a piece of Nintendo dating simulation software got to do with Josef Stalin, one might well ask? Let's think about these "unwritten rules" here.

Every culture has its unwritten rules; they are the foundation stones of what makes our society function. An example most of us have experienced at some point is the dilemma of what to do when offered a free meal. If someone offers to pay your half of the bill, you must make a quick calculation as to whether this is an occasion where you are to insist on paying your share, or one where you must merely make a show of insisting before relenting; the option to accept right off the bat, applies only to certain people in certain relationships, and you must be aware of these rules (these unwritten rules) in order to function smoothly in this situation.

In Japan, many of these unwritten rules are breaking.

The Tokyo Metro has been running a series of advertisements in its stations to educate passengers on the finer points of train etiquette. To an outsider, these "Please Do it at Home" posters probably seem like a mixture of common sense and outright weirdness, but there are some key signifiers that tell us what they are about.

Firstly there is the recurring character of the gentle, unfairly harassed old man who is the victim of all this bad behaviour. Secondly, the perpetrators of most (although not all) of these crimes are young people. Generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that there is a generation gap on display here. Young people either do not know, or simply disregard the unwritten rules.

Yet by producing these posters, hasn't Eidan Line themselves done damage to the system? By writing down the rules, the rules are no longer unwritten. By displaying the rules, they actually reveal more clearly the breakdown of the system, and by showing up the generation gap, they accentuate the differences.

One clear early memory of my early time in Japan is of an older middle-aged student that I was teaching telling me, "The good thing about a homogeneous society like Japan is that you can sit on a train and look at the person opposite you, knowing that they're thinking the same way as you." There was a great deal of comfort to be found in knowing that society shares the same values and rules. Now, how does he feel stepping into the Metro and seeing those posters? Perhaps he is comforted, but not in the same way as before. The poster comforts him by saying, "While the people opposite you may no longer think the same way as you, be assured that the system is on your side of the cultural division."

A more recent discussion I have had, this time with a group of middle-aged women, centred around the phenomenon of young women doing their makeup on the train, and this is where it gets really interesting for me.

Now as a man, and a foreign one at that, this is something I had never previously cared about, and the way the Eidan Line posters complained about it baffled me. How does a women doing her makeup harm anyone? Who cares? Sometimes I worried that a sudden jolt might send a line of mascara skew whiff, but that seemed to me a matter for the girl to deal with. Nevertheless, these three women were horrified by the trend towards girls doing this in public. To them, the act of showing oneself doing one's makeup on the train was equivalent to getting dressed in public. Viewing the process of transformation was what disgusted them. You may wear makeup -- and Japan is a culture that practically demands that its women spend a fortune on the stuff -- but you may not show yourself applying the makeup.

Perhaps significantly, or perhaps by happy coincidence, the Japanese term for "making up" literally means "changing" or "transforming" oneself, which brings us back to Stalin: by revealing the process, you shatter the illusion, and even though everyone knows it is an illusion, it is necessary for society to maintain the pretence of not knowing; to peel back the facade is forbidden.

This is where the real division between generations lies, and the crux of the matter comes in Japan's transformation into a postmodern society. The truth of these girls on the train is that they don't care about the illusion. The makeup is accepted on its own terms, not as a way of tricking people into thinking they are more beautiful; similarly, the elaborate art girls plaster onto their nails has no purpose in creating the illusion of beautiful nails: it is the art itself that they wish to display as beautiful.

Now, finally, let's return to Loveplus. A well worn theme when dealing with otaku culture is the division between reality and make-believe, and a well-worn criticism of otaku themselves is that they become unable to distinguish between the two. Reporting on Loveplus often focussed on the blurring of reality and fantasy, but what I would contend is happening here is very similar to the girls on the trains. The issue of whether the girls in Loveplus are fake or real is irrelevant; the chap I interviewed for the Metropolis piece, Endo-san, is an intelligent person and it's very clear from talking to him that his interest in 2D girls is made with full awareness of what distinguishes them from real women, simply that he accepts the distinctions on their own terms, and actually prefers 2D ones. Perhaps the real controversy with games like Loveplus is not that they blur distinctions between reality and fantasy (this has been the purpose of art since for ever), but that they reveal how easy it is for fantasy to substitute for reality, and that they ask questions of reality that it cannot answer except by reflexively replying "but I am real!" The game's reply to that is simply, "I know I'm not real love, but I argue that I am an improvement on reality. I am not love, I am Love Plus."

Oh, those Russians...

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this frankly bizarre article by Gregory Clark in that ever-reliable quality newspaper The Japan Times recently.

By all means read the whole article and get the full context, but I'll only be quoting parts of it as I go along here.

Antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people

Yikes! What a headline! Well, to be fair here, my humble journalistic efforts occasionally grace the hallowed pages of the JT and I know that writers are rarely responsible for their headlines. Also, given that the paper has a reputation among some for being a bit of a moaning shop for foreigners, there's surely no harm in bringing a bit of thoughtful, well-written balance. Hats off to the editorial team then. So let's get started:

"Japan girai" — dislike of Japan — is an allergy that seems to afflict many Westerners here.

OK so far. No one likes a Moaning Michael, for sure.

Normally these people do little harm. In their gaijin ghettoes they complain about everything from landlords reluctant to rent to foreigners (ignoring justified landlord fear of the damage foreigners can cause) to use of the word "gaijin" (forgetting the way some English speakers use the shorter and sometimes discriminatory word "foreigner" rather than "foreign national.").

Surely getting turned down for an apartment on account of being foreign can be quite a serious problem though. In what way are these "justified landlord fears" and in what way do these fears balance out a human being's right to a roof over their head? As for the use of gaijin versus gaikokujin, well, the issue is surely more the intention behind the decision to use one word rather than another. Where the intent is to insult or belittle, it is natural to take offence. Where there is clearly no such intent, in the words of Wil Wheaton, don't be a dick.

A favorite complaint is that Japanese universities discriminate against foreigners. How many Western universities would employ, even as simple language teachers, foreigners who could not speak, write and read the national language?

There's a clear difference between universities "discriminating against foreigners" and "foreigners who could not speak, write and read the national language". Is Mr. Clark saying that Japanese-speaking foreigners aren't discriminated against by Japanese universities? It would help to know. But then perhaps what he is getting at is something a bit different. The complaint about universities is a pet project of everyone's favourite serial litigant-cum-freedom fighter Debito Arudou. Could it be that "many Westerners" and "these people" really refers to just one person?

Recently they have revived the story of how they bravely abolished antiforeigner discrimination from bathhouses in the port town of Otaru in Hokkaido.

Ahh, the Otaru onsen lawsuit, and a familiar face reappears. The plot thinnens. There's not much I could add to this sad case of an innocent onsen owner hounded out of his business by drunken Russian sailors and his terrible revenge on foreignerkind other than that it seems like something that could have been resolved with much less trouble if everyone involved had been a bit more civilised, although I did like this quote:

as proof I harbor no anti-Russian feeling let me add that I speak Russian and enjoyed talking to these earthy, rough-hewn people in their own language

I'm sure Mr. Clark has nary a Russophobic bone in his body, and he's written some fine articles about Russia, but this line still carries that dubious whiff of "Yeah, but, you know, some of my best friends are gay" about it. Perhaps he just thought we should know that he can speak a lot of languages.

The antidiscrimination activists say bathhouse managers can solve all problems by barring drunken sailors.

Sounds reasonable...

But how do you apply a drunk test? And how do you throw out a drunk who has his foot in the door? Besides, drunken behavior is not the only bathhouse problem with these Otaru sailors. I can understand well why regular Japanese customers seeking the quiet Japanese-style camaraderie of the traditional Japanese bathhouse would want to flee an invasion of noisy, bathhouse-ignorant foreigners. And since it is not possible to bar only Russians, barring all foreigners is the only answer.

Perhaps some kind of sign is in order, maybe reading something like, "Quiet, please". Mr. Clark could assist with the Russian if they asked. He certainly sounds like he wants to help. Mind you, those "earthy, rough-hewn" Russian sailors that he so enjoyed talking to really do sound frightfully scary.

The antidiscrimination people point to Japan's acceptance of a U.N. edict banning discrimination on the basis of race. But that edict is broken every time any U.S. organization obeys the affirmative action law demanding preference for blacks and other minorities.

This is quite simply an appalling argument. Drawing parallels between legislation designed to combat discrimination and behaviour that actively discriminates against people because of their skin colour is the rhetoric of the extreme right and an educated, seemingly liberal, man like Gregory Clark should be better than that.

Without it, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama would probably not be where he is today.

Ouch!

Malaysia has also ignored it, with its Bumiputra policy of favoring Malays over Chinese and other minorities. There are dozens more examples of societies deciding to favor one group of people over others in order to preserve solidarity or prevent injustices. A large chain of barbershops in Japan has signs saying service is denied to those who do not speak Japanese.

This paragraph is evasion, bordering on a particularly petty form of whataboutery. Malaysia's policy sounds pretty racist from what Mr. Clark writes here, but then I don't know anything else about it and I thought we were talking about an onsen. Or were we talking about moaning foreigners? Again, with the barbershop point Mr. Clark confuses discriminating due to a language barrier that clearly hinders the ability of the establishment to do its job and discriminating due to nationality or skin colour.

Non-Japanese speakers probably cause much less harm to a business than delinquent Russians. But we do not see our activists in action there

That is because they aren't the same thing.

The activists say there should be action to educate Russian sailors in bathhouse behavior. But do we see any of the activists in the friendship societies where worthy Japanese citizens try to ease problems for foreigners living here? Not as far as I know.

Greater cultural understanding for those lovely Russian sailors sounds like a great idea. Who knows, beneath the chrysalids of those earthy, rough-hewn exteriors there may be dozens of Lafcadio Hearns or even, in rare, lucky cases, Gregory Clarks just waiting to unfold their wings into the sunlight. Those friendship societies sound great too. Why are these two ideas presented in opposition here?

Presumably close contact with these citizens would also upset their Japan-girai feelings.

That's quite a big presumption to make, Mr. Freud.

Japan has long had a real problem of clever Chinese and Korean criminals taking advantage of Japan' s lack of theft awareness to pick the locks and pockets of unsuspecting citizens. But when the authorities try to raise this problem, they too are accused of antiforeigner discrimination. Even companies advertising pick-proof locks are labeled as discriminators if they mention the Chinese lock-picking problem.

In this case, though, why is it necessary to make a point out of these clever criminals being Chinese and Korean? Surely just warning people to look after their stuff is enough and doesn't have the side-effect of making the ninety-nine-point-whatever percent of non-criminal Chinese and Korean immigrants (many of whom are second and third generation) feel that they are all being treated as potential criminals.

Let me add that I also have no anti-China feeling; I speak Chinese too.

Tee hee. And George Wallace had lots of black friends, and simply loved jazz. It's strange why people still use this argument, but then it's not so strange that people become defensive when they're attacking others.

It is time we admitted that at times the Japanese have the right to discriminate against some foreigners.

By "some foreigners", it's tempting to suggest that Mr. Clark means rough-hewn Russian sailors and clever Chinese and Korean criminals, rather than Oxford-educated vice-presidents of Akita International University, but no, let us not carelessly throw around accusations of hypocrisy; he states that while he dislikes being fingerprinted at the airport, he accepts that it's needed so presumably he is willing to accept other forms of discrimination on behalf of those other, bad foreigners (some of whom can't even speak Japanese, dontchaknow).

If they do not, and Japan ends up like our padlocked, mutually suspicious Western societies, we will all be the losers.

Firstly, where did that come from, all at once in the final sentence? Secondly, how did he get from the problems of foreigners complaining about being called "gaijin" at the start of this article to Japan's metamorphosis into this hellish dystopia at the end? Thirdly, wasn't he advocating locks of some kind to protect innocent Japanese from clever Chinese and Korean criminals just a couple of paragraphs ago? This single point, tossed off at the end of the article is an interesting and serious issue that Japan is likely to face as its cities become increasingly multicultural, and if one tracks back to early last month, there is a rather better article by Paul De Vries that deals less hysterically with both this idea and the extremely important issue of the Russian onsen controversy, but Clark doesn't explore it.

As Marc Jones writes in the comments section of his blog here, "I think maybe Mr. Clark is out of touch with how those foreigners with lower-status jobs than heads of universities are discriminated against, including Chinese and Koreans but also immigrant residents and workers from other Asian countries."

Gregory Clark isn't an idiot. Judging from some of his other articles he has a wide range of experience on all manner of issues and doesn't habitually write from a perspective of transferred nationalism. Neither does he seem like the sort of person who writes simply to shock. Somewhere amid all this nonsense and flawed rhetoric, I feel Mr. Clark has a point to make, but I'm also pretty sure that point is just "Debito Arudou is a wanker". It's just a shame that he had to catch a glancing blow off of pretty much every other foreigner in Japan with his wild swipe.