世論 What Japan Thinks

Oooh, I’m angry!

Shane at A Typical Life reports that Bloomberg has published a story detailing the recipe for hydrogen sulphide, the poison gas that has become all the rage for people doing themselves in, but a method of suicide that has killed a few others in the process and has sickened many, many more.

They have not only published the exact recipe and named the products to use, but in the case of the bath salts that may be difficult to obtain, they chose to link not to the official web site, but actually to an online shopping site so that death can be delivered to your door with a click of the mouse.

Please visit Shane’s blog and digg and Japan Soc the story, and add a word or two of support for her and also tell Blooomberg what you think of them for detailing information that the Japan National Police Agency is trying to keep off the web.

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Starting about two weeks ago, Japan Today has been publishing video ads through Google AdSense for the Church of Scientology, much to the annoyance of some of their readership. Although it is perfectly easy for Japan Today to block these advertisements (despite claiming they cannot - see the 434th comment labeled “sailwind at 11:45 PM JST - 19th April”), the adverts ran for at least a week indicating that the management at Japan Today prefers the income over any hackles promotion of that wonderful organisation might raise within their audience.

(As a side note, I posted a follow-up message to point out that the JT Editor was wrong in his or her observation about being unable to block advertisements, but they deleted my message.)

Next, they ran an open thread on why people join cults, which more than a few of the regulars found quite ironic considering they had been running adverts for the not in the least bit cultish Church of Scientology.

However, the final straw was the commentary piece published today, Japan in need of moral education, by Peter Zimmatore. I read it and thought the whole article sounded a bit fishy, so I did a web search for the Metempiric Foundation and turned up just one other hit, an event that sounds like some sort of vaguely religious gathering. This caused me to merely roll my eyes, but searching for the author’s name turns up a lot of Scientology-related hits. Whilst I fully understand that there may be other people in the world with the same name as him and I am most willing to be corrected in my assumptions, I can only conclude that this article has been written by a member of the Church of Scientology.

Further evidence from the article includes:

This was a transplant from the world of therapy (Carl Rogers/Abraham Maslow) and their psychology-based influence.

The Church of Scientology is well-known for its opposition to both psychiatry and psychology.

For teenagers and young parents, we need to have a technique that makes them able to confront and handle the defects they have developed and to redirect them to the need and desire to want to live a virtuous life.

This description sounds like Scientology’s auditing process.

Why is Japan Today publishing articles that have a hidden agenda? Is it willingly or unwittingly supporting the Church of Scientology? I have emailed the editor of Japan Today to ask him or her to clarify the web site’s position, but I am yet to receive a reply. However, I did notice that they deleted three comments by people making jokey comments directed at the aforementioned article appearing to be a Scientology plant, which is not a good sign.

Update: Between writing this article and publishing it, Japan Today has seen fit to remove all bar one comment (perhaps they missed that one?) associating that article or the author with the Church of Scientology, using not the usual method that sends an email to the comment author with a reason for deleting, but with a purge that does not notify the poster.

Japan Today is also in need of moral education. Was Japan Today paid to publish that commentary? A more honourable site would have at least left the comments standing to help the reader understand where the article is coming from.

Note: Although I am no fan of Scientology, they have the right to a presence on the internet and to try to publicise their message. It is Japan Today alone that I hold responsible for this.

This is the title of a recent report produced by Rubicon Consulting, which I picked up via Michael Mace’s blog. I love statistics and stories on the iPhone, and although this is a study of the USA market, I will project from the US findings to look at if similar trends can be observed in Japan, and will Apple’s device be a success or not over here based on the reported results. You may have heard the recent news that the production of a 3G iPhone has started, so the Japan release is surely getting near. Let us look at the key statistics in the full report and see what they mean. All statements about the Japanese market are based on surveys previously translated on this blog.

Demographics

460 randomly-selected iPhone users from all over the US completed an internet-based questionnaire. The sex breakdown is not listed, but by age 0% were under 18, 5% were between 18 to 21, 15% between 22 to 25, 30% between 26 to 30, 26% between 31 to 40, 13% between 41 to 50, 6% between 51 to 60, 4% between 61 and 70, and 1% over 70 years old.

User satisfaction

Overall over 40% were strongly satisfied with most of the features, and almost 80% satisfied to some degree. However, under 30% were strongly satisfied with data speed; in Japan with ubiquitous 3G, the need for speed will surely be even stronger.
Read the rest of this entry »

With the ongoing whaling by Japan being generally supported by the Japanese public, this perhaps sums up Japan’s official stance. It was Masayuki Komatsu of the Fisheries Agency who made that famous statement on minke whales being the cockroaches of the sea.

Since I’m being slightly off-topic this evening, here’s an interesting article that was passed to me from Andy at Siberian Light about a little bit of history that perhaps not many Westerners are familiar with (it was news to me), but which holds a pivotal role in shaping both the war in the Pacific and the Eastern Front.

The battle is of Khalkhin-Gol, or the Nomonhan Incident as it is known in Japan, which took place in 1939, just a few weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, and was sparked off by an incident along a disputed portion of the border of the Japanese and Soviet puppet states, Manchuria and Mongolia, near the town of Nomonhan, close to the Khalkhin-Gol river, thus the two names for the battle.

After much skirmishing and even aerial attacks by the Japanese, Tokyo eventually issued an order to expel the invaders and reclaim the ground lost to the Mongol and Soviet forces. On July 1st 1939, Japan attacked and drove back the opposing forces, but a counter-attack by the Soviets with a force of 450 tanks soon saw off the thrust, and on July 5th the Japanese withdrew. Another assault by the Japanese was also repelled, but before the Japanese could regroup for a third try, the Soviets counter-attacked on the 20th of August with 50,000 men, 498 tanks, and 250 planes. By the 31st the Japanese were encircled, and bar a few units who managed to break out, they refused to surrender and chose instead to fight to the death, and the Soviets duly obliged, with the battle finishing on the 1nd of September 1939.

As we all know, just a day later Hitler invaded Poland.

Official statistics report just over 17,000 Japanese total casualties, compared with around 9,000 Soviets, but some historians claim that Japan lost more than 45,000 men, versus Soviet losses of 17,000 men.

How Khalkhin-Gol changed Japanese military thinking

Realising that the Soviets were tactically superior, one reason being that the Japanese forces valued samurai-like ethics (for want of a better word) on the battlefield, Japan decided to curb its desire for expansion into Soviet territory, so even when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the Japanese chose not to open a second front, enabling the Soviets to concentrate on the threat from the West.

Thus, to satisfy its expansionist desires, the far-flung (from the European perspective) colonial outposts in South-East Asia were richer pickings. Thus, thanks to that defeat in Mongolia, perhaps Pearl Harbour became to be seen as a softer target, and the rest is, as they say, history.

If you enjoyed this short history lesson, please don’t forget to read the full story at Siberian Light.

My mother sends me clippings of the Economist regularly, and in this month’s batch was a very interesting article on how 200 years ago it was Westerners, mostly Amercians, who were encroaching Japan’s sovereignty - rather than today when Japan fishes (or should that be mammals, if that noun is verbable) in Australia’s self-declared sovereign region - to take whales, with at the peak 550 ships sailing around the still-closed country picking off the local cetaceans.

As for whaling around Japan, vestigial echoes reverberate. Every northern winter, Japan faces barbs for sending a whaling fleet into Antarctic waters. And why, asks the mayor of Taiji, a small whaling port, should Japanese ships have to go so far, suffering international outrage? Because, he says, answering his own question, the Americans fished out all the Japanese whales in the century before last.

Just to tie this into surveys, here’s a story from this time last year on an opinion poll regarding Japanese attitudes to whaling.

According to a poll recently conducted on behalf of the national broadcaster, when asked if without immigration would the nation’s economy suffer, almost half (49%) of the people of this island nation bravely trying to hold out against the inevitable forces of globalisation thought that it would not suffer without an influx of foreigners, versus 46% who thought it would suffer.

When asked if all these incomers would affect the unique identity of the nation, 62% agreed whereas only 35% disagreed; almost twice as many think assimilation is not possible, perhaps indicating some longing for past glories where it was their unique culture that was imposed on other countries.

In other news, 65% of Japanese wants to see more immigration, even at the unskilled level, to address labour shortages. The backward, xenophobic, racist nation described in the first two paragraphs is actually the UK.

Note that of course the Japanese and UK situations are in no way comparable, and there are other surveys that indicate, for instance, that 55% of the Japanese public blame a decline in public order in foreign crime, versus 36% in the UK, but it does show that nihonjinron is not a uniquely Japanese disease, and that Japanese public opinion is perhaps not such an outlier when compared to other nations. Having said that, Japan is an outlier when it comes to media and state reaction to racism and allegations of such, although I do not paint as black a picture as others.

Sources: UK survey from the BBC (pdf); Japan survey from the Mainichi via Japan Probe.

I was going to post on this myself, but Mari beat me to the punch. Pop over and see her selections from the candidate list of 60 trendy words and phrases.

You may have heard the news that 25 years ago on the 19th of September 1982, there was the first recorded use of western smileys on usenet. However, that got me wondering as to how old horizontal Japanese emoticons were. With a little investigation, I came across this Japanese page on the evolution of smiley marks in Japan. I’ll now present a summary translation of this history of the Japanese emoticon.

First up is a nuclear scientist claiming to have invented (~_~) and others round about the same time as ASCII Net (a Japanese online service) started in May 1985, although he says he wasn’t the first, he was just following the patterns of others.

Next up was someone claiming that when he attended Hokkaido University the first Japanese emoticon he saw was from Master Koala with (^O^) in fj.jokes, inspiring him to invent the following:

(^.^) - laughing
(;.;) - crying
(-.-) - sleeping, shocked
(_ _) - apologising, lowering one’s head
; - sweat mark, eg (^.^;)
* - red-faced, eg *^.^*

These were coined between May and July of 1988 and used on JUNET, the Japanese University Network.

Now, we get to a usenet post from January 13 1998, indirectly archived by Google Groups (but with broken encoding). In the message we can see the following marks:

(^O^) - Master Koala smiling
(-O-) - Master Koala sleeping
(*O*) - Master Koala shocked
(@O@) - Master Koala looking sideways
(=O=) - Master Koala squinting through narrowed eyes
(>O<) - Master Koala surprised
(dOb) - Master Koala neutral

Now we get a very interesting post, suggesting that the classic (^_^) was invented in Japan, but perhaps not by a Japanese. A Kim Tong Ho claims that in the first half of 1986 he signed posts to ASCII Net with the above-mentioned emoticon, with one example from 20th of June 1986. However, he doesn’t have confidence to claim to be the very first person to come up with a Japanese emoticon that doesn’t require head-tilting to read. Around the same time a person with the handle “binbou” (the nuclear scientist mentioned above) used (~_~), but as to who was first, it is rather difficult to say.

So, there we have it; the Japanese emoticon is at least 21 years and a few months old, perhaps even 22 and a bit years old.

Just a short note to say that Debito has published a detailed look at the recent survey on human rights, including bits from my translation and other more traditional news sources.

He gives an interesting summary, and adds a few of his own opinions, so head over there and check them out.

Thanks for the link back Debito - I hoped I could tempt/taunt you into replying and perhaps spark some debate on the topic.