Martti Ahtisaari is a former Finnish president and the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He came to Japan to speak on conflict resolution and then toured the tsunami-stricken areas near Sendai. I got to tag along and interview him for around a half-hour in the van on the way back to the shinkansen station.

The interview will go up on Nippon.com, which is the big project keeping us busy at Japan Echo these days. I have a blog post to write about all of that. It will happen soon.

Which is odd, really. The number 95 doesn’t refer to the number of prime ministers who have headed up Japan’s government, beginning with Itō Hirobumi (whose first term was 1885–88). It’s the number of times a man has been formally selected by the Diet to serve as prime minister. Of course, it’s much easier to write “the ninety-fifth prime minister” than “the person selected to be prime minister in the ninety-fifth such selection by the Diet,” which is why we get this shorthand version in news coverage. This could be described as the ninety-fifth cabinet to form, but that excludes reshuffled cabinets that didn’t involve the Diet tapping the prime minister to serve another term.

I don’t think there’s a very compact way to express this count in English. The English Wikipedia page on Japan’s premiers through history calls this “administration number” as opposed to the number of individuals, but it’s rare to see similar language—and whatever added information would be needed to make it clear to readers—in media coverage of these handovers of power.

In the United States, we talk about Obama being the forty-fourth president, not the fifty-sixth, as he would be if we were counting terms like this Japanese system does. (Things are made sort of confusing by Grover Cleveland, who served two terms with someone else in between; he gets counted as both #22 and #24.) In Japan, though, the standard count is the higher number. Itō was the first prime minister. He was also the fifth, seventh, and tenth, with various other Meiji statesmen taking turns in between his terms.

Nobody needs to push you out of office for you to get a new prime ministership, though. Koizumi Jun’ichirō, the last premier with any staying power, was prime minister #87, #88, and #89. We’re about to get the sixth single-termer in the four years, 11 months that have passed since he left office. Can’t tell the players without a program!

* UPDATE: Who is Noda Yoshihiko.

The media frenzy is finally dying down following the “election” to determine the top-ranking member of popular girl group AKB48. I’ve been struck by the fact that there has been plenty of media coverage of superficial aspects—who got how many votes, which members climbed to the top of the rankings—but almost no reporting has taken an analytical, objective look at what underlies this tumultuous affair.

The election wasn’t covered just by TV shows and sports dailies. Even the general-audience newspapers, which don’t usually give much column space to entertainment news, reported on it—a sign that Japan’s media companies judged this to be a major social matter with an impact on a broad population.

This reporting showed that the band has fans in many age groups and that the competition for the top spots in the election was fierce. The reports that stood out most, though, were those on fans who bought dozens, or even hundreds, of CDs—each of which counted as one “vote” in the election.

The more I watched, the more I came to see this as an election among bought candidates—the opposite of a contest where candidates press bribes into voters’ hands to secure their support. These fans are like female customers at host clubs, ordering bottles of Dom Perignon to try to boost their favorite host to the establishment’s top slot. These aren’t actions that people generally pursue in public view.

But this election was nothing more than a sideline entertainment industry story, right? No. The media took this up as a genuine social phenomenon; that makes it an issue to be addressed on a more universal level. Given that, you’d expect at least one media outlet to explore this event’s structural weirdness. It wouldn’t take more than a hundredth of the effort of uncovering the connections between politics and money.

It turns out there were a few entertainment industry figures speaking out about deeper aspects of this election. The June 30 Shūkan Shinchō reports that Okamura Takashi, of the popular comedy duo Ninety Nine, said during a regular radio appearance: “This is a reverse host-club situation. ‘Here, I want to make you number one in the club,’ is what the fans are saying.” Another comedian, Ijūin Hikaru, also noted on his radio show: “TV commentators have have sharp tongues when it comes to just about everything going on these days, but how are we supposed to take them seriously when they don’t have a single word to say about [AKB48 svengali] Akimoto Yasushi’s exploitation of the fans?” I find these comedians worth listening to.

Yes, it’s just entertainment. Just a meaningless pop star tale. Just sit back and watch without thinking too deeply. Don’t fret about how the media is reporting the AKB48 story. I’m sure plenty of people feel this way. But the moment the media begin to pass on the day’s events in an uncritical stream—no matter how insignificant they are—is the moment the media begin failing to fulfill their proper role. Once they start down that path, there’s a real danger that that they’ll become unable to do anything but pass a shallow information stream straight on to the audience when more serious events take place, impacting our daily activities, our work, and even our very lives.

Kōtetsuyama, a former rikishi who wrestled under a number of names from 1957 to 1975 (see his Japanese Wikipedia entry for the details), took the name Ōnaruto when he became a sumō elder and stable master. Hashimoto, another former wrestler (Wikipedia), had served as an officer in kōenkai (“support groups,” or fund-raising fan clubs) for the yokozuna Kitanofuji and for the Ōnaruto-beya led by Kōtetsuyama. As vice chair of the Kitanofuji club, Hashimoto was allegedly involved in raising money to pay for the bout-fixing that helped the wrestler attain the sport’s highest rank—one tidbit that eventually went into Kōtetsuyama’s tell-all book, Yaochō: Sumō Kyōkai ittō ryōdan (Bout-rigging: The Sumō Association’s drastic solution).

Since February 1996, the two men had also been writing a series of articles for Shūkan Posuto under their real names, exposing the organized crime connections, match-rigging, drug use, prostitution, and other sordidness in the sumō world. Kōtetsuyama was scheduled to give a prepublication press conference on April 26, where he would talk about the similar content of his forthcoming book. He died 12 days earlier, though, in the early morning hours of April 14. Doctors at the hospital gave the cause of death as acute, severe pneumonia and heart failure.

An unfortunate death with unfortunate timing. But it became scandalous when Hashimoto died in the same hospital that evening, of what doctors described as the same causes. The article “Sumo Wrestling in Grip of Corruption,” published a month or so after their deaths, gives a good overview.

Three days before his death, the 53-year-old former wrestler told Tokyo’s Weekly Post magazine that he had received threatening phone calls from men identifying themselves as members of a large crime syndicate.

He also claimed that a senior JSA executive had told his gangster friends to “stop Onaruto”, and said he was afraid of being poisoned.

None of this prevented the book from going to press, and it sold well. Not well enough to force any sort of police investigation of the men’s deaths, sadly. In April 2010 the government abolished the statute of limitations for murder cases, so theoretically these deaths could be looked into once again, but that isn’t likely without some media pressure—and today, like I said above, the media has bigger stories to report than 15-year-old sumō scandal. But I thought Kōtetsuyama and Hashimoto deserved at least a mention on this day.

Did I say “person”? I meant “huge list of people, companies, and other assorted entities.” A picture of a manga character can involve a consortium of toy manufacturers, film distributors, TV broadcasters, banks, advertising firms, and, somewhere in there, the people who actually invented and drew the character in the first place. On more than one occasion the demands to have a stupidly long photo credit attached to the image (with certain firm names in SCREAMING CAPS for no reason, of course) have led us to give up on posting the image in the first place. “© Jiji” is fine; “© 2008 BANDAI CO. LTD., Toho Co. Ltd., HAKUHODO Inc., Fuji Television Network Inc., On and On and On. All Rights Reserved. In fact, don’t even look at this one.” is more lines of text than we want on our page. It gets to the point where it isn’t worth it.

Not sure why that's doubled up there.

Something that struck my eye a while back was this: Nibariki-GNDHDDTW. Ugh! But wait, that’s actually a rather page-layout-friendly thing the consortium in question has done for publishers like us. This page (in Japanese) had the explanation I needed:

• Nibariki = The company that handles rights issues for Miyazaki Hayao’s work. (This is housed in a cool-looking building south of the Chūō Line just east of Mitaka Station with a sod roof. The grass gets pretty crazy in the late autumn; I imagine it’s an eco-friendly structure. Click here for a Google Maps street view of it.)
• G = Studio Ghibli.
• N = Nippon Television.
• D = Dentsū Inc.
• H = Hakuhōdō DY Media Partners.
• D = The Walt Disney Company.
• D = Mitsubishi Corp. (My guess is that “D” comes from “diamond,” since the company’s name means “three diamonds.”)
• T = Toho Co.
• W = Wild Bunch (which appears to handle European distribution). Not included in all credits, but it’s in this gang at least part of the time.

If we had to spell all that out just to stick a picture of Ponyo into an article on Japanese cultural exports, we might have left her up to the readers’ imaginations instead. As ugly as the alphabet soup looks, it’s actually a relatively welcome option to have.

On the subject of these consortia, I recommend reading a post on Matt Alt’s blog titled “Risky Business.”

Fans tend to romanticize the anime world as one of unbridled creative freedom. The reality is a vicious cycle in which production committees not only dictate the content (as they will only fund the series they feel are solid investments) but keep the majority of the profits (as animation studios have traditionally only been paid a fixed sum, without royalties, for their work.) The vast majority of the men and women who actually create the stuff toil in poverty and obscurity, because they are at the absolute bottom of the food chain.

An excellent report linked there (PDF) is Capitalizing on Innovation: The Case of Japan. Distressing stuff about the Japanese anime industry begins on page 20.

That post is from 2009, but I only saw it today when he linked it from his “Project A” entry. The government has finally scrounged up some funds for animators in Japan as part of its loudly advertised “cool Japan” soft power push—just a few million yen, but it’s probably the first worthwhile spending in that entire misguided effort. Alt sounds the “underfunded creators” warning again:

In spite of what the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would have you believe about “Cool Japan,” the anime industry is in serious trouble. Perhaps the biggest problem is that appallingly low salaries have hollowed out the talent pool to the point where even Academy Award winning directors like Hayao Miyazaki can’t pull together enough people to animate an entire film by hand anymore. But finally, it seems, the Japanese government has started putting their money where their mouth is.

Another good post of his covering some similar ground is “State of the Anime Industry 2009.” Um, just go stick him in your RSS reader. He’s worth the read.

The Nikkansports.com article [Japanese] on the dastardly crime (seriously; they’re looking into police action on this, which I don’t quite understand) notes that the kid’s incomprehensible answer had horrible grammar, including missing subjects. Zero points. Investigators are going to see whether this sloppy machine translation appeared as-is on the test-taker’s paper and use it as evidence against him if so.

You’d think a zero score and a school rejection would be sufficient punishment, but apparently this particular nail requires a bigger hammer.

The cheater went by the handle “aicezuki” on Chiebukuro. There was also a Twitter account with that name—deleted now—that was posting things like this soon after the test hours: 「京大の試験官は全然監視してないからカンニングしほうだいだったよ。さすがに周りの受験生がいるからあれだが、少なくともトイレにいけばカンニングとか余裕な状況だった」 (The Kyoto U. proctors weren’t watching at all, so we could cheat all we wanted. Well, you did need to worry about the eyes of the others taking the test around you. But you could go to the toilet and do your cheating there, no problem.)

(Hat tipped to @shilkytouch)

Jesper Edman, Tokyo Office director for the Stockholm School of Economics’ European Institute of Japanese Studies, will give a talk beginning at 18:30 along these lines:

This presentation examines the evolution of the Japanese micro-brewery (ji-bīru) industry from its initial establishment through deregulation in 1994 to the present. Drawing on archival data as well as first-hand interviews, I show how deregulation of the brewing industry merged with a larger policy goal, the rejuvenation of regional prefectural economies.This policy agenda subsequently resulted in a discourse and logic that shaped the entire industry and its economic trajectory. In particular, the emphasis on regional revitalization served to mobilize a particular group of both entrepreneurs and support actors and institutions. I show that deregulation is not simply the removal of rules, and that entrepreneurs are not simply independent and atomized actors. The very identity of entrepreneurs in the ji-biru industry, the definition of the ji-bīru product and the standards by which it was judged, were a result of the interaction of entrepreneurs, supporting actors and institutions, and the state through the process of deregulation. I also examine how these various aspects impacted the long-term survival and growth of the industry as a whole.

Following the presentation, Coedo Brewery CEO Asagiri Shigeharu will give a short introduction to his company, followed by a tasting of its products. Sounds like a nice way to unwind after the talk. You’ll need to register by March 10 by writing to Florian Kohlbacher at the DIJ (kohlbacher at dijtokyo.org).

The Business and Economics Study Group is “intended as a forum for young scholars and Ph.D. candidates,” but I know a number of people in Tokyo have a healthy interest in this industry, and it shouldn’t be a problem to attend this even if you aren’t an academic.

You can read the full announcement at the H-Japan mailing list archive. Click that link for the details.

Mishima_dialogue.pdf

It weighs in at more than 6 MB, so don’t click it if you’re on a slow connection.

———

I was reading Mishima before I met him, from around the time I was in high school. There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in those days except for the movies. It was usually a double feature, and I’d always look forward to the next one. I remember seeing a preview for Junpaku no yoru [Whitest of Nights]. This white-complexioned youth, Mishima Yukio, was appearing in it, along with the actress Kogure Michiyo, who was still in her prime and quite beautiful. I didn’t know what sort of story it was, but Mishima was introduced as the phenomenally talented young writer on whose book the movie was based, and I remember thinking he really looked the part. He was being called a young prodigy, a genius, and that was exactly the impression he conveyed.

I was interested, and I wondered what sort of things he wrote, so I began to read his stuff. Just about that time his novel Kinjiki [1951–53; tr. Forbidden Colors, 1968] was being serialized in the literary magazine Gunzō, and I found it really absorbing. I’d look forward to each installment. I had no knowledge of or interest in homosexuality, but I was impressed by the way he made something I couldn’t even imagine seem perfectly natural. I was still a virgin myself. But I was intrigued by his virtuosity and panache, portraying homosexual passion in such seemingly genuine and authentic terms.

During his last years, Mishima once asked me which of his works I liked the best. When I told him, Forbidden Colors, he said, “Oh, that’s nothing but showmanship. I’ve gone way past that.” I said, “Your inspiration is failing you now, so all you write about is actual incidents, but that period was really your peak.” He was angry. “What the hell are you saying?” he snapped.

———

The above is from “Mishima: The Man and the Mask,” Japan Echo, spring 1996, pp. 74–81; a translation of “Mishima Yukio no eikō to zasetsu,” Subaru, December 1995, pp. 84–99. This is pre-web for our company, so it isn’t available in digital form. If you’re desperate for a look at the whole thing, let me know and I’ll see about digging up the ancient Quark files or scanning the magazine pages into a PDF or something. I’m probably failing my company by not telling you to contact us to buy a back issue, but frankly I don’t know whether we have any of this one left.

There are two texts to translate: one selected from the “novels” category and one from “critiques and essays.” The contest goes from Japanese into English and German this year, and translators of any nationality or age (except for those who’ve been published before, drat) are welcome to participate. The deadline for applications is the end of November this year.

You can get more information and download PDFs of the texts to be translated at http://www.jlpp.go.jp/ (or jump straight to the contest details in Japanese or English). I couldn’t spot any information on the prizes involved, but they may include publication of the winning works somewhere.