Finally, ahead of the BBC

Having missed the Nova news, despite it being round the corner, and letting The Times scoop it.  I would like to point out that I still have the drop on the  BBC: By clicking on the link you can read their coverage of Japanese immigration’s introduction of compulsory fingerprinting of all foreigners entering the country… at least two weeks after I mentioned it in “You’re not from round here, are you?”, below.  They seem to have been speaking to “some people” who said very similar things to me too. Hurrah! I am in the moral majority!

Concrete Opinion

After the second world war, in the 1950’s and 60’s Japan experienced a building boom. Not unsurprisingly perhaps, given the amount of destruction waged upon its cities and towns by the American air force. A lot of the old wooden buildings that had the quintessential Japanese flavor that we now only see in places like Kyoto or Nara were destroyed and new buildings erected in their place: A terrible shame, especially since many old neighbourhoods were destroyed not because they were damaged, but simply they were seen as a throwback to when Japan was an old fashioned, feudally governed country and now unrepresentative of the emerging Asian power that Japan was becoming.

So Japan’s love affair with concrete began – and the more the economy picked up, the more premises and building that needed to be built. Even the government, with its coffers steadily filling as the economic revival gathered pace got involved, it built the famous bullet train network as well as highways, express ways and local train networks that still are the envy of many countries in the world. At it’s height the construction industry employed more than 20% of the entire Japanese workforce, so construction companies came to wield considerable political clout too.

Some wily politicians realised that, with the vast amounts of money available for public works, companies would reward any information or help in swinging the contract their way. Japan’s pork-barrel had never been so full, and everyone was getting their share.

Unfortunately, what didn’t happen in tandem with the building boom was the evolution of a system of zoning building areas or anything resembling planning permission. Basically if you owned the land, and had the money to build, you could pretty much build what you wanted – such as a chemical works next to an infant school. It also meant that power cables are not buried (because that is more expensive for the power companies). In fact, most of the mountain views of Japan – and there are a lot – are almost without exception despoiled by ranges of power pylons criss-crossing their summits.

Of course, there came a point when the private sector’s needs were largely met, and the contracts for private construction declined. The construction companies began to put people out of work – and the politicians got scared. What should have been the planned downsizing of the industry never happened. That 20% of the workforce meant a huge number of votes – especially in rural areas – belonging to the ruling LDP party. The politicians themselves were also too used to the amount of kickbacks they were getting to entertain the possibility that this state of affairs couldn’t continue. So, the amount of public money available for construction grew and grew.

What was no longer being built by the private sector was built by national and regional governments with “donations” ending up in the pockets on local administrators, and local populations being saddled with buildings they don’t need. Projects such as flood defences have meant that EVERY river in Japan has been concreted for some part of its length, even in the cases where no flooding had ever happened in living memory. Of course, concrete does not allow for much of an ecosystem to develop, and the results for wildlife have been catastrophic. Mountains haven’t escaped either. They are given concrete frames over them to stop rock slides – imagine the expense of covering a mountain in a concrete lattice! Add to this thousands of culture centers and community buildings that have been built, despite an absence of need, in nearly every village and hamlet in Japan.

The government supplies low-interest loans for these activities, which communities take up only to find that the running costs for these buildings far exceed the amount of money to be made from them – causing a circle of debt to accumulate. The second largest city in the country, Osaka, is so overburdened with these kind of projects that it had to declare bankruptcy, and is now governed by central government. It reckons to be solvent again in 2050! But still the construction industry is not sated.

Local governments receive a set budget every year. A lot of this is earmarked by central government for construction projects whether there is a local need or not. Now here is the rub – if the money is not used, the subsequent amount of money budgeted to that local government will be smaller. There is no incentive to save money… the only way to assure that current levels of budget are retained is to spend everything allotted for a given year. Thus, the white elephants of modern Japan are born – more concrete, more buildings, more running costs for things that people don’t use. More rivers and mountains concreted, more old buildings replaced by concrete boxes.

Japan is looking less and less “Japanese” every year, and governments and regions becoming poorer whilst the bureaucrats and construction companies get wealthier and ever more powerful. Somebody has said it won’t end until the whole country becomes a car park.

Such a shame that everyones’ memories of what was a beautiful country have to be buried beneath it.

Not from round here, are you?

It’s a tricky thing, racism. If you look for it, you can find it everywhere and blame it for everything, it can be made the reason for everything that goes wrong in your day in Japan from dawn to dusk. Generally Japanese people don’t intend to offend, it’s just that their media and education haven’t really caught up to the idea that denigrating someone’s race or drawing stereotypical inferences from it is bang out of order.

At it’s very mildest it’s the expectation that no foreigner can speak Japanese (see below), or that we should be offered a knife and fork in a restaurant because no non-Japanese person could possibly have mastered the ancient art of chopstick use. My personal favorite is going to a restaurant, ordering the meal – in Japanese, only for the waiter to address his replies exclusively to my Japanese and hitherto silent girlfriend. I suppose actually being able to  get in the door to order the meal is a bonus: As foreigners, we are also barred from some restaurants, clubs, onsens as this video attests.

To be fair, “racism” may be too strong a word for the everyday experience – unless you have the ultra-nationalists in their black speaker vans come around your neighbourhood espousing ideas for sending nuclear weapons into North Korea and the like. There’s certainly no Japanese Ku-Klux Klan or racially aggravated violence to speak of. It’s more that normal Japanese people have little contact with foreigners, and seem bewildered what to do when that opportunity presents itself. But many Japanese people are at least uneasy around foreigners. Perhaps we are viewed stereotypically because there are only stereotypes to draw from. Blonde hair, blue eyes, large noses, speaking terrible Japanese, these stereotypes proliferate in Japanese TV shows and print media.

However, this occasionally irritating but ultimately harmless cultural insensitivity hides a much darker undercurrent, the effects of which go straight  to the highest level of government: the governor of Tokyo has stated, on record (See the section “racism”), that were there a natural disaster in Tokyo, all the foreigners were likely to rampage – looting, pillaging and much worse. We are barely tamed beasts, it seems, and thus we are to be watched carefully.

Today, this distrust has reached new heights with the announcement that all foreigners entering the country are to be fingerprinted and photographed. Ostensibly the reason for this is to combat terrorism and rising crime. I can perhaps see their point in doing this for visitors without visas – illegal immigration is becoming a world wide problem. But I have a visa, have lived here for ten years and pose a lot lower threat to law and order than the yakuza who are based near my city’s station. I already have to carry a special “Alien Registration Card” everywhere I go or face arrest – this already has my photo, signature, domicile and place of work written on it! Why not photograph the whole population? Crime, while rising, is lower than almost anywhere else in the world, and as far as I know is only committed by foreigners in proportion to their makeup of the entire population. By fingerprinting all the foreigners, you are telling the whole country that ALL foreigners are potential criminals and somehow untrustworthy. It won’t stop crime, but the sales of masks and gloves might go up.

The only country that photographs and fingerprints its tourists and visitors is the USA. Now, pardon me, but the USA has a much larger problem with terrorism than Japan. So does Britain, Spain and even France and Germany. They don’t take these draconian measures. The only terrorism perpetrated on Japanese soil has been perpetrated by the Japanese, most recently by the Aum Shinrikyou attacks on the Tokyo underground, and previously in the 70’s and 80’s by Japanese communist lunatics. But not a foreigner. Not once.

By bringing in these needlessly stringent rules the government assures the population that it is being strong on law and order, by picking on an easy target (since it’s not like we foreigners can vote against it) whilst really achieving very little: by concentrating on the foreigners it makes for more division in society, plays up to the right wingers and makes us feel less welcome in the communities in which we live. And of course, by focusing on the foreigners as a source of potential trouble, it makes domestic attacks like Aum’s subway atrocity more likely, since the police are literally looking the other way.

There he goes….

As predicted (not very exclusively, mind) by my good self last week, Shinzo Abe, hitherto Prime Minister of Japan has fallen on his sword. Metaphorically speaking, of course: not many people really go in for the ritual disembowelling these days outside of the odd samurai film. Makes Japan a lot less dramatic I can tell you – mind you, feel safer when you screw up at work. I’ve only had to cut three fingers off so far…

Anyway, back to the hapless Abe, who resigned before an upcoming vote on whether the Japanese ‘Self Defense Force’ could continue aiding NATO in Afghanistan. He was destined to lose, the opposition having pointed out that Afghanistan being a sovereign country in its own right, meant that the ‘SDF’ was semantically barred from engaging in military operations there . Thus, having discovered the glaring error in his oen logic, Abe resigned.

Well, the Afghanistan thing, his inability to appoint an honest agricultural minister in four attempts and heading a government that lost the records of 64 million contributions to the national pension scheme probably all played a part. The words “hapless” and “bungler” come to mind.

There be money in that rice…

You live in Japan for a while, and you can’t help but notice how many politicians are on the take. Barely a month goes by without news of someone getting illegal kickbacks or having falsified expenses or hidden debts. Honestly, a politician in Japan seems to have problems even crossing a road without being offered some large brown envelope full of money to do so. But even the Japanese are a little shocked by recent goings on in the ministry of agriculture – three ministers of agriculture have been removed since May owing to financial scandal.

The first to feel the heat was Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who was found to have appropriated 28 million yen for utility fees for his buildings – despite the fact that utilities are provided freely by the Japanese government. He decided to take his own life as a face-saving way out. His successor had barely been approved for the post before he was accused of also receiving expenses for things he hadn’t actually expended. In turn was replaced by a third minister, Takahiko Endo, who last week also quit, his agricultural cooperative having falsely exaggerated crop damage in order to receive government compensation.

It would be nice to think of this as a blip on the political radar but almost every department of government has had their own fair share of shame, beit expenses being fiddled or bid for public works being rigged in favour of the largest “Party contributor”. Corruption in Japan is rife, and almost accepted as part and parcel of politics, the newspapers only reporting the most blatant abuses, but it seems this latest triple whammy may be enough to force the Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, into an early election that he is destined to lose. The opposition is pushing for the prime minister to surrender to the will of the people – doubtless hoping to get their own hands on the spoils of power.