As an adherent of the Robert D. Kaplan school of travel, I’m a big fan of overland travel. Given the choice and when time allows, I’d much rather travel by boat, train, or bicycle. Flying is convenient—but it rushes you to your destination without letting you appreciate the distance. But like any form of mass public transportation, it can present opportunities to meet people (some interesting, some weird). Flying from Tokyo to Dubai, I introduced myself to my seatmate and we began chatting. It turns out he was an Afghan national living between Japan and the UAE, and once we spoke a bit and he saw that I knew something about Afghanistan, or at least enough to have a conversation about his country, we spent several hours chatting on world affairs and his life story on our many hours together. (The moment when he opened up and began to talk about his life story was after this exchange: Him: “I’m not a Pakistani Afghan, I’m Persian.” Curzon: “Persian? Do you mean Hazara or Tajik?” Him: “Yes, Hazara, you know well…”)

My seatmate was born in Kabul in the post-monarchical Republic of Afghanistan, the period after the fall of the monarchy and before the Soviet invasion. His father was Hazara and his mother was Pashtun, but his family was culturally Hazara and he spoke Persian, although he did not elaborate further. He attended one of the best private schools in the city until the age of 8, when the fighting forced his family to flee Kabul, and they relocated to the mountains to the west of the city (the town name began with a “b,” I cannot recall further). After surviving the violence there for four years, they moved to Mazar-e-Sharif in the north and spent several years there. At the age of 14, his family was separated and he spent three weeks walking, alone, from northern Afghanistan to the Pakistan border, where he spent a few months at a border camp until being reunited with his family in Iran. From there, they immigrated to a town to the north of Dubai. For the past decade he’s lived half his life in the UAE and half in Japan, and runs a business exporting second hand cars from Japan to the Middle East region together with other members of his extended family.

He recieved very little schooling through his ordeal. Although an advanced speaker of English and Japanese, he could not write any Japanese and only very little English. He took more than a minute to write his short e-mail address on his business card and wrote the letters “h” and “m” backwards.

It’s a weird experience to hear tales of brutal violence from someone who experienced such a traumatic childhood. He had horrific stories that he spoke of with a straight face, looking almost bored, with piercing and unwavering eye contact that disturbed me. One such story he recounted was a mortar attack he and his family survived at age 11. The next day he helped lift dead bodies and body parts into a truck to be taken away to a mass grave. Another story was about a makeshift school he attended in the mountains, where gunman walked in, grabbed several of the oldest children in the room, and brought them away, where they were reportedly drafted into fighting and never heard from again.

He did not have much to say on the future of Afghanistan except that it was bleak. He visited once after the fall of the Taliban and said he would not go back again, and the country will remain poor and chaotic for the next 100 years. The problems? One is education. People have no education and can’t read and are not literate. The other is the different ethnicities. What I took from several minutes of talking on the topic was that the problem was not hatred between ethnic groups, but the loyalty that was exclusive to ethnic groups and clans.

He also said the Taliban were all foreigners. To paraphrase him, they were Russians, Americans, Indians, and especially Arabs who grew their beards and tried to dress like locals, but who were just foreigners with guns who were the guests of the Taliban bosses.

Speaking about his family, he reported that he had relatives in his extended family across the world in Los Angeles, London, Japan, Sydney, and New Zealand, many of whom are naturalized citizens. The UAE does not offer such an easy path to naturalization and limited benefits when he considered getting a UAE passport. He cannot read or write Japanese, not even the phonetic katakana or hiragana alphabets, and thus does not meet the third grade reading requirement to apply for Japanese citizenship (about 400 kanji characters).

One fun fact about renewing a passport at an Afghanistan embassy overseas, which he has done in the UAE and Tokyo, is that the embassy always asks random questions to confirm the true Afghani nationality of the passport holder. Questions such as, “Where was your grandfather born?” and “How long does it take to drive from Kandahar to Kabul?” Apparently, an Afghani passport can be purchased for $20-50 in Afghanistan, and lots of Pakistanis use it to try and apply for refugee status overseas, and the phenomenon is broad enough that embassies check.

That I write this of course means that I’m safely in Dubai. The big local news is that the new metro line opens today. I’ll be back with more on the city soon.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has ruled Japan almost uninterrupted for the past six decades. It suffered a leadership crisis through the 1990s but managed to keep power largely due to the incompetence of the opposition. In 2001, the party elected as Prime Minsiter its last best hope, a maveric fringe politician known as Junichiro Koizumi. He pushed through structural reforms, most importantly the privatization of the Post Office, the controversy over which led him to disolve the Diet and call a sudden snap election, which resulted in his party winning a record-breaking landslide in the most recent Lower House election in September 2005.

Barely a year after winning that election, Koizumi stepped down without nominating a clear successor, leaving the party to decide who would follow after him. In a three-way race between an old school conservative, a boring moderate, and a “Japanese neo-con,” the later—Shinzo Abe—was the clear popular choice. Abe had only a decade serving as a parliamentarian in the Diet and had little cabinet experience, and his election made him the youngest PM in the modern era and the first born after World War II. Abe was labeled a “Japanese neo-con” and was a nationalist who focused on his pet issues such as patriotic education and needling North Korea over abducting Japanese nationals. Although he started out very popular, he was slammed by more practical issues that affected the lifestyle of the citizenry. He was then slammed by a sleeper issue, the failure to correctly record the national pension records, and saw his popularity collapse. This resulted in the LDP losing the Upper House election to the opposition Democrats, and he spent exactly one year in office and resigned when he couldn’t handle the stress.

Abe was followed by Yasuo Fukuda, a softer, more moderate face of the LDP. But Fukuda was unable to grasp the popular mood and appeal to issues that were relevant to the voting public. Over time Fukuda faced the same problems as Abe and saw his relatively high approval rates steadily drop. Like Abe, Fukuda resigned due to the stress.

Taro Aso was an old school conservative and the eldest son from an elite family heavily entrenched in politics and business. He was the clear favorite to follow after Fukuda resigned, partially because he was seen as the best man to lead the LDP into an election. That was correct at the time. But his repeated gaffes, unpopular attempts to stimulate the economy, and inability to convince the electorate that he was competently aware of the issues has quickly resulted in his steady unpopularity. Although some LDP reformists tried to dethrone Aso before today’s election, he has survived—and despite the party’s woes, many in the ruling coalition are relieved that they finally have a leader who doesn’t cut and run from the leadership the moment

All three of these men were “LDP royalty”—each counted a former prime minister as their father or grandfather. This aspect of Japanese politics won’t immediately change if the opposition wins. DPJ party leader Yukio Hatoyama is the grandson of a prime minister, and his brother sits across the political aisle and until recently served in Aso’s cabinet.

Polls close in just a few hours at 8 p.m. local time, and the results should start to flow in immediately thereafter. If you’re in Japan and understand Japanese, NHK will provide the best coverage. If you’re not in Japan or want instant English coverage, our friends over at Transpacific Radio and Mutantfrog are teaming up with others to provide live, streaming coverage of the results as they come in, the only audio-visual media that will provide this type of live coverage in English. Those of you who are interested should be sure to tune in here.

Ichiro Ozawa resigned last week as leader of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) over a fundraising scandal. The opposition democrats had a leadership election on Saturday and were faced with the choice between Yukio Hatoyama and Katsuya Okada, two former DPJ leaders with solic track records as total losers. Hatoyama won by a comfortable margin.

The basic political profiles of the two men are:

• Hatoyama was head of the DPJ from 1999 to 2002, after which he resigned after taking responsibility for the “confusion” over rumors about the merger with the Liberal Party, which was at the time lead be former DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa. The two parties ultimately did merge, and Hatoyama took a role in party leadership. (Hatoyama’s tenure was preceded and followed by Naoto Kan, another regular in the leadership roster of the DPJ).

• Okada became head of the DPJ in 2004 and led the party to one of its largest electoral victories in history during the 2004 upper house election. The winning streak didn’t last—he resigned a year later after his party suffered a dramatic losses in the 2005 general election that saw Koizumi’s ruling party the Liberal Democratic Party take its strongest win in history.

For an opposition party that has been floundering in defeat for more than a decade as it struggles to take power, the candidates for the leadership are a sorry pair. Not only are they both uncharasmatic repeat losers, it shows the party has a poor ability at cultivating new leaders.

Hatoyama’s selection is especially ironic when you consider that weeks ago, the DPJ suddenly made their public pet issue the ending of hereditary elected positions. In many districts in Japan, long-serving members of the Diet retire and have sons run in their place. I don’t have current figures, but I’ve read that at one time, as many as one third of the districts had such hereditary members. The DPJ is trying to end the practice, but this new and sudden moral mission is amusingly ironic now that Hatoyama is the party leader. Hatoyama is the grandson of former Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, the son of former Foreign Minister Iichiro Hatoyama, and his brother is the current ruling party Minister of Justice. Do the rules, or at least the spirit of the rules, not apply to the leaders?

Hatoyama’s impending task is leading the party into an election that is just months away. The DPJ was favored to win for months, but with the new fundraising scandals facing the party and PM Aso finally finding his mojo, the LDP may now manage to win yet another election. And when Hatoyama and Okada are the best possible men to be proposed to lead the nation, perhaps that’s for the best.

Ikizukuri (or ikitsukuri or iketsukuri) is a controversial Japanese method of preparing raw fish for consumption in which the fish (or other marine animal) is filleted and prepared alive, its carcass then put on display for the consumer to witness while eating.

Last weekend I saw a truly awesome display of ikizukuri in a cafeteria-style restaurant run by a fishing coopeartive, and posted the photos, along with a discussion of the morality behind the practice, at mutantfrog, where I occasionally contribute posts regarding Japan topics. You can read that post here. I’d encourage readers to engage in the discussion in the comments section in that post—but for those who just want to see the gore, my photos are posted below…

Read the rest of this entry »

Aceface kindly pointed me to this, a scanned pdf of the Japanese-language “Flying Object Information” form, filled out by hand by a Japan bureaucrat. It contains the basic information on the missile that flew over Japan on Sunday, noting where it was spotted (to the west of Akita prefecture) and when and where it left Japan’s territorial sphere. Notice also the painfully low resolution of the scan (200dpi?), such that the font is jagged, and you can see random black dots where the scan was imperfect.

The Japanese government has been doing its best to show the public that it is being diligent and fully in-control of the North Korea missile situation. The day of the launch, news clips showed fresh young agency bureaucrats in the Self Defense Force and other affiliated government agencies in rural Akita and Iwate prefecture literally sprinting between rooms when the launch was announced. The public disclosure of the pdf linked above is yet another part of looking busy. They’re doing their absolute best to look like they control the situation when they are almost entirely helpful. Tobias has more on this here and here.

I give them an “A” for effort in looking busy. But the stubborn refusal of the Japanese to use modern technology in the most basic of internal management systems is just revolting. Communications in every modern western organization today are handled electronically—nothing needs to be filled out by hand, and there aren’t “runners” in the halls of the Pentagon and Whitehouse to implement and communicate important information. (In the rare situation that data must be taken by hand, it is punched into a database or system through data entry, and raw handwritten documents that aren’t fit for public scrutiny aren’t voluntarily disclosed to the world). Japan has the best hi-tech gadgets in the world, but so much of the busy work of government (and industry) is still handled by this type of paper scrawl, and throwing raw manpower at problems instead of trying to make systems of operation and management efficient or streamlined. All of this means that government in Japan circa 2009 is backwards. This simply must change.

In other news related to the DPRK missile launch, a majority of Americans would support a military response to the missile launch, 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Gingrich says he would have destroyed the missile before it was launched, and in case you didn’t hear it, despite all the chest-thumping from Pyongyang, the launch was actually a failure.

Comments are closed. Please comment at Mutantfrog, where this post also appears, and where I occasionally write posts on topics relating to Japan.

Although everyone is looking forward to getting their free money Prime Minister Aso’s 2-trillion-yen cash handout program remains unpopular. As we get closer to payday things look like they will be getting even worse as Aso has left the responsibility for distributing the handouts to resource-strapped municipal governments.

I spoke with a Nagoya city worker last week about the program. Japan’s third-largest city seems to be having problems organizing the cash handouts. With only 5 city workers assigned to organizing the approximately 2,236,000 kickbacks, payday isn’t apparently coming until June. The clamouring masses aren’t happy and the office responsible for payments apparently receives nearly two thousand telephone complaints a week, further tying up the staff. Yes, this is third-hand information. But simple rumour of such incompetence isn’t doing wonders for the administration’s already dismal reputation.

Following on this post of last month, I’ll give JPY500 to anyone who can tell me what this recent statement by the Yukio Hatoyama, Secretary General of the Democratic Party of Japan, means:

We want to move away from U.S. dependency to a more equal alliance… We are only looking for an equal relationship, which we believe the U.S. also prefers.

DPJ supporter Tobias Harris believes this is not an anti-US statement, and I think he’s probably right. He also thinks that the Obama administration will create a post-Clinton/Bush Japan alliance that is focused solely on joint security declarations. But then we had this gem from DPJ leader Ozawa

If Japan is prepared to take care on its own issues that are relevant to itself, then there is no need for the United States to forward deploy to such an extent in Japan.

Here also, we’ve got a quote that could have a dozen meanings. It was widely condemned by ruling LDP officials and even US diplomats, as it is believed to call for Japan to be more independent. But the same vague statement could also be seen as a conservative’s call for a less restrictive constitution regarding Japan’s limitations on having its own military. Which is it? And what would Ozawa and the DPJ actually do if their motley crew of socialists, right-wingers, and free market liberals actually came into power? The chances are increasingly likely that we’ll find out in a few short months.

Pictured from L to R: Younghusband, Genghis Khan and Roy Berman

Last weekend I met up with Roy of Mutantfrog.com during his eventful adventure in Nagoya (a soon-to-be-published post). He was just in time for the local celebration of the Mongolian lunisolar New Year festival Tsagaan Sar. We met up with CA commenter Aceface at an amazing local Mongolian restaurant, the inside of which resembles a large yurt. We ate, drank and were merry. There was traditional clothing (as pictured above) and traditional socialist Mongolian karaoke. Best of all we were treated to a performance of Khöömii, the famous “throat-singing” of Mongolia. I have embedded a short two-minute sample of a Mongolian man playing the Morin Khuur and singing for your pleasure.

In 1957, two intrepid Westerners traveled from Tokyo to Alaska by amphibious jeep, and lived to tell the tale. One half of the duo published a book on the trip, titled Once a Fool.

You can read large excerpts of the book on Google books and you can buy the book at a major discount at Amazon.com. But e-books has the best excerpt:

In 1957 Japan-based journalist Boye Lafayette De Mente joined Australian adventurer on an amphibious jeep named “Half-Safe” on an ocean-crossing journey from Tokyo to Anchorage, Alaska that took precisely four months, and resulted in their incredible experience being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. (Gas for the jeep was carried in a large torpedo-shaped tank behind the jeep.) Enroute, the two encounted Russians, fish nets, a wall of water, the gas tank, sea lions, whales, each other, and were lost for three weeks. The aftermath of the trip continued for some 40 years. This is De Mente’s intimate account of the journey.