Pictured above is Japan’s Hyuga-class “helicopter destroyer” (different angle) alongside the USS George Washington (see opposite angle here). It is hard to see from this angle but there is a significant size difference. The George Washington is a Nimitz class carrier weighing in at 97,000 tons and capable of 85 aircraft. The Hyuga is just 13,950 tons and carries only 11 helicopters. Still, the Hyuga is the MSDF’s biggest ship to date.

The above is a pretty historic scene. The Hyuga is the first of its class and was commissioned earlier this year. As Scoop Deck notes: “it’s neat that the last time Japan and the U.S. both fielded aircraft carriers, they were at war”.

“Aircraft carrier”?

The Hyuga, like the earlier commissioned Osumi class LST, is a controversial ship. Both have carrier-like capabilities despite Japan’s 1988 declaration that it would never build aircraft carriers again. Thus, these ships are carefully designed to have little to no power projection capabilities. The Hyuga is described as a “destroyer” in Japanese (護衛艦) because of its role as an escort ship. This is in contrast to the central command and control role that US aircraft carriers play. Yet unlike traditional DDH the Hyuga has a longish flat-top, which makes it controversial. This means it can handle VSTOL aircraft such as Harriers and F-35s (which, by the way, Japan does not have). Here is a clip of it in action:

The Hyuga is for deploying helicopters in conducting amphibious operations, humanitarian missions and anti-submarine warfare. Rather than a revolutionary procurement in terms of Japan’s constitution, this is more of an evolution in terms of the kinds of operations Japan currently conducts (ie. sweeping sea lanes for the USN, disaster response in Southeast Asia, etc.). The Hyuga is a sign of Japanese innovation under military restriction. Simultaneously, it can be viewed as practice run for any carrier building program Japan may potentially decide to pursue in the future. Despite these controversies, the above picture is still pretty amazing.

H/T to Fred Z and Dan who shared this through Google Reader.

The Telegraph has an interesting article on the internal divisions of Britain’s Conservative Party.

This is a tale of two parties. It starts at a drinks reception in Manchester, where a senior Conservative is talking about prisons. In his view, far too many people are locked up. Like the Tory grandee Douglas Hurd, he thinks jail is an expensive way of making bad people worse.

Try telling that to the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, who will present himself to conference as the nation’s turnkey. Under his “mug-a-hoodie” strategy, the prison population would rise to 100,000 for the first time in history, and “street rats” could expect no mercy.

On a host of other issues, the party is similarly split. For every save-the-planetarian with a gnat-sized carbon footprint, there is someone who attaches more credence to the tooth fairy than to global warming. For every rationalist arguing that Britain’s future is in Europe, there is a Little Englander who fears, quite wrongly, that we are going to become a dystopia of Brussels bylaws and straight bananas.

The Conservative Party gathered together this week is reformist and reactionary, modulated and spittle-flecked, nice and nasty. Janus-faced, it has one eye focused on the future and the other staring at the past. With the Thatcher legacy still unresolved, libertarians vie with social authoritarians.

The concern of which school of conservative thought an opposition party philosophically bases its policy principles is not limited to Britain. It is the same dilemma faced by the opposition conservative party in two largest economies in the world, the United States and Japan. Britain is the test case, as the next general election will take place on or before June 3, 2010. Japan’s next major election is next summer. America’s next major election is in November next year.

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.

Well, as Curzon said: the party’s over. Last night the ruling party of Japan’s 54 year streak of power was finally broken. One could say that a political earthquake has struck Nagata-cho. Or that a tsunami has left them washed up. Or a typhoon has blown a wind of Change™ through the halls of power. No matter how many hackneyed phrases I use I will never measure up to the amazing political coverage provided live on uStream last night by the guys at Trans-Pacific Radio and Mutantrog. Their guerilla pundit show was most excellent. I was amazed at the depth of knowledge these guys had of all the local politicians. I have been long fascinated with international politics and political philosophy, but the minutiae of electoral politics has never been very appealing to me. I also never collected baseball cards. It must be a personality type.

In the age of the internet, when domestic and international politics cross lines all the time, not having a grounding in at the lowest level of political analysis is a weakness. That is something I am aware of, and also the reason I read and listen to the gents at TPR and MF, along with our other blogfriend Observing Japan to get indepth English language commentary on Japanese politics. You should too. Last night the LDP received a royal kick in the knads from the Japanese public, and it was all the more enjoyable with the informed commentary of the TPR, MF and OJ crew. Thanks lads.

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.

In recent years Robert D. Kaplan has been writing about the potentially disastrous consequences of urbanization and climate change: the number of deaths due to climate change will increase because of the concentration of people in high-risk zones for natural disasters. What about the political effects of natural disasters? This week’s Banyan column in The Economist posits a similar theory for Japan:

Tokyo’s quake of 1855 came just after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and his “black ships” which forced Japan to open to the world. The two traumas were conflated. The 1923 quake and its economic consequences hastened military rule and war. The coming quake may reverberate politically, too, particularly affecting the public paternalism that prevails in Tokyo’s approach to disaster management as in so much else.

I myself have often argued that expansive domestic political change in Japan has historically been the result of external stimuli (e.g. guns in 1500s, “black ships” in the 1800s, nukes in the 1900s). I had not thought of climate change as a potential catalyst.

It’s not every day that one is walking down the street and finds a playground that once used to be an execution ground for Christians.

The text on the sign reads as:

Former Kirishitan execution site and burial ground for people who had no living relatives
In 1661, during the era of the Edo Shogunate’s “Prohibition of Kirishitan (Christianity) Policy”, the second-generation lord of the Owari feudal Clan, Mitsutomo Tokugawa began to carry out mass arrests of Kirishitan (Christians) and in 1664 executed over 200 arrestees at the Senbonmatsubara execution ground, formerly located here.
However, just one year later, Mitsutomo Tokugawa moved the execution ground to Kawarakeno and erected the Seiryo Hermitage (existing Eikoku Temple) in its place, to pray to Buddha for the repose of the souls of those executed.
Additionally,more than 1,400 people who died leaving no living relatives behind were buried here during the period 1860-1871.

On the left side of the photo you can catch a glimpse of a small cemetery.

Further on down the road is a park and playground, that used to be a testing ground for swords… on criminals.

The sign reads:

Site of Anatomy on “Otameshi-ba” (Execution Ground)
In the winter of 1821, the first dissection of a human body in the history of Nagoya was carried out by a physician, Ishiguro Seian. The place was an execution ground where brand new swords were tried out in beheading the sentenced.

Tameshigiri is a practice popularized in the Edo period, the 250 year-long period of peace that followed the Warring States Period (sengoku jidai). During the Edo period warriors had to come up with alternative ways to test their skills as the glory of the battlefield was no longer attainable. Tameshigiri was one such trial. Later, many Imperial Japanese Army officers got in trouble for doing tameshigiri in Manchuria and Occupied Korea.

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.

View of the Kiso River from the donjon of Inuyama Castle (Shot by Younghusband, Summer 2008)

Chikujojutsu, the Japanese art of fortifications, classifies castles into three main categories: hirashiro (flat-ground castles), hirayamashiro (hill castles), and yamashiro (mountain castles).

The hirashiro was usually the home of a lord and had a population centre connected to it. Being on flat land it was easily accessibile by the lord’s subjects. The hirashiro was the most difficult type of castle to defend as siege towers could be erected providing an elevated position from which to attack from.

The yamashiro, on the other hand, was situated on the summit of a mountain, and was thus the most easily defended since there were a bounty of natural defenses such as cliffs and forests. The yamashiro was also the least susceptible to the destructive power of earthquakes, which tended to ravage other kinds of plain-based structures. Unfortunately, they were difficult to construct. Digging for water supplies was particularly challenging. Yamashiro were vulnerable to damage by strong winds and were also nearly inaccessible by citizens of the fief.

Hirayamashiro, built on a hill or low mountaintop providing a view of the plain below, had the most advantages and least disadvantages of the other types of castle since it mixed the properties of the yamashiro and hirashiro.

There are also rare categories of castle such as the ukishiro (“floating castle”), constructed on small islands. This type of castle enjoyed an endless supply of water, and a natural moat preventing many siege tactics.

Last week I went on a tour of Okazaki Castle, rebuilt in 1959 and said to be the birthplace of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The second floor of the castle features a brilliant display of samurai weapons and armour. Although the castle is not in its original position, the following video from the top of the donjon gives you an idea of the view from a hirashiro.

Last summer I visited Inuyama Castle, which is one of Japan’s oldest extant castles. From the top of this hirayamashiro one can see far across the plains of Gifu and Aichi prefectures. (Forgive the low res of the video, it was shot with my Sony digicam).

In all my time visiting castles in Japan I have never been to a yamashiro. However, I did see Iwakuni Castle while at the bridge where Sasaki Kojiro perfected his tsubamegaeshi technique. One day I will get to take some film from a donjon on top of a mountain.

Related: Some photos of Nagoya Castle.

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.