Our Man in Abiko's Blog, page 11

Letter to the US Ambassador to Japan @AmbassadorRoos

So, I fired this off to Ambassador Roos a couple of minutes ago. I could have gone on, but seems to me that there is only really one pertinent question that I have a right to ask: is the US spying on me and my fellow residents of Japan? It's naive of me to expect a reply, but before I begin ascribing evil intent to the higher ups, I should at least follow protocol.

But I don't know what the protocol is for complaining about the surveillance state, so I just wrote an email, sent it to the only US embassy email address I had and put Mr Roos' twitter handle in the post headline. Someone in the know should read it.

Full transcript as follows, and a little easy listening too:


To John V. Roos, US Ambassador to Japan

Sir,

Speaking as a resident of Japan, tapping away on my Apple computer, reading my Amazon tablet and posting this letter on gmail (and my Google-powered blog), it occurs to me I need to ask whether the US government been monitoring, recording or (dare I say) spying on my actions.

I realise that you are under no obligation to answer such a question, one that I naively posed to you in tweet three days ago. You probably have a policy not to comment on matters of intelligence, and certainly a wise one would be not to respond to every nutty tweet you receive (especially one from me), but I'm not talking about The Third Man cloak and dagger intelligence no doubt perpetrated by every great power given half a chance.

No, this is a question about spying on an entirely different scale, as I'm sure you appreciate. The recent allegations from former NSA operative Edward Snowden of widespread data-mining of millions of Americans have really disturbed me. I hope the allegations disturbed you and turn out to be untrue, because taken at face value they paint a picture of a surveillance state that, by its very existence, has quashed the democracy it was supposed to have been safeguarding.

But of particular concern to me, is that while it appears recent US laws have enshrined, at least theoretically, a legal framework to decide whether a surveillance operation on US citizens may go ahead, there is not even that flimsy theoretical protection for non-US citizens. In other words, foreigners, innocent of any crime, or even suspicion of committing any crime, are fair game to have their data recorded and used at the US government's whim, with no legal recourse. This doesn't strike me as very democratic, if true.

Maybe writing this open letter is an act of folly, but beneath my smart-ass blogger shell beats the heart of an idealist who still believes the United States has a core decency capable of turning the ship of state away from the totalitarian rocks it appears to be hell-bent on striking.

It's sad that it has come to this, that I have reason to ask: Is the United States government spying on the general public of Japan?

Given recent revelations, it's a reasonable question that I hope you will see fit to answer.

Patrick Sherriff,
Abiko

NOTHING TO HIDE

I'm late to the game again. But just to recap in case you missed the biggest story in the history of data entry or something, the US government has been spying on us.

As far as I can tell, they have real time access to everyone's phone calls, digital communications and require no warrant. And I'm not even exaggerating or re-living some teenage paranoid fantasy. Take it as gospel that everything you or I have ever done online is being snooped on by some spotty wannabe drone pilot in suburban Idaho. Or will be at some secret organisation's discretion. But that's not even very shocking.

What's really shocking is the lack of outrage. The hip thing to do is make a joke about calling the government to find your lost keys, shrug your virtual shoulders and say, "Yeah, I already knew they have our data. Hell, I give it away for free to Google, Apple and Amazon everyday, I've got nothing to hide."

Well, bully for you. May Our Man gently recommend reading Why privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide which might debunk you of some heavy bunk. It did for me. Basically, should you trust the state to keep your best interests at heart? (no) Keep your data secure, even if its intentions are pure? (no) Accurately interpret what the data means without accidentally assuming you were a dangerous lunatic and launching a drone strike on your bedroom because you bought a copy of George Bush's Decision Points and Tony Blair's A Journey on the same day? (no. Actually, I have no problem with this assessment.) I could go on, but just read the goddamned article and leave me in peace to catch my train of thought.

Oh yeah, the biggest threat.

The biggest threat is that the saner ones among us (use your imagination here) realise this whole social media internet connection thing actually is a thinly veiled Orwell-meets-Kafka bureaucratic big brother trap and they drop out, go offline and disappear or are so scared to behave in anyway that would mark them as abnormal to our higher ups that they lead a freakish fake public life that has no bearing on their true allegiances. Like a blog, er, for instance. Hmmm. Secret state wins.

You know what beats secrecy? Openness. So the state has a secret treasure trove of titbits it can use against the individual, lose or fuck up. Maybe setting up an open record of our identities that can be independently accessed is the only defence. Pervert my data, misuse my identity, set me up, but know this: everyone can see what you're doing because you don't control the only record.

Works for me. My name's Patrick Sherriff, but you already knew that.

PARDON MY FRENCH

If you haven't already, go and read this Asahi Shimbun article about the highly hyped billions that were supposed to flow into the coffers of the disaster-stricken prefectures and, one could hope, into the pockets of the 300,000 displaced survivors of the 2011 tsunami living in shanty towns and on the floors of their relatives' shacks. If they have any family members left.

We are not talking meaningless amounts of money. We're talking ¥200 billion -- $2 billion. And what does the government, and more to the point, the survivors have to show for all this? Pardon my French, but fuck all. Or as the Asahi puts it:


Counting sea turtles, publicizing a green-haired mascot and promoting a manga event with an “idol” group were among prefectural projects financed by an emergency employment budget intended to help victims of the March 2011 disaster.But no one displaced by the disaster was actually hired for these projects.The employment measures budget, worth 200 billion yen ($2 billion), was designed to provide livelihoods for people in the Tohoku region who lost their homes or jobs after the Great East Japan Earthquake. However, the government’s ambiguous wording has allowed prefectures to freely spend the money on jobs for local residents.Of the 200 billion yen, 108.5 billion yen went to 38 prefectures other than the nine damaged by the quake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.The Asahi Shimbun has found that disaster victims accounted for only 2,000--or 3 percent--of the 65,000 employed by these prefectures in fiscal 2011 and 2012.
This is all par for the course, unsurprising to a silhouette who is beginning to feel the cynicism of old return, despite his best intentions to believe that we can do better. That we do actually give a shit about our fellow human beings and not just the votes that they posses to keep the charlatans and their sycophants living on easy street. But I have to wonder. And more depressing than the jobs for the boys is the news that the Abe government has no clue or intention of chasing up these wasted billions. And in fact is readying to pump in trillions more. Trillions, that is ¥25 trillion over the next five years.

But with no accounting for the spending, no enforcement of standards or punishment for transgressions, oh and no ethics, I'm left wondering what on earth this hype about Abenomics means. As far as I can tell it amounts to jobs for the boys, business as usual and one massive fuck-you to the survivors of the tsunami.

I hope I'm wrong.

COLD COMFORT

What is he on? First he gets elected to mayor of Japan's second city, then he reckons he's an expert on history, women's rights, colonialism, rape and goes on for three hours about how misunderstood he and Japan is on war and such.

Nope, sorry, the world is beginning to understand all too well about Toru Hashimoto and Japan's thing about sex slaves.

For Our Man's money, Michael Penn had the best take on the day Hashimoto proved to the world that he doesn't get it, but Our Man doesn't have much of a budget (certainly nothing left to hire a proper court artist) so he would like to offer his free summary of all you need to know of Hashimoto's long-winded statement : "Two wrongs do make a right and sorry about that thing I said about letting Yanks into soaplands so they don't rape Okinawan kids. OK? Can I be Prime Minister now?"

No. No, you cannot.

OUR MAN IS NUMBER 1 (IT'S OFFICIAL)

Why blow your own trumpet when you can get someone else to blow it for you?

Or something. Our Man was honoured to discover that he has made the pages of the No. 1 Shimbun. That's only the blinking newsletter for the hallowed Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, the FCCJ to those in the know, or who can't figure where the apostrophe is supposed to go.

I'm honoured, really, for this accurate  write-up of this here blog.

Our Man's yearly honorary membership has expired and he would so love to throw tomatoes (literal ones not tedious overripe figurative ones) at the Osaka Outlier Hashimoto who has picked the FCCJ to defend/prostrate himself on the ground over his indefensible comments on sex-slaves and such on Monday May 27th. Anyone got any spare tickets for the Hashimoto gig? And a tomato or two?

Word for today: Honoured.

TASTE OF NATIONALISM

I see the Japanese nationalists have opened up shop in Abiko next to the Italian restaurant opposite Peppy's English school.

I also note that there are a lot more stories* about Japan's rightward march and its rattling of sabres with China and general nastiness to Koreans, most recently with the governor of Osaka (the Chicago to Tokyo's New York)  tacitly defending the Imperial Army's use of sex slaves which they shipped from vassal nations of their East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Only this time, Governor Hashimoto suggested that Japan's friends in the American forces of occupation ought to make use of sex workers more rigorously and thus avoid those pesky troubles that randy Marines cause when they go off and rape Okinawan schoolgirls and such.

Where to begin?

The problem is, I get what Hashimoto is saying. Sort of. Armies do have a habit of raping and pillaging. That is kind of the point of them, isn't it? It's rape of life and liberty by the bayonet rather than the todger. And the whole edifice is indefensible. Certainly, the Imperial Japanese use of 200,000 Chinese, Filipino and Korean women as sex slaves was abhorrent. But then so is war. And so was the systematic use of 200,000 Japanese women in brothels by the US, Australian and British after the war. But, two-hundred thousand wrongs don't make a right.

There are massive differences between battlefield rape, sexual slavery and prostitution. (As there are to speaking off the cuff as a blogger with an audience of dozens than as a mayor of a city of millions.) I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, as usual, but to conflate sexual slavery with prostitution as some kind of excuse for a shameful episode of Japan's history, not to mention such a casual fuck-you to the quaint notion that women might have some kind of right in 2013 to not be sexual fodder for the military machine, makes me glad to know that the Abiko Japan Restoration Party campaign headquarters will be long gone after the upper house elections in July.

I look forward to strolling past Peppy's on the way to savour my margarita pizza in peace, along with the rest of Abiko.

*This reminds me of the flurry of stories of radiation hot spots in cities in the aftermath of Fukushima. Some were hot spots of radiation, but most were hot spots because people were looking for hot spots. They weren't objectively particularly hot. Just saying. But I still think Fukushima, on the whole, was bad. Very bad.

200 YEARS TOO EARLY

During the Industrial Revolution, machines were limited to performing physical tasks. The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early.

I used to be quite cocky in my belief that robots will never be able to replace the core functions of humanity (pizza making, Chilean wine horticulture and writing how-to-write-your-first-novel books) but then, about 30 minutes ago, I read this rather brilliant article  in Mother Jones and I finally got it: the robots are getting smarter, just one sushi arm, one chess game, one driverless vehicle, one baseball sports report at a time. But with the doubling of memory every 18 months or so, by about 2030, the world economy will be so entirely dependent on smart computers and robots that we folk who thought we had some economic value selling our labour may find we're shit out of luck. If we're not already.

With apologies to Maekawa Senpan for the ripped-off art.

YEAR OF THE SNAKE

As for trusting what members of the Abe Government say, there is that problem too. When a snake tells you "I'm not hungry" (Or, more specifically, "My basic thought is that I'm not hungry") -- is what matters is the fact that the snake said, "I'm not hungry" or that he is a snake?

Couldn't put it better myself than MTC over at Shisaku on the problems the Japanese revisionists have in saying anything even remotely believable, straightforward and, er, honest about the Korean sex-slave thing.

History still has quite a potent bite.

CATCHING UP WITH THE TIMES

This is Day Two of life in the bunker without the Japan Times. I know this because my wife asked me: "Are you missing your paper?" and for a moment I thought she meant working for one, which I haven't done for six years, and haven't missed since I discovered belatedly that you can blog and write ebooks without having to ask anyone's permission.
"Oh yeah, you're going to cancel our subscription. When's that happen?"
"Yesterday."
"Oh, I didn't realise."
An unread paper in the post box is worth two in the print run. Or something.
Actually, I did notice a lack of news this morning, largely because I'd forgotten to recharge my phone, so I had to make it through my shower and a pot of coffee before I was able to get a bit of celeb news that the Harry Potter actor will be starring in the film of Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice book. Somehow, I  doubt that snippet made the print edition of the Japan Times, but I didn't feel the urge to log on to the JT site to check.
What's been apparent to the wife for a long time has finally sunk in to my thick skull: why are we paying for something that we rarely use, is already out of date when we do and that we can get more easily for free?
To support journalism? To keep my drinking buddies in a job? Because old habits die hard?
No reason I could come up with was very compelling. I suppose if I'm honest, it's more of the last reason than anything else; how are we to know the value of the news unless it's been approved and stamped as Page 1 quality or whatever.
Yes, yes, the rest of the world has already moved on. And I have too. It's quite liberating to be free of the format, where the print medium is the message. I quite like constructing my own hierarchy of news. What's on Our Man's virtual page 1?
Today, it's Helen Keller was a radical militant, Corporate cuddly toy makers exploit Chicago's poor, Harry Potter star to play Jake in the film of Tokyo Vice.
Yes, yes, all those stories were written by pro journalists (tho I heard about them for free on Twitter) and I'm not sure how you pay for pros, but I'm pretty sure it's not through print subscriptions now.
If the Japan Times had an app or a subscription to Kindle, I wouldn't mind paying for it, but they don(t and as it stands, why should I pay more a month for my subscription to my newspaper than my smartphone?

ABE'S GOKIBURI HOI-HOI

If I were a newspaper editorial page cartoonist, I'd have the Prime Minister of Japan, Herr Abe, Jackbooting around with a little ¥100 plastic trumpet (made in China), but maybe make him very small, possibly a cockroach in a helmet, and his audience could be maybe a bunch of smaller cockroaches, say on the floor of a restaurant. Towering above him could be someone recognisably Chinese like a noodle chef with a big wok that he's about to crush on Abe's head, with maybe an American customer, say a fat bloke with a cowboy hat just to make that clear, with a basket full of roach traps for sale. The cockroaches could be labelled "Japanese voters" and the slightly racially insulting stereotypical Chinaman would be labeled "China" (because editorial cartoons are too suffisticated without labels) and Abe could be handing over wheelbarrows of freshly minted cash to the American cowboy for the roachtraps which Abe is laying all around the shop.

But fortunately I'm not.

Instead, here are a few links.

Abe showing his true nationalist colours

Will the international community just watch Japan's Nazification?

And then there's this Skewed History of Asia from 10 years ago in the Nation by Tim Shorrock

Oh yeah, and Japan refused to sign a declaration against the use of nuke weapons and all that Yasukuni shrine-visiting nonsense, for which I've lost the links.

Ho hum. It's almost like Abe wants to scrap the Japanese pacifist constitution and go nuclear. Nothing like an arms race to stimulate the economy, eh readers? That's Hooked On Abenomics.