Our Man in Abiko's Blog, page 19

JAPAN ELECTIONS 2012: AN IDIOT'S GUIDE

Oh dear what a mess. The Prime Minister of Japan (you mean a Prime Minister of Japan, there have been so many -- ed.) will dissolve the lower house on Friday which means there will be another election that Our Man can't vote in. But here at the bunker, he has carved a tiny niche of a smidgeon of a following by sticking his uninformed, disenfranchised nose in other people's business and he has no intention of stopping now. Here's an idiot's guide to the coming fun...

There will be an election on Sunday, December 16th in Japan. Our Man can't vote and probably neither can you.Japan is a parliamentary democracy. That means you can't choose who the top guy is even if you could vote. That position is already taken by the national figurehead (Hello Kitty? -- ed.) -- the emperor. This is just about who gets to be the Newt Gingrich or Nancy Pelosi of Japan.The likely winner is Shinzoe Abe , 58, a former PM right-wing legacy pol with the Liberal Democratic Party who quit as PM after a year with a bad tummy ache in 2007. Really. Cue joke about whether he has the stomach to lead Japan again. But he is the best that the LDP have to offer. Sheesh.His presumed nearest rival is current PM Yoshihiko Noda , 55, head of the disintegrating left-leaning Democratic Party of Japan which was formed by "Shadow Shogun" Ichiro Ozawa , 72, no relation sadly to porn actress Maria Ozawa, 36-24-36*, who was booted out of his own party, but has started a new party (The Popular People's Front**) and presumably he will be still around drawing a pension and syphoning off non-LDP talent from the DPJ.Osaka firebrand, 43,  Toru Hashimoto 's Nippon Ishin no Kai or Japan Restoration Association is all grown up and a national party now, apparently. Shintaro Ishihara , 80, yes 80 years young, has just formed the Party of the Sun (or Sunrise, as he prefers it to be called in English because he's a loon) after jacking in his job as Tokyo governor. He is a loon.Various other old gits calling themselves parties who just do it as tax write-offs and because they can and the Communists who can tell the truth because they haven't got a hope in hell and New Komeito, the acceptable face of the loony religious.  To summarise: You can't vote. If you could, you can't pick who rules you. But if you could vote for someone to pick who rules you, your choice is: a shambles at the head of the rightwingers, a leftwinger at the head of a shambles, a statesman with no state, a local pol with no national party, or an 80-year-old with no marbles.

For what it's worth, Our Man says never bet against the loon. It's Ishihara all the way.***

Good luck Japan.

*That was a joke. And you'll have to google your own link.
**That was another joke. It's really called the People's Life First Party. Really. 
***That was not a joke.

Picture is of an idiot.

FRESH CURRENTS: A BACK-TO-FRONT REVIEW

Our Man's not a very good reader. He tends to read the first few pages of a book, flip to the back and skim read back to front, pausing at pretty pictures and punny captions. Maybe that's a consequence of growing up with newspapers, or a personal inalienable belief that life is too precious to waste on poor writing. Or an interest in the footy scores.

Or it's just him, which is why he tends to keep his writing as brief as possible, aware that you, dear reader, have far better things to do with your time.

And so it was that he read Fresh Currents: Japan's flow from a nuclear past to a renewable future -- reading the intro and flipping to the end and skim-reading back to the front.

The first shock was that his name is there in the "Special Thanks" category, below Bianca Jagger, but above Jake Adelstein. Other than retweeting the occasional pronouncement from the Fresh Currents folks and wishing them the best in their publishing endeavours, Our Man is wholly undeserving of special thanks. But now he felt obliged to read on.

Very well, here's what Our Man took from the experience:

If you are a Buddhist you should buy green energy coupons, according to Buddhist writer Jonathan S. Watts. Not to be confused with the Jonathan (no S.) Watts who is a Guardian journalist and whom Our Man once got pissed with in Takadanobaba watching the Spurs v. Leicester City League Cup final. Spurs won, which pleased Jonathan (no S.) Watts no end, being a Spurs fan, but not Our Man, a Leicester native. But Jonathan (no S.) Watts confusingly also contributed an article to Fresh Currents about some Chinese CEO reckoning that his solar panel beating company would be as big as BP. Seems an un-Buddha-like ambition to have, but what would Our Man know?Dams are bad.Little windmills in Tokyo are good.Masayoshi Son, the Softbank dude, was going to solve Japan's energy needs by putting solar panels on unused beaches, building a giant "super grid" that would cost billions and billions and trillions, and then building another one to link Japan to China and India, those two countries famous for their abundance of excess electricity and stable governments.Super grids like the one above are bad.Always turn off unused lights. This could save 30% of lighting bills."Mr Renewable Energy Japan"Some incomprehensible tables with numbers that could mean something very significant or not, Our Man had no way of knowing.If renewables constituted an enormous percentage of Japan's energy supply in 2050, wouldn't that be nice?Nuclear disasters are bad.We'd have to build lots more nuke power plants to stop global warming, but if we did that, there would be lots more nuke power plants, which would be bad, so therefore renewables will solve all our energy needs.TEPCO is bad.Yakuza are bad.Hiroshima is bad.More numbers.Buddha is a tool-making ape.For the record, Our Man entirely supports the aim of weaning Japan off fossil fuels and turning the nukes off, but apart from saying this would be an undoubtedly Good Thing to do, he's not sure Fresh Currents made the case. Should we have giant solar schemes? Or grow our own energy on rooftops? If nukes aren't the answer to global warming then compost heaps are? And we get to continue our current lifestyles jetting around the world and downloading PDFs of Fresh Currents to our smart phones indefinitely?

How do we get from our messed up present to the sorted-out future? That's the pressing question that Fresh Currents doesn't answer. Maybe none of us can, to be fair, but the shit is going to hit the fan soon and if we can't use fossil fuels or nukes to dig ourselves out of it, there are going to be some pretty severe sacrifices that we aren't going to able to avoid, no matter how hard we stamp our feet. If we think the solution to our energy needs is just a matter of wanting it badly enough, we've got a hell of a bigger shock to come.

Download a PDF of Fresh Currents: Japan's flow from a nuclear past to a renewable future here . And read a more thorough review over at Spike Japan right here .

LAST TANGO IN ABIKO

Things change. Take the Stones. Our Man never would have thought he'd be so out of touch that he didn't know that they had a new song out. A couple actually. Or that he'd find out about it from an old mate he grew up with who is these days tweeting him about it from Dusseldorf of all places. Or that Our Man would be uploading the video here and probably being satisfied not to buy the album.

Things stay the same. Our Man still listens to the Stones on occasion. He still hunches up his shoulders and grimaces like he's bitten into lemon every time he hears a Keith riff. And while he doesn't tape them off the radio and swap with his mates anymore, he still favourites the good shit on YouTube and is happy to share with his virtual mates online.

Our Man could link to all the fun clips of Fox News imploding as their world of bullshit against Obama falls on their heads, or he could link to Obama doing the old "Romney's my best buddy, can't wait to work together again" bollocks, but the 7-11 wine is reaching cerebral cortexes he didn't even knew he had  and it's time to admit: if you haven't already seen all that stuff on twitter or facebook then you prolly ain't interested to see Our Man rehash it here.

All Our Man can offer are these piss-poor posts and a couple of essays that he actually put some effort into, and even wrote in first person, perish the thought. Oh, and the point of this post: he is, between suspended fourth chords, working on a small collection of essays he hopes to have out before Christmas provisionally titled " Last Tango in Tokyo ." You have been warned.

Carry on.

THE AD THAT WILL COST MITT THE ELECTION

This ad resonates with folk in Ohio, the swingingest of the swing states. Full story here .

It's bad form for foreigners to comment on other nation's elections, and certainly bad form to lecture anyone on who they should or shouldn't vote for. So Our Man has, mostly, avoided that this time round.

But, to hell with good form. 

Our Man finds he is disenfranchised in his adopted homeland of Japan, unable to have a say in who makes decisions about what taxes he should pay, what his daughters get taught in school or which greasy pol is least likely to get the country into a war with his new neighbours. More on all that here .

And thanks to arcane rules about absentee voting in Blighty, he is effectively barred from voting there since ballots must be sent by post and received back at the constituency and counted before the deadline, all within one week.

So, what's a good silhouette to do? Our Man claims the right to at least offer his opinions on British politics, Japanese politics and, dammit, US politics too. He did live there for four years, his mother was Arkansan, he likes Jon Stewart and buys his books from Amazon.com, not .co.uk, so he passes the threshold, just.

But in the interests of impartiality, let Our Man say this: if you want to vote for a man who wears magic underpants and believes Jesus will come back to, er, Missouri, go right ahead. If you want, instead, to vote for a man who believes it's not terrorism to kill women and children  in other countries by remote control, that's your choice.

It's the best democracy that money can buy, as they say.

FREE EXCERPT FROM CHAIRMAN MOUSE

I think, comrades, you will agree with Our Man, that Chairman Mouse: A Tokyo Disneyland North Korea Fantasia marks a great leap forward in cover design for the Abiko Free Press, and punning titles, for which Our Man is indebted to editor Dan Ryan. But enough of all that. Want a free excerpt? Of course you do... here are the first 841 words of the essay...

When Joe saw the sentries, he broke out in a cold sweat. 

He knew the rules. How could he not? He’d heard them repeated from loudspeakers buried in the square bushes all along the kilometre of asphalt to the checkpoint.“Enter in an orderly fashion. All bags will be inspected.”That last sentence was making his legs shake.He told himself that this was just part of the game his uncles had been teaching him to play. But if it was just a game, why did they make him repeat and memorise every action until he could think of nothing else? He couldn’t even remember his own name. Weren’t games supposed to be fun?He went over in his head for the two-hundredth time what he had to do. If anyone was to doubt his identity papers he was to shrug and say, “My name is Joe.” If that wasn’t enough he was to say “Joseph. Joseph Pak. I am eight years old.” And say nothing else. If he played this game right, he could meet up with his mother. She’d be waiting for him on the other side… if he didn’t mess this up. The thing was that the guards must not become suspicious. His life, his uncles’ lives and his mother’s depended on it.He was nearly at the front of the queue. He turned around and looked back along the line snaking behind him over the concrete. Somewhere lost in the mass of people his older brother must be standing. He said he’d done this before. He said everything would be fine, there was nothing to it. And yet there was something not right…“Bag please,” the sentry said.The boy held out his Mickey Mouse backpack for him to inspect. He could have told them everything that was in it: a bottle of water, in case he got hot; a sweater, in case he got cold; a rice ball, in case he got hungry. What he couldn’t tell anyone about was the secret. Sewn in to the left back-strap was $1,000 and in the right a capsule that he was to bite into “if all else failed.”Some game.The guard was suspicious. The boy knew it.
“J-J-Joe,” the boy blurted out. But he couldn’t stop his leg from shaking…My apologies for beginning this essay with a piece of fiction. When the latest addition to the Disney family is its $4 billion Star Wars baby, who cares for plot lines if the bottom line is so compelling? Yet, fiction can tell its own reality. The reality of what happened on May 12th, 1991, is known to only a handful of people still alive, but what we can piece together from Japanese intelligence leaked to the press is that the eight-year-old boy was Kim Jong-un, the eventual heir to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—the Kim family fantasy-land that is North Korea.
Lil’ Kim had entered Japan with his elder brother, Kim Jong-chul, on Brazilian passports. The two left a week later. They had been accompanied by ten minders. Their mother, a Japanese-born ethnic Korean dancer, Ko-Yong-hi, had entered Japan a few days later.Their destination was Tokyo Disneyland.What did the future Supreme Leader of North Korea make of the place? I can claim personal experience here—I have survived Space Mountain, battled Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters, come through the Country Bear Jamboree and lived to tell the tale. So, take it as the word of a survivor, when I say I can be confident of one thing: Lil’ Kim absolutely, unreservedly loved Tokyo Disneyland. Why wouldn’t he?If we erase the history that we know, North Korea’s infatuation with Disney becomes so much easier to understand. Forget for a moment the Korean Central News Agency’s ritualistic hatred of the imperialist Japan, which had annexed the country in the first half of the century, sowing a generation of resentment (and coincidentally, establishing the industrial infrastructure that kept the country going until the collapse of the communist bloc 60 years later). Forget for a moment more Walt Disney’s personal avowed anti-communism, his formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and naming of names to the House Un-American Activities Committee back in the good ol’ days of the 1950s. Keep the amnesia going for just a moment more to forget that the Disney Co. is praised as “America’s national baby-sitter, myth-maker and re-creator of history, the Sistine Chapel of service culture” by business writers and other, er, lapdogs of their capitalist masters. Forget all that.Tokyo Disneyland is an aspiring despot’s wet dream.Now, before we depart for that destination and I wow you along the way with comparatively few typos given the length of some of the sentences that you would expect of an essay with the necessary flab to distract you from the intellectual leanness of its opening premise: Disney is evil, North Korea is evil, therefore they are the same (any reasonable adult who has spent the day sober in Tokyo Disneyland doesn’t need an essay to know the place is evil) I must first offer a few disclaimers...
***  

COMRADES!
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR LOOSE CHANGE! FIND OUT WHAT DISCLAIMERS OUR MAN DISCLAIMS! THE ABIKO FREE PRESS HAS THE TRUTH! VISIT THE CAPITALIST PIG-DOGS'  BOOKSTORE HERE  AND LIBERATE OUR MAN IN ABIKO'S LATEST ESSAY!

STILL ALIVE AND WRITING

Three items:

1. Our Man (above) is still alive.
2. He's working on a collection of essays for a Christmas book.
3. He's got one essay in the can and it could hit Amazon as soon as Thursday.
4. The cover is done for Thursday's essay and here it is:



5. Death to the petit-bourgeois tyranny of correctly numbered lists.
6. Here's an online interview with Our Man that appeared in a real print magazine just recently.
7. Carry on.

RUN (OR WALK VERY SWIFTLY) FOR MY LIFE

Time to dust off the old running shoes and this old video from a few years back now... because tomorrow Our Man may die. That is, he is going to attempt, despite pitifully little training this year, to run the annual half-marathon. His best time, clocked last year, was just under 2 hours for the 21 and a bit kilometres. This year, he might not bother timing himself. But he will finish dammit.

He's not doing it for charity this year, figuring in these pre-Christmas and post-Savile days, the pleas for cash will fall on deaf ears. But, in lieu of flowers on his grave, please consider donating a couple of yen at the side of the blog here  so we're not too out of pocket helping a couple of teenagers from Tohoku who lost their Dads to the tsunami have a good Christmas.

Anyway, I may try live-tweeting the race this time, synchronise watches for 10am Central Abiko Standard Time.

Oh yeah. This is Our Man's cover disguise for tomorrow...


Gotta go. Just enough time for that pre-race nightcap Guinness. Vitamins and stuff, yeah?

Carry on.

THUNDERSTRUCK: SEASON OF THE CRAZED FRUIT ISHIHARA

A few hours ago, Shintaro Ishihara announced an October surprise worthy of The Trump, that he was quitting his window seat at Tokyo city hall to run for Parliament. Go ahead laugh that an Octogenarian could have ambitions to become leader of this great nation. At 80-years-young, Shin-chan has still much to offer. He may not have all his own teeth, or marbles, but he does have his own party. And we can cry if we want to.

Consider his diplomatic prowess with China, his ability to deny the rape of Nanking (must have been God's will, eh Shin?) and, er, ability to get elected despite it all.

What an inspiration.

Need any English teachers in England? Asking for a friend.

COVER LETTER TO GRANTA

MORE INSULTS, PLEASE

As usual, it's left to the comedians of this world to make the most serious of points. As Guido Fawkes says, well worth 10 minutes of your time. Carry on.