James Fallows

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. More

James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book, China Airborne, was published in early May. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

 
Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.

Filtered by "japan" (Clear filter)

Krugman, Fingleton, and Japan

Global
When I was holed up in Beijing for several months last year finishing my China book, Eamonn Fingleton was part of a virtuoso team of guest bloggers who filled in for me in this space. One of his items drew a lot of attention and generated a lot of discussion. It was called "The Myth of Japan's Lost Decade," and it argued that the Western world had been all too self-congratulatory about the utter "collapse" of Japan's economy. In fact, he argued, Japan was still very rich -- and although its political system was terminally dysfunctional (sound familiar?), its companies in fact enjoyed ever-growing world market share in a wide range of high tech goods.

This is a case I sympathize with, and have made various times -- for instance, in the Atlantic two years ago. I am sure that Fingleton has noticed that Paul Krugman, long a skeptic of the "Japan is stronger than it looks" view, now agrees. Or so a new interview with Martin Wolf in the FT suggests:
The conversation turns to the Japanese crisis of the 1990s. In retrospect, I [Wolf] suggest, the Japanese seem to have managed the aftermath of their crisis quite well.

He [Krugman] agrees. "What we thought was that Japan was a cautionary tale. It has turned into Japan as almost a role model. They never had as big a slump as we have had. They managed to have growing per capita income through most of what we call their 'lost decade'. My running joke is that the group of us who were worried about Japan a dozen years ago ought to go to Tokyo and apologise to the emperor. We've done worse than they ever did. When people ask: might we become Japan? I say: I wish we could become Japan."
Respects to Fingleton, who was one of the few making the case against exaggerated Japan-pessimism all along. (Bill Holstein is another.) And to Krugman, for acknowledging how things have evolved.

Eamonn Fingleton Makes a $10,000 Offer

Global
Eamonn_Fingleton-150.jpgEarlier this year, Eamonn Fingleton (right), an economics writer based in Tokyo since the 1980s, got a lot of attention with a guest post in this space arguing that the image of Japan as an economic basket case was grossly at odds with the country's actual economic performance. For instance:
>>[A]nyone who visits Japan these days is struck by the obvious affluence even among average citizens. The cars on the roads, for instance, are generally much larger and better equipped than in the 1980s (indeed state of the art navigation devices, for instance, are more or less standard on many models).  Overseas vacation travel has more than doubled since the 1980s. The Japanese boast the world's most advanced cell phones, and the biggest and best high-definition television screens. Japan's already long life expectancy has increased by nearly two years. Its Internet connections are some of the world's fastest -- something like ten times faster on average than American speeds. [JF note: I can attest to all these points.]

True, not all of Japan's indicators are equally impressive. The Tokyo stock market, for instance, has never recovered from its 1990s slump. Neither has the real estate market....

On the negative side, there is also the fact that Japan's economic growth rate, as least as calculated officially, has averaged little more than 1 percent a year in the last two decades. For those who propound the "stagnation" story, this is their strongest card. But it does not accord with the common observation --  undeniable to those who have known the country since the 1980s -- that the Japanese people have enjoyed one of the biggest improvements in living standards of any major First World nation in the interim.<<
One more example, from the Asian Development Bank rather than Fingleton. Everyone sees "made in China" on an iPad or iPhone and naturally thinks the products reflect China's growing technological dominance and its eclipse of Japan. And in the trade statistics, the value of an iPhone or iPad is counted as an export "from China" to the United States. But in reality, nearly all of the value of what's being exported consists of components from Japan (also Germany, South Korea, etc) merely reassembled in China. For an iPhone, Japanese companies account for ten times as much value as Chinese companies do. Details here.

Fingleton wrote his guest-post item shortly before the devastating earthquake / tsunami / meltdown sequence that has pummeled Japan so terribly. But the points about economic fundamentals remain, and are at odds with the conventional "oh, Japan, didn't we used to care about them?" attitude in the West.

Fingleton is sure enough of his outlook to have made a public offer of a $10,000 donation to a charity, preferably one for Japanese earthquake victims, if proponents of the contrary view join him in a public debate. You can see his offer and accompanying manifesto at his site. Worth considering.

Below, a study aid: a WSJ chart, from Asian Development Bank data, on the "value flow" in an imported iPhone.

WSJSmileyCurve.jpg

The Zipper Streets of Ikebukuro

Global
When showing a picture of the "zipper streets" of Amsterdam, I mentioned that Japan was the only other place where I'd seen such an effort to carry out "tidy" infrastructure improvements. Happily, a reader who has worked in Japan sent a picture taken on the west side of Tokyo several years ago that illustrates the point :

Ikebukuru_2006A.jpg

The reader says:
>>The attached photo was taken on the Meiji Dori between Shinjuku and Ikebukuro in Tokyo, Japan while I lived there during a long term contract. It appeared to be a structure that allowed trucks and equipment to be lowered from street level down underground work areas, perhaps a new subway line. I marveled at how clever it was. There was little equipment noise and even less impediment to the traffic flow.

I was trekking up to Ikebukuro because my Dad, who had served as an MP at Sugamo Prison in Ikebukuro after WWII, wanted me to make the last visit there he knew he would not be able to make. Of course, the prison is gone and there was little recognizable left for him in the photos I took, but he seemed satisfied. He guarded Tojo in his last days.<<
And, to the previous question of why the Dutch are so good at "zipper street" skills, another reader explains:
>>After spending a good chunk of the last five years in Rotterdam, I note that the Dutch have two big advantages over the rest of the world when it comes to digging up streets:  most of the country is built on sand, not dirt (a result of their ongoing reclamation of the North Sea as usable land), and it is easy to dig through.  And for the most part, their utilities are under the sidewalks, not the streets, so its usually just pedestrians and bike traffic who have to work around it, not cars and trucks.

One more thought: the Dutch tradition of working hard at hand labor exceeds most countries: the culture really expects (and celebrates) hard work.  Their work crews put American equivalents to shame.  I'm always amazed at how hard they're working, and how quickly the work is done.<<
After the jump, zipper streets in Italy, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

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Security Theater: The Ripple Effects (updated)

Global
[See UPDATE below] I mentioned recently that the Japanese postal and express-shipment authorities had decided that parcels weighing more than a pound and headed for the United States would have to go by sea mail, which means many weeks in transit. Big corporate shippers were exempted. The Japanese officials said they had imposed the rule to cope with U.S. security regulations -- and they appeared not to be applying it to shipments headed anywhere else.

Dave Bull, a craftsman based in Japan (below, from his site Woodblock.com) writes about the effect this has had on his business.
 
 DavidBull.jpg

He says:
>>I am a woodblock printmaker living in Tokyo, and with exports making up about two thirds of my business, the Post Office restrictions are having a huge effect.

The root cause seems to be a ban on the mix of cargo and _passengers_:
http://www.impactpub.com.au/aircargo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6929&Itemid=60

The post office here has been using cargo space booked from commercial airlines, and as that has been cut off, they are at a loss what to do:
https://www.aacargo.com/content/news_article_10.jhtml?cargoID=article29

As no such bans seem to be in place from other countries (at least according to a quick scan of various postal websites around the world), I would assume that other postal administrations are more nimble, and have arranged 'pure' cargo shipment alternatives. How long it will take the Japanese post office to wake up and work something out, remains to be seen ...

In the meantime, the only option for a 'small shop' like myself is to make bulk seamail shipments to a friend in the US, who will hold the goods and then send them on at my instructions as/when orders come in.

Just when - if ever - the US is going to work out how to co-exist with the rest of the world, is a question that seems as though it will provide endless 'entertainment' for quite some time yet to come ...<<
Even handed as always, I add this Japan Times story suggesting that the Japanese authorities have done as much as the Americans to over-react in this case. (Eg, some private shippers have gone back to a more flexible approach, while Japan Post is taking a hard line.) The impulse toward security theater knows no national boundaries.

UPDATE: Bull reports that the Japanese postal authorities have lifted the ban. They will resume shipments of over-one-pound parcels to the US, but say shippers should allow several extra days in transit, for screening and so on. Announcement of the change, in Japanese, here. When an English translation is ready, it will appear on their English site here. So, there are cases of security theater being undone. Encouraging in its modest way.

More on Chalmers Johnson

National
(See update below.) When I got the news in the middle of last night that Chalmers Johnson had died, I put up a very brief commemoration, intending to do more later.

It turns out that that will not be necessary. My friend Steve Clemons, who knew Chal very well and both agreed and (occasionally) disagreed with him, has done a wonderful and thorough appreciation on The Washington Note. A sample:
>>In one of my fondest memories of Chalmers and Sheila Johnson at their home with their then Russian blue cats, MITI and MOF, named after the two engines of Japan's political economy -- Chal railed against the journal, Foreign Affairs, which he saw as a clap trap of statist conventionalism. He decided he had had enough of the journal and of the organization that published it, the Council on Foreign Relations. So, Chalmers called the CFR and told the young lady on the phone to cancel his membership.

The lady said, "Professor Johnson, I'm sorry sir. No one cancels their membership in the Council in Foreign Relations. Membership is for life. People are canceled when they die."

Chalmers Johnson, not missing a beat, said "Consider me dead."

I never will.<<
Steve's assessment is very much worth reading in full. And for another heartfelt appreciation of what Chalmers and Sheila Johnson have meant, see Tim Shorrock's testimony here. And a photo, from here, of Chal with one of his beloved cats.

ChalWithCat.jpg
UPDATE: Clyde Prestowitz also has an insightful and warm remembrance, here.

Chalmers Johnson

Global
I have just heard that Chalmers Johnson died a few hours ago, at age 79, at his home near San Diego. He had had a variety of health problems for a long time. (Photo source here.)

cj_7355.jpgJohnson -- "Chal" -- was a penetrating, original, and influential scholar, plus a very gifted literary and conversational stylist. When I first went to Japan nearly 25 years ago, his MITI and the Japanese Miracle was already part of the canon for understanding Asian economic development. Before that, he had made his name as a China scholar; after that, he became more widely known with his books like Blowback, about the perverse effects and strategic unsustainability of America's global military commitments. Throughout those years he was a mentor to generations of students at the UC campuses at Berkeley and San Diego.

Johnson and his wife and lifelong intellectual partner Sheila were generous and patient with me, as I was first trying to understand the world they had studied and analyzed. I vividly remember spending an afternoon in the early 1990s on the sunny patio at their house in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, north of the UCSD campus. I'd moved back from Japan, was working on a book about it, and spent hours writing notes as fast as I could as Johnson described Douglas MacArthur's mistakes and (occasional) successes during the U.S. Occupation of Japan, and why Japan's economy was unlikely to open itself on the Western model, even if U.S. or British economists kept giving lectures about the importance of deregulation. I have never concentrated harder as I tried to be sure to capture his bons mots.

Johnson would have been about 60 at the time. Even then he suffered from a rheumatoid or gout-like condition that caused him swelling and pain. "It all goes so fast," I remember him saying. He made good use of his time. Sympathies to Sheila Johnson and their many friends.

Security Theater: The Ripples Spread to Japan

Global
A reader who has followed Japanese postal regulations conveys the latest security announcement. Short version: items weighing more than 1 pound can no longer be shipped to the U.S. by any means involving flight. The announcement, in Japanese, is here; a PDF of the details, also in Japanese, is here. The reader's interpretation is this:
>>Apparently the conditions for shipping packages via air to the United States have now become so restrictive that the Japanese Post Office has announced that, effective Nov. 17, it will no longer accept any packages weighing over a pound for shipment to the US by any method that involves air transport (including EMS, airmail, and SAL). Except for large corporate mailers, everything over a pound must apparently now come by sea. Asahi Shimbun is reporting that the Japanese equivalents of FedEx and UPS have followed suit. I assume that airmail service remains in effect for the remaining 200 countries across the globe that have not lost their collective minds.

I do read/speak Japanese and regularly use it in my work, but it was actually my Japanese-speaking wife who brought the news to my attention through her cries of anguish when she read the news: This effectively cuts off her supply of dry goods, books, and magazines; ruins Christmas for our daughter (at least from the Japanese side of the family); and means we'll not be getting any mochi for o-shougatsu. Having spent sixteen years in Japan (though currently living in the US), one of my basic guiding principles is that if your procedures are too burdensome even for the Japanese to bother complying with, you've probably gone a bit too far.

Between the new, "enhanced" TSA procedures and this story, I've lost any hope that our leaders know where to stop when it comes to reacting to terrorist threats.<<
Image of part of the PDF announcement is below (click for more detailed view), and after the jump some updates from Japanese news stories on the policy. Larger point: the only route toward perfect security is perfect lock-down and control. If we value freedoms or privacy, we must by definition accept something short of perfect security. I'll ask it again: Who among our political leaders is speaking up for weighing liberty in the balance? Or reminding us of the motto, "with liberty and justice for all," not "perfect security for all"? You newly powerful Tea Party people: cat got your tongue?

Bonus larger point: the damage done by terrorism, always and everywhere, is not the destruction it causes directly but the reaction it provokes.
JapanPost.png 

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Poor Little (Rich) Japan

Global
This summer my wife and I went back to the suburban neighborhood outside Tokyo where we'd lived and sent our children to (Japanese) public school during the late 1980s. Its name was Utsukushigaoka, 美しが丘 in Japanese, which literally meant "beautiful hills" and figuratively had a connotation like "Pleasantville" in American real estate terminology.  As I explained in this short article and accompanying slide show, we were struck by two things: how much richer our former neighbors and their entire country had become in the intervening decades; but also how different, more cautious, and more inward-looking the political and cultural mood of Japan seemed now than in those "Japan That Can Say 'No'" days.

The title the article ended up with in the magazine was "Japan Surrenders," which many readers wrote to me to complain about. (On various grounds -- that it was dismissive of Japan, that it ignored the country's continuing core-economic success, that the current more cautious mood was actually a sign of maturation, etc.) I don't write headlines, since I lack that part of the magazine-staffer's brain. But I thought this one accurately conveyed part of the contrast I was presenting -- Japan's more tentative political/cultural mood, not to mention its projected substantial population decline -- and shouldn't be seen as suggesting that the country was in dire economic straits.

Yesterday's New York Times had a long article that presented Japan as a failure in about every aspect, including the economic. For instance:
"For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy."
"Little more than an afterthought" -- but one that, until only months ago, was second only to the United States in total economic output, and whose level of production and wealth per person is still nearly ten times greater than China's, the country that has just overtaken it in gross-output terms. When we lived in Japan, Toyota had a dream of being the biggest car manufacturer in the world. Now... And on through a long list.

The Irish writer Eamonn Fingleton has lived in Japan nonstop since the 1980s and has argued through that time that the Western press has been too quick to write off the enduring strengths of the Japanese industrial and export system, as part of "trend" stories about its obvious failures and stagnation in other areas, notably political decision-making and reform. Fingleton has just laid out his contrary case for understanding Japan's strengths and weaknesses here, as a critique of the NYT piece. Sample:
>>Take the only significant statistic cited [by the NYT]: Japan's GDP in 2009 was supposedly the same as in 1991 -- $5.7 trillion in both cases, allegedly. In reality, as a check of the World Bank's website will immediately confirm, the correct number for 1991 was a mere $3.45 trillion -- and the figure announced at the time by the Tokyo authorities was actually even lower. The Times seems to have overlooked the fact that the yen was worth a lot less in 1991 than it is now. It is actually up 65 percent against the dollar since 1991 and fully 69 percent since 1989.

In its only reference to Japan's trade performance, the Times states: "Its [Japan's] once voracious manufacturers now seem prepared to surrender industry after industry to hungry South Korean and Chinese rivals." The truth is that Japan multiplied its current account surplus more than three-fold between 1989 (the last year of the Japanese stock market boom) and 2008 (the last year before the present global slump). In the same period the US current account deficit ballooned sixfold!<<
Read and judge for yourself. The broader point is that while there may be a few relatively small countries that can be classified as "failures" across the board, big complex societies are always a mix of strong and weak points, and the prevailing Western view of Japan goes way too far in (self-congratulatingly) dismissing it as an utter "failure." Picture below, of a new coffee shop / brewpub in our old neighborhood, on a sunny Saturday in June, proves nothing but is a little atmospheric touch (click for larger).
 Thumbnail image for IMG_8764A.jpg
While you're at it, be sure to check William J. Holstein's recent series of posts based on a return visit to Japan, where he worked for many years as a reporter. One that takes exception to a (different) NYT "Japan has failed" piece is here; another about understanding Japan is here; and an index here. Lots to consider.

UPDATE: Via Andrew Sprung, a reminder of a Gideon Rachman column last year which made a similar point -- that Japan's "failure" is in many ways one to envy. The column is on a protected site, but it was on August 31, 2009, and it concluded this way:
>>Some of [Japan's] efforts to deal with an ageing society are positively unnerving. The country has led the world in developing robots as companions for the elderly.... These include a "snuggling Ifbot" that, according to press reports, "lives in an astronaut suit, chats about the weather, sings and plays games".

It is best not to laugh. As the US and Europe struggle to come to terms with the aftermath of a bubble economy, rising public debt and the retirement of the baby-boom generation, they should look to Japan with respect. It may be the future.<<

A Japan That Can 'Just Relax'

Global
In response to this article in the current issue -- short, but heartfelt; seriously, I hope you'll read it! -- a reader in Yokohama writes to say how the same phenomena look from a Japanese perspective. The reader's note is below, following a picture from the magazine of our old house in the Tokyo suburbs, which was brand new when we moved there in 1988:

UtsuK.png
Having read your recent story "Japan Surrenders", I thought I could provide a bit of input from another perspective.

To give some background, I am a member of your childrens' generation, and having basically split the bulk of my life between Tokyo and San Francisco, I probably epitomize what most Japanese would have once referred to as "shinjinrui", although that term is now long dead, as much a relic of the bubble age as eurobeat and shoulder pads.

Although you seem to miss the hyperkinetic energy of that era, most of the Japanese I know would say good riddance (especially to eurobeat). I don't see today's Japan as having "surrendered" -- I see it as having matured.

Our grandfathers' generation saw Tokyo reduced to ashes and were forced to work hard just to keep from starving. Our fathers' generation found that hard work could take them anywhere, even to challenge the US for tops in the world. They were motivated because they had something to prove -- that Japan could beat America at their own game.

Our generation followed a completely different narrative. We came of age during the bubble years, and saw it all collapse before we even entered the work force. Although the collapse of the asset bubble was a great shock to Japan, the shock was muted for our generation, since we never had a stake in it. For us, the last twenty years (the two "lost" decades) are simply the normal state of affairs, and it seems silly to expect an economy to keep charging at full-speed forever. We have known from the beginning that an overenthusiastic pursuit of wealth can have devastating consequences. Why not forget about being number one and just enjoy what you have?

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Our Life in Japan

Global
I made a deal with our sons to stop using them as cameo figures in articles once they got to an age when they might come across a magazine around the house and see something about themselves. Which is to say, after their crucial cameo role in this 1982 article about our first computer.

They're safely above the age of consent now, and have given their consent to some pictures of their year as students in Japanese public school, just over 20 years ago. This slide show, put together by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, accompanies a brief dispatch in the magazine (subscribe!) about how our old Japanese neighborhood, "Pleasantville," looks on a recent return these many years later -- and how surprising it seems, compared with the Japan we knew then and the China we have recently experienced.

Utsukushia.png

Here the kids sit on our back deck with some schoolmates, playing jan ken pon -- rock- paper- scissors -- to see who gets the first move in a game. More pictures with the story, including a glimpse of the tiny plot of grass that we used to make the kids "mow," with household scissors. Plus this picture, below, of our younger son watching the "packers" help customers aboard at our local commuter train station. I'm sure he was thinking that he and his brother would have to get on the next, equally crowded train, and that his parents would be telling him that it was a great adventure and would be good for him.

Packers.png

On Obama's Asian diplomacy -- #3

Technology
Last week some of Barack Obama's critics were upset that he ducked a question in Japan about whether he approved of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I cannot begin to say how short-sighted that criticism is.

When I lived in Japan for several years in the 1980s, I learned about the various realms of the things you could say in public (tatemae) and things you actually believed ( honne). Although not strictly a matter of tatemae/honne, the atomic bomb decision is a particularly thorny and awkward one for Americans to discuss with Japanese. The normal way to consider the topic in Japan involves the country's status as the only object of an atomic attack in history, the suffering its people underwent, and the status it therefore possesses to talk about the importance of avoiding any such event again -- all of which is understandable. There is a lot of history the prevailing Japanese account leaves out, but that is a point better raised in internal Japanese debate than by American officials. Americans may believe that Harry Truman saved both Japanese and Allied lives by this decision. But there really is no mileage in a U.S. official saying that to people in Japan. Probably the worst thing I did in my time there was to propose that argument to a man who had been a doctor in Hiroshima in 1945. The conversation came to an abrupt and hostile end. And I was just a reporter, not the American president who has the power to order nuclear weapons used again.

Here's the best analogy I can think of: suppose you were a sheriff who had gunned down a group of terrorists who were threatening to blow up a town. In the crossfire, some innocent children were killed. If you run into their parents long afterwards, do you say: "Tough luck, it was in a good cause! And I'd do just the same thing again!" Or do you recognize their great sorrow and loss and do everything possible to avoid rubbing it in?

In avoiding a direct answer to the question from a Japanese reporter about whether the bombing was justified, Obama did what any American president or diplomat should do when this topic is raised in Japan. There is no answer that would have worked out better for him than his not answering at all.

Language politics: Germany, Japan, Cote d'Ivoire

Technology
Following this item about how China and America had one attitude toward foreigners trying to speak their language, while Japan, France, and (arguably) the Ivory Coast had a different view, some assent, dissent, and elaboration. These are long but if you're interested in language, then the detail is interesting.

About German speakers:
"Vigorous agreement on the American attitude towards foreigners speaking English, as contrasted with (in this case) German-speakers. My mother, an Austrian, always used to watch as my dad, an American, inevitably got mocked in her homeland for his imperfect German accent, and, indeed, imperfect German (which was still pretty good). She notes this would never happen in America -- it is rare for Americans to actively mock a foreigner's accent. When they do, it's usually in a way that somehow includes the foreign speaker. (We have a young family friend who sometimes says a word or two in "Churman" to make fun of her -- but he doesn't know any language but English -- he isn't lording any linguistic superiority over her -- knowing 2-3 languages to him is like ESP, a genuinely remarkable capacity.) Mom always says that the most common American reaction to her accent is a genuinely curious and open, "You have such a nice accent -- where are you from?"
"Those German-speakers aren't being malicious -- something about the relative difficulty of the language instills this attitude in them. It's just hard for a foreigner to avoid mistakes that every educated German-speaker learns to avoid at the age of five. Also, note that in German there is a sharp distinction between "Hochdeutsch" and the vernacular German that the unlettered masses speak, meaning that a fairly substantial percentage of the population isn't even really trying to speak German correctly. English doesn't really recognize any such division -- we're all speaking English, one way or another. (Also, it fascinates me that the dictionary in German is known as the "Fremdwörterbuch" -- the book of foreign words -- you know, those hard Latinate words that you sometimes need to look up -- everyone knows the core German words. Mongrel English treats all words the same, regardless of origin.)

"My mother, whose English in the meantime is excellent (but with an accent), observes that the thing about English is that the first stages of learning the language are easy -- anyone can learn it. And then comes the huge chasm to true fluency. English's vast vocabulary creates endless nuance in expression, which is just damnably difficult to master. But the first stages are easy, a linguistic open-door policy."
About Japanese:
"I agree with your comments about the Japanese language. I am a 2-year resident of Tokyo with fairly strong Japanese skills. [After some university study in Hiroshima and London] I mastered the language not by learning it from textbooks, but doing it on my own will-power. So, by speaking to people in Japanese almost non-stop, by reading books and newspapers in Japanese, watching Japanese television programs and listening to Japanese music and the radio, and by making requests by emails and fax for work in Japanese. Dating a Japanese girl for 3 years who only spoke Japanese, helped too. (we're no longer together, but I am grateful to her for the hours we spend talking together) I'm still learning day-by-day, but I am approaching the upper-intermediate level."

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More on US presidents as Japanese words

Technology
Several readers, plus my raised-in-Japan Atlantic colleague James Gibney, have reminded me that Barack Obama is not the first American president whose name has been converted into an ordinary word in Japanese. After the first President Bush fell ill and vomited on Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa at a state dinner in Tokyo in 1992, the term Bushu-suru -- ブッシュする, "do a Bush" -- became a joke staple of Japanese slang. Bush understood how Montezuma must have felt about having his name appropriated for gastrointestinal use.

Real time picture, via Wikipedia, of Barbara Bush and PM Miyazawa coming to the aid of the stricken president (behind napkin):
Bush-japanese-pm.jpeg.jpg

Via Google Books, an account from the Encyclopedia of Political Communication of the meaning of Bushu-suru, though I prefer my own "do a Bush" English version.
 
BushSuru.jpg

I don't know whether doing "a Clinton" -- クリントンする --  came to mean anything in Japanese.

"To Obama" in Japanese

Technology
Last week the NYT ran a story about how Barack Obama's version of spoken English has become a huge hit in Japan, emerging as the new standard for language-learning. This rings true to the fad/blockbuster nature of many commercial and cultural phenomena in Japan. And, we can all think of worse versions of English for them to emulate. (Carville? Stallone?)

But I thought that this item from the Ampontan blog, written by a foreigner in Japan, was more fascinating. It is about the way the invented verb Obamu -- オバむ, "to Obama" -- has gained currency among some Japanese youths. Explanation:

"obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think "Yes we can, Yes we can," and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to elicit success in a personal endeavor. One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu. (拒む, which means to refuse, reject, or oppose).

"[Japanese bloggers] give the following example:

:ほら、何落ち込んでいるんだよ。オバめよ、オバめ。

"Or, "Hey, why are you so down in the dumps? Cheer up, cheer up!"...

"One more Japanese-language citation is from a Twitter tweet, which defines it simply as believing you can accomplish something.

"Those familiar with the language will understand immediately that such a coinage would sound very natural, and that it is typical of Japanese creativity and their sense of humor."

The absorptive-and-transforming power of the Japanese language is indeed one of its charms. It will be a good sign for Obama if his name continues to be used in this mainly-positive context.

More on Ls and Rs in Japanese

Technology
As mentioned yesterday, the risk in correcting others is that you get exposed to correction yourself. So it turns out to be -- sort of -- with my comments about the L and R sounds in Japanese. Major point: it remains correct to say, as I did, that Japanese speakers do not "lallate" -- use Ls in place of Rs, and vice versa. Minor refinement! It's not quite right to say, as I also did, that the Japanese phonetic system "has no L sound." Its writing system has only Rs instead of Ls (when represented in the western alphabet), but the sound is more complicated. Representative messages:
"I think it is more accurate to say that Japanese has a single sound that is somewhere in between English 'l' and 'r'.  The Japanese 'r' is certainly not standard US retroflex 'r'.  Say the name "Richard" and feel where your tongue goes (it's back towards the roof of your mouth).  Now say "baseboru" with your best shot at a Japanese accent - you'll find that your tongue is further forward in your mouth and just taps the ridge of your gums.  Now say "Lilly" - your tongue will be even further forward.  The 'r' in 'baseboru' is somewhere in between  "Lilly" and "Richard". " [JF note: this corresponds to my experience in coping with Japanese.]
And, from someone raised in America whose husband was raised in Japan:
"Yeah - they use "R" when they write those syllables in Roman alphabet.  I've learned though that my pronunciation is somewhat less comical to the listener if I pronounce it closer to the English "l" sound.  As best I can make out, the tongue position makes it something of a cross between our "r", "l", and "d".

I believe there is research showing that a newborn is able to "hear" most any of the sounds you can make, but by the time you are 3 or 5 (or somewhere in there) your brain has specialized for the sounds you normally hear.  My husband simply cannot hear the difference between the spoken "l" and "r", because there just aren't those distinct sounds in spoken Japanese.
"

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, Besuboru dept

Technology
Update: Just after posting the item below I learned of the death of William Safire, who for three decades wrote the NYT Mag's language column, among his voluminous other works. Sorry for a querulous-seeming note under the circumstances. On the other hand, this is the kind of distinction that Safire himself reveled in. My condolences to his family.
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There is a big risk in writing items on the lines of: "Everybody thinks X, but everybody's wrong. Actually Y is correct." The risk is that, as the corrector, you can be wrong yourself. I know! I've been there before, and no doubt will be again.

Unfortunately, I think that the estimable Jack Rosenthal of the NYT, in today's "Language" column in the magazine, is there too. Most of the column is devoted to correcting widely-practiced misuses of "phantonym" terms -- "disinterested" to mean bored (wrong) rather than impartial (right), etc. I'm with him on all of these! Then he adds this multilingual note:
"The Japanese love besuboru, reflecting the phonetic phenomenon of lallation, reversing "r" and "l." "
Not really. Rather, in keeping with my opening note of caution: to the best of my knowledge and experience, this is incorrect. Japanese fans of the Hiroshima Carp or the Nippon Ham Fighters do indeed refer to the sport as either besoboru or, more formally, 野球, yakyu. But they don't say besoboru because they are switching Ls and Rs. They say it because the Japanese language does not have the L sound. Where English speakers would use either L or R, the Japanese language has only R.*
 
Therefore when Japanese people speak English, they often have trouble with Ls and may even "lallate," mixing up Ls and Rs. Much as English speakers, raised in a language with no gender, often mix up le/la or der/die/das in gendered languages like French or German. But when they're speaking Japanese, they say besoboru because that's the way their language works. (And if Rosenthal meant that the change wasn't caused by lallation but simply illustrated the use of an R where there had been an L -- OK. But it's still a bad illustration, since both Ls and Rs in English will become Rs in Japanese. Saying that it illustrates lallation implies that Rs would become Ls in Japanese -- Balaku Obama, etc. That doesn't happen.)

OTOH, a very nice homage to one of my long-time Atlantic friends and colleagues in the Cox-Rathvon acrostic in the same magazine today, and a lot of unusually elegant clues. Check it out.
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* Primer on Japanese sound system here and here. As anyone who has studied the language knows, its syllabary has the ra / ri / ru / re / ro sequence of R sounds, but nothing involving Ls.

Foreign words are often brought directly into Japanese and and converted to Japanese phonetics -- in contrast to Chinese, where the concept behind the foreign word is often re-rendered in Chinese. Thus "computer" is konpyuta (コンピュータ) in Japanese, but dian nao, "electric brain," (电脑), in Chinese. And thus in China I had a whole invented Chinese name with little relation to my original name, whereas in Japan, within the limits of Japanese sounds, my last name became ファローズ, Fuarohzu.

Karel van Wolferen on the Japanese electoral revolution

Technology
I mentioned last week that the Dutch writer Karel van Wolferen was, like me, a devotee of "interesting" software for writing and thinking. His real metier, of course, is political analysis, most notably about Japan. On his site he has just put up a detailed post about this weekend's historic ousting of the Liberal Democratic Party from governing control in Japan.

The LDP's name has unfortunately misleading connotations in English; as the hoary joke goes, it is neither "liberal" nor "democratic" but instead is the long-standing force of status-quo, favor-trading conservatism. And as Karel has argued in his many books and articles, its mere existence is misleading in a more fundamental sense, since it implies that Japan is a "normal" democracy, in which political parties compete for the power to control government policy. In fact, elected politicians from the LDP and all other parties have been relatively weak, compared with the permanent and powerful bureaucrats who distribute money, set policy, and in most senses run the country.

To see that analysis applied to the current situation, check out his latest dispatch. He asks whether this election will make any more difference than the only other time the LDP was driven (briefly) from power, just after Bill Clinton's inauguration:
"Will Japan's new government be able to do what the reformists could not possibly accomplish in 1993? Skeptics point at the  divisions within the [new ruling party]...

"But my impression is that the individuals of the inner core of the party are deadly serious about what must be done to turn their country into what one of them, the most senior and most experienced Ozawa Ichiro, has in his writing called a 'normal country'."
The idea of Japan as a "normal" country -- one that takes responsibility for its own defense, one with a functioning political system -- is more significant than most people outside Japan usually recognize. I remember hearing Ozawa use that phrase when I interviewed him, in his role as an LDP potentate, twenty years ago while I was living in Tokyo. I have no idea whether this election really will signify, as the one in 1993 did not, the long-awaited historic emergence of Japan as a functioning democracy. But Karel van Wolferen's post lays out the stakes, and the reasons to think it might.

Two articles from Counterpunch (updated)

Technology
Two of my friends of longest standing (note how I avoid saying two of my "oldest friends") have articles online at counterpunch.org  that deserve notice.

Eamonn Fingleton, who has been based in Japan for years and has been both contrarian and right in emphasizing the residual strength of Japanese manufacturing (even as the Japanese financial system collapsed), now has an article about the American media's coverage of Detroit. It is mainly a corrective to the automatic sneer at U.S. automakers that characterizes much political and press commentary about them. The article says:
As press commentators have generally spun it, the Detroit story has been a simplistic  morality tale of "incompetent executives," "lazy workers," and "intransigent unions." Detroit in other words has richly deserved its fate and, in the opinion of many of the more callous observers, the sooner it is put out of its misery the better.
          

The real story is a complex one in which the American auto industry has often been more sinned against than sinning.         

The article is very heavy on US-Japanese auto competition; for the record, I disagree with Eamonn on a few of the harpoons that he hurls. But the simple rarity of arguments on the automakers' behalf makes the article worth considering. Update: Another illustration of its approach, from the beginning:
To see how well -- or rather how badly -- you understand the background, try this quiz:           

1. What was the Detroit companies' share of the Japanese market in 1930? (a) About 90 per cent. (b) About 20 per cent. (c) Less than 4 per cent.
           
2. How many models do the Detroit corporations currently make with the steering wheel on the right (the standard configuration for Japan)? (a) More than 40. (b) 12. (c) 3.           

3. What was the combined share of all foreign makers - American, European, and Japanese - in the Korean car market in the last decade? (a) Less than 2 per cent. (b) Around 15 per cent. (c) More than 70 per cent.           

The correct answer in each case is (a).           

If you flunked, don't feel bad. Just cancel your newspaper subscription.           

I don't buy Eamonn's "cancel your subscription" advice, since newspapers are just behind carmakers in their overall distress. But his overall pitch is significant.

Also we have Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, whose name is familiar to anyone who has read or thought about American defense policy over the last generation. Based purely on his study of conflict through the ages, last year Spinney made a call about Obama-McCain campaign tactics that proved far shrewder than that of many political "experts" at the time.

In his new article, he makes a call about President Obama's expanding commitment to Afghanistan that is convincing to me and should be alarming to anyone who reflects on what the U.S. is getting itself into. Both articles very much worth a look.

On language schools and weirdo ads

Technology
Recently I mentioned "weirdo language school ads" with an apparent bondage theme, and quoted a reader who had taught English in Japan and offered some psycho-sexual interpretation of the ads. Two updates:

First, the latest entry in this category, from a billboard in Beijing yesterday. Speaking personally, nothing could give me greater confidence in the quality of English language instruction than the slogan, "Talenty English, Talenty Education."

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/IMG_6905A.jpg

(Yes, "Talenty" appears to be the name of the school, but I'm not sure that helps.)

Second, a letter I received from an official of the Gaba Eikaiwa (English conversation) school in Japan. He objects to the way the school's reputation was characterized by the reader I quoted. In the spirit of fair reply, his letter follows:

Dear Mr. Fallows,

I happened to recently read your blog of April 14th 2009, entitled "More on weirdo language school ads (updated)". As the person in charge of recruiting new instructors at Gaba language school, I was somewhat disturbed by the several inaccuracies referenced as "testimony from a 'former English teacher in Japan". I would like to bring these to your attention.

Firstly let me mention that the ad pictured is not reflective of current Gaba advertising. It was a poster that last ran over 6 years ago. Current Gaba advertising is significantly different in theme. Please see the J-peg attachment of our current advertising as a sample. While the ad certainly was "unique" and I won't quibble with the fact that some might even find it 'weird', I would hope that the fact that this ad is from 2002/2003 could be mentioned somewhere in the copy.
Here is Gaba's current ad, featuring its "Man to Man" (マン ツー マン) teaching approach. Underneath that, as a reminder, the previous ad; then, after the jump, the rest of the letter:

New adGabaAd.jpg


Old ad
gaba1.jpg
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China v. Japan: the packed-train factor

Technology
Superficially Japan and China are similar; in nuance and operating details they're generally opposites, as illustrated previously here. Kathy Kriger, whom I knew in Tokyo twenty years ago and who now lives in Casablanca (where she runs, no joke, Rick's Cafe), reminds me about an important difference: What happens inside a packed train.

Japan's subways are flat-out more intensely crowded than anything I've seen in China. In Tokyo, uniformed and white-gloved "packers" are normal. The Beijing and Shanghai subways are merely "self-packed," with people crowding their way in but without that extra ratchet-up of density that only trained, professional packers can provide. In Tokyo I lived through the scene below more often than I want to recall. (Photo from Encarta.)

Chikatetsu.jpg

Clearest sign that the photo was taken in Japan rather than China: Not the packers but the next car-load of passengers, waiting punctiliously in line!

As I recently mentioned, a very-crowded Beijing subway provides the opportunity for petty theft. In Japan, it's more like petty... petting.  Kriger says:

That brought back a flood of memories from Tokyo's train and subway commutes.  My most vivid were from when I lived a year in Yokohama and commuted into Tokyo first on the JNR Negishi-sen, the blue train.  The worst was the morning, crammed in and unable to move - invariably forced  to look over the shoulder of a guy immersed in a porno comic book.  When it got too much I got out and boarded the next train.  But robbery was never a problem, ever. 

My favorite story was forgetting my purse on the upper rack exiting in Yokohama from the Yokosuka line enroute to Yokosuka - the end of the line - and going there the next morning to retrieve my handbag and sign a form verifying that everything was still there. 

We women didn't fear the pick pocketers so much as those who rode the trains to take advantage of the crowded conditions to let their hands wander.  I think it might have been Jean Pearce [a local writer] who recounted a story when an outraged American woman, accosted on a crowded subway, grabbed the offending hand, raised it and said in Japanese, "Whose hand is this?
The porno-comic factor was such an omnipresent aspect of Japanese public life that it drove my wife from a slow boil into outright constant rage against adult males in general, including the one who happened to be living in the same house. As for the "whose hand is this?" factor, that was so common that there is a standard term for it in Japanese (chikan, or in hiragana ちかん) and signs outside crowded stations warning "beware of subway gropers." I don't think I ever saw a sign in Japan warning against pickpockets. More here.

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