Sorry for the big gap - been busy. Just a short note on the topic of self-censorship, because I said I would...

All of the following is going to be unsubstantiated, and based on dim recollections of articles I've read, and conversations I've had over the last few months. I'm sorry, I don't have the documentation in front of me - good disclaimer for a piece about irresponsible journalism, huh?

Here's a brief history - there are over 130 million people here, and the unemployment rate is something like 1.2%. Everyone works, even the homeless. It takes 4 guards to help me sign in at a company front desk, and there are guys guarding empty parking lots at 2am, but that's an entirely different subject. All these people need to be kept busy, and manufacturing is way down since about 1992, when the economy came very close to collapse. So, they build things. Specifically, they build dams and highways.

The Construction Ministry is the most powerful and corrupt bureau in the government, and they are the big subject these days. If you want a very detailed breakdown of how this particular system gets away with its nonsense, I suggest you pick up a copy of Alex Kerr's 'Dogs and Demons' - a painstaking accounting of the high-level chicanery happening in the backrooms across the country.

Anyway.

About 3 months ago, the Minister of Construction, Muneo Suzuki, was caught red-handed, fixing construction contracts for some useless make-work civic monster of a project. Since then, the papers have been full of the usual "I did not" / "You did so" blather attached to political scandal, and plenty of underlings are coming out of the woodwork to help sink their former boss, and deflect blame away from themselves. He's done for, and everyone knows it.

This is what all papers, Japanese and English editions, are reporting across the board - common knowledge, and casual banter fodder for the dinner table. This is where the split between Western and Japanese journalistic styles occurs. In the U.S. (especially) or in Canada, we know that a scandal like this one will launch many careers on talk shows, in magazines and newspapers, and the media will go crazy, blowing out of proportion almost anything else that even remotely resembles the main story. In the months following Sept. 11, alarmists turned fistfights into global terrorism, and CNN copywriters ran out of bizarre names for special breaking reports. Not so here. Things must remain pleasant.

In the English edition of the Daily Yomiuri, there are at least 5 new stories every day, either detailing further developments in the Suzuki case, or exposing remarkable frauds in other companies and government ministries. I take this as the usual media hounding of a common theme, and carry on reading the paper and shaking my head with (I assume) everyone else on the train. As it turns out, these follow-up stories simply don't appear in the Japanese edition. I tried to develop debates in class, using the follow-up stories as support for the central theme of government corruption, but students had no idea what I was talking about. They know all about the Suzuki case, and can discuss it easily, but they've never heard of the handful of other stories. This from people who claim that their primary use of the Internet is invariably 'to read news'. I don't blame them for turning to digital media for news - they're not getting it from the papers.

The more surprising thing had to do with something more interesting than politics, and I thought it would have been the headline on every front page. During the ramp-up to the World Cup in Korea and Japan, public figures in both countries decided to bury the hatchet, and say some nice things about each other for a change. (Korea and Japan get along like albinos and Aruba). Among the trite and hackneyed doublesaynothingspeak coming from elected officials, Akihito decided to chime in. The Emperor isn't a very public figure, so I assumed that when he says something, people tend to listen. His quote actually made me say "What?!?", out loud on the train platform. Again, I don't have the quote in front of me, but the substance was that the emperor of Japan, a country that has hated Korea for a couple of thousand years, said that it is likely that the Japanese people are probably descended from the Koreans. Just to put it into perspective, that's like Rush Limbaugh saying he has a feeling his grandfather was a gay liberal macramé instructor.