Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the main reason behind the Japanese government’s improvisational response to the COVID-19 crisis. We’ve been covering this general topic for years now. The gist of our interest is that Japan has a national health insurance program that provides excellent, affordable care to every resident, but the government’s obsession with market dynamics combined with the medical industry’s profit-making impulses, can undermine the fundamental purpose of health care, which is to improve lives. In this column we explain how ongoing cost-cutting measures first implemented in the 1980s created a situation in which Japan was unprepared for the pandemic. For anyone who is interested, here are links to some other articles we have written on the same general theme.
Ballooning medical costs = higher premiums
Psychiatric care as a growth business
Also, near the end of this week’s column we mention JCP lawmaker Tomoko Tamura, who we should point out has been prosecuting the government’s approach to medical care for some time. She may know more about Japan’s health care system than any current lawmaker, and the media should be paying closer attention to her work. Mostly they treat her as an opposition force who is effective at making the ruling party squirm, which is fine. We need more people who can do that. But what she’s really after, which is to improve the health care system rather than make it merely cost effective, is really what the press should be covering.
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There’s something wonderfully encouraging about Emir Kusturica’s filmic fascination with Latin America. The Serbian director’s reputation as a polymath who makes a decent if not outstanding living as a filmmaker, writer, and musician is enhanced enormously by his tendency to work well outside his wheelhouse on subjects that simply fascinate him. His documentary on the soccer god Maradona was so personal that he titled it Maradona by Kusturica, and while that personal angle sometimes made the narrative impenetrable, it held up as a kind of primer for how to watch South American football, which is like no other pastime in the world. The cigar-chomping director brings this same element of indescribable love for his subject to his portrait of Jose “Pepe” Mujica, the former president of Uruguay who is now comfortably retired on a farm he runs with his forever partner Lucia Topolansky. Now in his 80s, Mujica has lost none of his left-wing fervor (since Topolansky was, at least at the time of the shooting, Uruguay’s vice president, he still has skin in the game) nor his biting, clear-headed intelligence, and though most of the movie involves Kusturica in conversation with him, it’s basically a monologue, because once Pepe starts a story you don’t want him to stop.
Though I was initially interested in reading Thomas Piketty’s big bestseller about income inequality as a permanently expanding fixture of economic life, I eventually concluded that the book would probably teach me little. Anyone with a decent grounding in social history who follows the news with any kind of regularity already understands most of Piketty’s most salient points: the growth of the middle class, as well as its doom, was predicted by Marx, stockholders eventually eclipsed stakeholders as the drivers of capitalism, late 20th century deregulation meant the end of upward mobility regardless of what the ruling classes told you, the financial industry would dominate all others, and China’s rise was just another victory for the oligarchy. The movie version of Piketty’s tome lays all of these elements out in a convenient timeline spiced up with eye-catching graphics and animation, peppered with tasty sound bites by some of the most charismatic economists presently pontificating, and presented at a crisp pace that will keep you riveted without breaking your brain.
Almost 50 years after he committed ritual suicide at the self-defense agency headquarters in Tokyo at the age of 45, Yukio Mishima wedges his way back into Japan’s consciousness in the form of a documentary based on “lost footage” of a public debate he had with a left-wing student organization at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo in May 1969. In terms of quality and content, the footage is certainly impressive and worthy of scholarly and even general scrutiny, though there’s a certain dated predictability to the exchanges depicted and, later, analyzed. Director Keisuke Toyoshima lines up as many surviving participants in the debate, as well as people with academic skin in the game, in order to show us how momentous this event was, but in the end it feels more like a historical curiosity than a revelatory document.
philipbrasor.com 