Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about welfare reform. Though the column was prompted by the Fukushima lawsuit that seems to have spurred the government to address the lack of educational opportunities for young people in families that receive assistance, the general thrust of the proposed reforms is that the government wants to save money. Some will get more in benefits, but the majority will get less. It should be noted that welfare ranks are increasing by the day, mainly among the elderly, so reductions are to be expected, but in many cases it is families with children who will see their income decrease. In particular, single parents—which in Japan means single mothers—will have a tougher time. On a recent posting on Blogos, Chieki Akaishi, the head of Single Mothers Forum, talked about the proposed welfare reductions and their specific effect on single mothers. After the proposals were covered by the media, she started receiving phone calls from single mothers who are worried about having their benefits cut. One was a woman with a sixth grade daughter who used to work full time but had to quit due to health problems. She’s fortunate in that a “relative” has allowed her to live in a house the relative owns, but nobody in her family helps her out financially. She receives the child welfare allowance (jido fuyo teate) and some other benefits, but it only amounts to ¥52,000 a month. She applied for livelihood support (seikatsu hogo) but the city official she talked to told her she would have to get rid of her car first. Formally, cars are allowed for welfare recipients but they have to prove that they only use them for taking children to the doctor and looking for work. The woman lives in a rural area and needs the car for other things that the city office does not deem necessary, such as shopping or driving her daughter to school. There are almost no buses where she lives, but still the city office deems her automobile to be “not essential” to her well-being. Akaishi volunteered to accompany the woman to the city office and help her negotiate in order to keep her car and still get the livelihood support, since she obviously qualifies for it. For some reason, the woman rejected the offer.
The woman’s situation is not that unusual, and for single mothers matters may, in fact, get worse. According to Tokyo Shimbun, as part of the government’s welfare reform the mother-child benefits (boshi kasan, which is mainly for single parent households) will be cut by an average of 20 percent. Also, assistance for children’s public education up to junior high school—money to buy supplies, etc.—will be “adjusted,” meaning specifically that the program will be expanded for high school students but curtailed for pre-school children. Opposition lawmakers have protested that the overall effect of these changes will confound efforts to “reduce childhood poverty” in Japan. It’s as if the government were giving something with one hand and taking something away with the other.
The Beguiled
Since they don’t tour or make videos, XTC give interviews. Lots of them. Colin Moulding, the group’s soft-spoken bassist reckons he and his partner, guitarist Andy Partridge, have done something like a million since they began promoting their new album, Apple Venus, Vol. 1, last fall.
In today’s Japan Times there is a 
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As there was no one record that monopolized my attention this year—nothing I wanted to hear compulsively, like Heartthrob or The Truth About Love in past years—I found myself shuffling through a lot more new music than I usually do, and with a greater sense of curiosity. Consequently, I discovered acutely how far my tastes ranged from week-to-week, even day-to-day. It’s not unusual that an album I really liked at the beginning of the year faded in my estimation toward the end of it, but in 2017 I found this fluctuating attraction to certain songs and artists to be even more extreme, and while at first I put it down to a kind of middle-aged ADD, now I think of it more as a function of the type of emotional involvement with music I used to take for granted when I was young but no longer have the time to indulge. Of course, one of the reasons you glom onto certain artists or albums is that you instinctively steer toward the safe harbor of familiarity, and I’m not just talking about the stuff you liked when you were a college freshman. When making up lists like this, I always trust my impulses first, and I know that doing so can necessarily push away things I might genuinely love if I gave them enough time; though I also think that music, as opposed to movies, is a more impulsive endeavor, for both the creator and the receiver. And if there’s anything that unites the albums that made my top ten it’s their ability to please me in an ever-intensifying way now that I’ve learned them more or less by heart, and in many cases that didn’t happen until December. That said, the new album I probably listened to most intensely this year was Randy Newman’s, and I can’t rightly say why it didn’t make this list. Maybe I just prefer his older, more concise songs to his late-career theatrical approach, but I guess that’s a safe harbor, too, and when I was honest with myself, I had to admit I liked a lot of other stuff much more. 
Every year my movie-watching regime becomes more rarefied owing to tighter schedules and diminished monetary inducement. Nowadays, however, I can often make up for the films I miss at press screenings by seeing them later at my local multiplex, on streaming services, or on the satellite channel WOWOW (though by then they’ve usually been out of theaters for a year). In actuality, I can only think of one film I saw in any of those situations that might have ended up on this list: Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories. I’ve always liked Baumbach, and this one, which I saw on Netflix, was better than most. I think I might have liked it even more if I had seen it in a setting with no cats or other domestic distractions. These are definitely the pitfalls of home viewing for anyone who takes their movies seriously. So are overly comfortable seats. I can definitely attest that I fell asleep during substantial portions of Ghost in the Shell and Despicable Me 3 because I saw them at night-time big press screenings held in movie palaces with those damn throne-like chairs. I can just as confidently say that regardless of where I saw them, I did not doze off during any of the following fifteen films, all of which I wouldn’t mind seeing again, as a matter of fact. As always, these films were all released in Japanese theaters during the 2017 calendar year. Oh yeah, and I loved Twin Peaks the Return, but I would never qualify it as a movie. 
philipbrasor.com 