Media Mix, Apr. 7, 2013

Posted on April 7, 2013 by philipbrasor
AFP-Jiji

AFP-Jiji

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the current administration’s attitude toward the constitution as demonstrated by its handling of the vote disparity issue. This attitude might have met with more criticism from the media if the judiciary were stricter about its own enforcement of constitutional precepts. Maybe I’m making too much of something that doesn’t merit close scrutiny, since a constitution is simply a blueprint for governing and lawmaking. The American constitution included the Bill of Rights, though it should be pointed out that it was an amendment. Those who want to rewrite Japan’s constitution often make the case that the Americans wrote it, which is only partly true, but in any case they use it as an excuse to say they want to make the document more Japanese. Regardless of Article 9’s renunciation of war, these people feel that the present constitution stresses citizens’ rights at the cost of responsibilities, and they want to correct that imbalance, as they see it. The whole point of defining civil rights is to check the power of the state, since the people are sovereign in a democracy, and it is this aspect that the current administration doesn’t seem comfortable with. Last week during a Lower House budget committee hearing, the Democratic Party of Japan’s secretary-general, Goshi Hosono, questioned Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s interpretation of the constitution, in particular the “three principles”: people’s sovereignty, pacifism, and civil rights. Abe said he understood them well and did not plan to change them. But he added that he believed the document should have a fourth principle since in the current charter the citizens “impose limits” on the state’s authority. “We have to include in the constitution the idea of what kind of country we want to make,” he said. Hosono, obviously alarmed by this statement, countered that the purpose of the constitution should be to limit the state’s authority. The real question, then, is do the Japanese people think that the constitution is a satisfactory charter? At the moment the media is convinced that the citizenry supports the Abe administration and so it would be easy for him to change the constitution, but the country simply thinks that Abenomics is worth a try. There’s really no consensus about the constitution. In a recent Kyodo News survey a majority of respondents said that the government should keep the law that stipulates approval of at least two-thirds of the legislature is necessary to change the constitution, which would seem to indicate they aren’t anxious to change it. My feeling, however, is not so much that the people like the constitution, but rather that they don’t think it’s broken enough to warrant fixing.

edit: In the original post there was a typo that said 75 percent of the legislature had to approve a change to the constitution.

Posted in Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Media Mix, Mar. 31, 2013

Posted on March 31, 2013 by philipbrasor
Tadami Line

Tadami Line

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which along with another article we posted on our JT blog completes a double this week on public transportation. Though the two pieces address different news stories, both bring up the issue of what sort of obligation private companies have toward the public. The reference to Cerberus Capital, the company that is trying to buy a controlling stake in Seibu, is central to this issue because Cerberus is American and represents a very powerful financial trend of the past forty years. Though the company seems to want to play down the specifics of its reconstruction aims for Seibu, it’s obvious that Seibu itself, not to mention other entities that might be affected by the company’s restructuring ideas, fear the outcome. Several media reported that Cerberus wants to shut down five of Seibu’s smaller railway lines because they are losing money, and this is easy for Japanese people to believe. Just look at the state of public transportation in the U.S. Outside of a few major cities, it has never been less popular, and Amtrak is considered a joke, mainly because it still has to be propped up by the federal government. I remember reading an article in one of the online magazines late last year that described conservative American politicians’ deep-seated hatred for public transportation.

Trains in Japan were originally a mix of public and private lines, but when the government privatized JNR in the late 80s, the public dimension vanished, at least on paper. JNR left billions in debt that the central government (meaning you and me) is still paying off while the various JR entities are now turning a profit. The question of what sort of responsibility private railway companies have toward their patrons becomes more complicated when you realize those companies would have never existed in the first place without public subsidies, especially in those cases, like the Tadami Line, where local residents have no other means of transportation unless they can drive. The background of the railway is instructive. The tracks that eventually became the Tadami Line were built to transport construction supplies to the sites of several hydroelectric dams. When the last of these, the Takogura Dam, was completed, JNR bought the tracks and turned it into the Tadami Line. According to Tokyo Shimbun, the line has always been in the red ever since it became a people moving enterprise, but it was a public entity designed to serve the local people. After JR East took it over, it started looking for an excuse to close it down, and the floods that knocked out bridges in 2011 provided that excuse. JR East just doesn’t want to spend money to repair those bridges. This is the prerogative of a private company, whose mission is supposedly to bring profits to its shareholders. The central government still believes that any public transportation entity, even a privately owned one, must be regulated since its services are vital to the well-being of patrons who depend on it for their livelihoods. In America, that idea now seems old-fashioned, maybe even radical to certain diehard capitalists. In Japan it’s still debated, and it should be. Japanese private railways have done an excellent job of serving the public, particularly in and around the major cities, but one has to wonder how well they would have performed without that public element.

Posted in Media | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

April 2013 albums

Posted on March 28, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the April issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Monday.

atomsforpeacejohnfoxxAmok
-Atoms For Peace (Hostess)
Evidence
-John Foxx and The Maths (MSI)
However one interprets the work of Thom Yorke, as either a member of Radiohead or a solitary creative unit, his choice of electronic music over the more conventional electro-acoustical forms deserves more scrutiny since he’s probably done more to promote what is still disparagingly called “electronica” to the masses than any Warp artist or major label hip-hop producer. Though Yorke is ostensibly fronting a band on this project, the listener will likely not register individual performances since one of the hallmarks of electronica is its ironically organic gestalt. No matter how many “players” are participating it sounds programmatic by design; which isn’t to say it sounds artificial, only that it’s more difficult to distinguish the personal affectations that usually constitute collective pursuits. Yorke writes and sings everything here, and if the compositions are more free-form than his Radiohead work, they also lack the intramural tensions that makes Radiohead’s music so compelling, even if AFP’s propulsive rhythms qualify it as more of a dance outfit. As bassist, Flea sports the most recognizable musical mannerisms and provides more melodic distraction than Yorke might be comfortable with, but he isn’t half as funky as he gets with the Chili Peppers, even when exercising his Afrobeat druthers on “Before Your Very Eyes.” The percussion is even less notable for its power than for its textures, suggesting that Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco knew they weren’t hired primarily to keep the beat. What we’re left with is Yorke’s vocals, which despite the uniform wistfulness never fail to engage. It’s not just the flesh-and-blood contrast with the surrounding machine, it’s the effort to break free of the machine, which is the greatest irony of all for an artist who named his solo project after a phrase that attempted to soften the image of the most destructive technology ever invented. Or maybe it isn’t. John Foxx, formerly of Ultravox, is a pioneer of electronic pop, and his new outfit the Maths is more forthrightly analog-sounding than Atoms For Peace, which doesn’t make it any less mechanical, but that was always the point of synth-pop anyway, right? The pioneer of this sort of ghost-in-the-machine style was Peter Gabriel’s Genesis, and if Foxx’s similarly processed diction sounds pretentious it’s also accomplished. The vocals are certainly more impressive than Yorke’s if only because so much care has gone into the multi-tracking. Sometimes it can get ridiculous—the Boris Karloff inflections on the Matthew Dear-assisted “Talk,” for instance—but Foxx starts from a more familar place, the dark recesses of the psyche that so much electronica endeavors to plumb. His methodology is more melodramatic than Yorke’s, indicating a classical approach to art rock. That’s the weird thing about old electronic pop: despite the label it made no claims to pleasure. It was totally caught up in meaning. Blame it on David Bowie if you want to, but when such music succeeds in its aims, it can be thrilling. Continue reading →

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

April 2013 movies

Posted on March 26, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the April issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Monday.

annakareninaAnna Karenina
Arguably the greatest novel ever written and one of the few whose scope translates easily to the screen, Tolstoy’s love story is treated as a candy-colored melodrama by director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, a movie that is as much about its own capacity to dazzle as it is about the source material. Keira Knightley plays the title character as if she were an idol of St. Petersburg’s smart set. Smartly downplaying the more philosophical Levin storyline, this Karenina comes close to Harlequin territory with its breathy love scenes between Anna and the showy, incautious Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). An indication of the filmmakers’ desire to make this a story that appeals to unsuspecting youth is the counter-typecasting of Jude Law as the cuckolded Karenin and his suitably fuddy-duddy reaction to his wife’s infidelity, which starts the ball rolling toward her famous fate. Though the contrast between the amoral, instinctive Anna-Vronsky affair and the chaste, spiritual Levin-Kitty courtship remains the story’s nexus of contemplation, in this version love is simply a train that runs you over. (photo: Focus Features) Continue reading →

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Media Mix, Mar. 24, 2013

Posted on March 24, 2013 by philipbrasor

imagesHere’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about coverage of a new prenatal screening test and the attendant discussion of abortion in Japan. The general opinion, both here and abroad, is that abortion is legal in Japan, but while it is widespread (more than 210,000 performed in 2010) it is not, strictly speaking, legal. It can only be performed under two conditions: if delivery of the child endangers the mother’s life, or if the mother cannot afford to raise the child. As pointed out in the column, the latter condition is the one used for the vast majority of pregnancy terminations in Japan, even if the women who undergo them don’t know it. There has been some controversy over the years, albeit of a very hushed nature, as to whether or not this financial condition has been supported by gynecologists who make their living from abortions, but since no one really wants to talk about it in the open it’s difficult to say. The greater prevalence of prenatal testing to discover birth defects and other disorders in fetuses, however, has forced the medical community to talk about abortion more openly since it is assumed that pregnant women may opt for abortion if they think their baby could have problems. The Aera article cited in the column explains that the opinion among doctors is split, with some saying that the “abortion crime law” should be amended to include mention of fetal health. However, one physician believes the law should more readily “adhere to international ethical standards with regard to the right to life,” which I take to mean that the fetus is considered a human being with a full set of civil rights. A different doctor believes that making a law protecting the fetus will simply “open up a Pandora’s Box,” because of the “gray zone” of determining what constitutes a life and what doesn’t, especially when talking about fetuses with very serious birth defects. In any event, the abortion law has been hidden for too long, and has been used by the government as more of an economic tool than a medical or even a moral one, as explained in this report. As often happens in such legal arguments that involve government policy, the people most directly involved, in this case women, haven’t been sufficiently consulted.

Posted in Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Media Mix, Mar. 17, 2013

Posted on March 17, 2013 by philipbrasor

UnknownHere’s this week’s Media Mix about the Shinsai Big Data project, which endeavors to make sense of data recorded on March 11, 2011 in the areas of northeastern Japan that were hit the hardest by the tsunami caused by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Rereading the column in the paper this morning I realized it may come across as a sort of magic bullet—a means of managing disasters as they happen—but in truth the only aim of the project now is to evaluate that data. Any recommendations that follow have more to do with changing people’s perceptions of how to act in an emergency, rather than how to utilize GPS and mobile phone data, as well as social networks, in the event of a disaster. In other words, the value of the knowledge gained by the project is still in the realm of preparedness. For sure, social networks are going to be a very valuable tool in disaster management from now on, but such considerations can be addressed without having to study how they were used during 311, though such study is helpful. What the project really tells us is that preparedness measures have been insufficient so far. The implication that people drove toward the most dangerous areas and were then killed in their cars when the tsunami hit indicates that not enough has been done to educate people who live in at-risk zones. Also, better evacuation plans should be drawn up, stressing distance from the shore rather than just height above sea level. It’s understandable that under such tense circumstances people will first think of the safety of their loved ones, but the data implies that a good number of people died trying to do that. Given the reality of human nature perhaps it’s useless to expect people will leave their loved ones behind if they think they have even the slightest chance of saving them, but they have to be made aware of the fact that an automobile in such a situation may end up being a tomb rather than a tool. What the NHK program suggested to me was that anyone in danger of being a victim of a quake or tsunami—and that includes almost everyone in Japan—must be told of which areas are more dangerous than others. More significantly, schools and nursing homes and other facilities catering to individuals with less mobility should not be built in isolated places that cannot be readily reached by rescue personnel. These are exigencies that don’t require mathematical analysis, just common sense.

Posted in Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

March 2013 albums

Posted on March 1, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the March issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last Monday.

asaprockyT.I.13LONG.LIVE.A$AP
-A$AP Rocky (RCA/Sony)
Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head
-T.I. (Atlantic/Warner)
A$AP Rocky’s fledgling career is a rubber-band throwback to the days when big labels made a difference. After securing a $3 million contract based on nothing but a mixtape he delayed release of a proper debut album not once, not twice, but three times. Media as well-informed as Pitchfork speculated that he would be dropped by Sony, but here’s the album at last and all is forgiven. He may have Kendrick Lamar to thank for that. Timing is everything and it’s difficult to imagine that six months ago this sort of personal, idiosyncratic rap would have attracted the same attention it now does in the wake of the left-field success of good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Granted, input from the likes of Skrillex, Florence Welch, and Lamar himself can’t help but raise eyebrows, but unlike the usual guest gambits these are positioned for their novelty effect. Nothing interferes with Rocky’s solipsistic naturalism. Though he focuses on the usual lifestyle perks—”PMW,” which stands for “pussy, money, weed,” is a statement of purpose—he thinks deeply about matters that most rappers toss off, which begs the question we’ve been asking since Biggie made huge gold chains a statement: Is materialism worth rapping about? Though Ma$e appropriated the symbol of mammon first (sorry Ke$ha), Rocky actually ponders its implications. That $3 million makes more than one appearance on these tracks, not to mention what it’s already bought. When he talks about his roach-infested childhood on “Suddenly,” it makes an impression, especially as he rattles off, in the course of only two lines, a litany of death and exile and betrayal. Maybe Jay-Z and Nas told the same tales with more force and greater humor, but that was almost two decades ago and in the meantime money has become the be-all-end-all of major league rap. Even 50 Cent won’t cop to anything except the challenge. Besides, Rocky’s beats, regardless of where they come from, complement his street smarts with the sort of pop universalism that justifies the advance and gives it meaning. Long live free enterprise, an ethos T.I. could theoretically take issue with, considering how much jail time it’s bought him. At one time the standard bearer for the moneybags hip-hop movement, the Atlanta rapper has struggled to reclaim the banner since his incarceration for weapons possession. One problem is his attempt to exploit his criminal past by recreating some of the incidents that got him arrested. Is the use of Marvin Gaye’s original theme song for a blaxploitation flick and that huge gun on the movie-poster cover part of a big joke? It wouldn’t matter as much if the music were consistently compelling, but the production jumps from arena rock to squiggly minimalism with little concern for T.I.’s ability to adjust. As a result the many guests, which include Rocky, overshadow him. It’s good to know he has lots of new capitalist endeavors unrelated to rapping. Continue reading →

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

March 2013 movies

Posted on February 26, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the March issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Monday.

amourAmour
Michael Haneke’s unsentimental study of the decay of flesh and soul couldn’t be opening at a more appropriate time. In the wake of Taro Aso’s clumsy comment about how old people should “hurry up and die” the subject of expiring with some measure of grace and comfort is suddenly topical. The elderly couple in Haneke’s film, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), are neither poor nor isolated from society. They live in an airy, spacious Paris apartment and have a daughter, Eva (Issabelle Huppert), who, while not as attentive as she should be, is nevertheless there when she’s needed. The couple leads an active intellectual life, taking in concerts and keeping up on literature. Haneke hasn’t always been polite in his depiction of this species of European (Cache) but his purpose in showing Georges and Anne at a piano recital and then, more importantly, taking public transportation is to drive home the point that death and illness strikes everyone—poor and rich, conservative and liberal—pretty much the same way. But this is a personal story, as the title implies, and there are important choices to me made when a loved one starts showing signs of fading. Anne suddenly freezes during breakfast, and then returns as if nothing happened, but, of course, something did. Haneke elides the more graphic elements, and in the next scene Anne has already undergone an operation to remove “an obstruction from her carotid artery” that should have gone well but didn’t. We learn this not from the physician involved but from an almost too casual conversation between Georges and Eva, and only after Eva has dominated the conversation with her own trivial worries. The tension between father and daughter, however, is palpable, because neither wants to face the fact that this is the beginning of the end, and it’s this refusal to confront the inevitable that grounds the drama. Perhaps because she knows what she’s in for, Anne wants to talk about it, but Georges resists, and almost perversely decides that he can take care of Anne, bedridden but still in possession of her faculties, by himself. At first, her deterioration is chronicled in subtle ways—a difficulty in opening a book, an avoidance of mirrors—but soon enough, the descent into incontinence and incomprehensibility accelerates. Georges has to hire a nurse, and then fires her in a stupid fit of bourgeois entitlement. As Anne’s condition worsens, the world seems to retreat, the apartment gets darker, and Georges is isolated in his loneliness, chasing pigeons out a window and seeing ghosts. If Haneke is a master of anything it is the abrupt gesture, and when Georges finally decides to act, his desperation is terrifying, because we can see what’s in store for us, too. In French. (photo: Les Films du Losange-X Filme Creative Pool-Wega Film-France 3 Cinema-Ard Degeto-Bayerischer Rundfunk-Westdeutscher Rundfunk) Continue reading →

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Media Mix, Feb. 24, 2013

Posted on February 24, 2013 by philipbrasor
Straight from the horse's...: basashi

Straight from the horse’s…: basashi

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about vegetarianism as an expression of conscience. The article is not meant to advocate meat-free diets. My point is that the moral imperative which informs vegetarianism is worth discussing and it is not discussed in Japan because too many parties have something at stake. I would guess that in the developed world vegetarians are still in the minority, but I also guess their number is rising all the time. You hear of no such movement in Japan, mainly because the media indirectly brand vegetarians as being far outside the mainstream. Though less contentious, the anti-fur movement is also a touchy subject, but there are a few celebrities who have come out as being against the killing of animals simply to satisfy fashion prerogatives: Becky, who I mentioned in the column, Aya Sugimoto, Miyoko Atsuda are three who have publicized their objection to fur. The pop singer Nakano Sun Plaza is also anti-fur, and, in fact, is a vegetarian, though he never discusses it when he’s on TV. Greenpeace’s agenda is generally environmental in nature, but its anti-whaling activities are only mentioned by the press when they involve alleged illegalities, such as the theft of whale meat that prompted a criminal investigation. Though the Greenpeace activists cited in the investigation were Japanese, they were portrayed as advancing a foreign agenda that ran counter to Japanese interests. Continue reading →

Posted in Media | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Donald Richie

Posted on February 22, 2013 by philipbrasor

250px-Donald_RichieMy first encounter with Donald Richie, who died earlier this week at the age of 88, was a pleasant surprise, since it was he who approached me. In late 1995, about a year after I started my Media Mix column in the Japan Times, I received a letter from him that had been forwarded by the JT. He wrote that he always looked forward to reading me “in the paper” and “much enjoy[ed] the column.” He was prompted to get in touch by a recent piece I had written about the relationship between “the royals,” as he called them, and the media. “And it occurred to me that you might like to read about my recent encounter with their imperial highnesses and their keepers. This is not for publication, naturally, merely for your amusement.” Enclosed was a four-page, single-spaced, word-processed manuscript, seemingly taken from a longer work (pagination), about a visit to the newly rebuilt imperial palace. At first I was confused because the date in the heading was “5 October 1955,” and after reading through the MS and noting a number of typos and run-on sentences I concluded the thing hadn’t been copy-edited. Though I hadn’t read much of Donald’s work at that point aside from his weekly book reviews in the JT and his piecemeal memoirs in Tokyo Journal, I knew his reputation and was delighted to have received from him what seemed like an unpublished article, flattering myself that maybe I was the first one to see it. The piece recounted Donald’s first ever visit to the palace. Besides providing a rare, detailed glimpse of what actually exists within that highly fortified compound in the middle of Chiyoda Ward (“…then down what looked much like a country road on either side of which were further walls and behind them virgin forest which is the heart of this land. I had heard rabbits and foxes still lived here, in the center of Tokyo, but I didn’t see any…”), he at last enlightened me on just what it is the emperor and empress say to their guests as they stroll down a line of well-wishers. Though I wouldn’t characterize the tone as irreverent, it wasn’t bemused either. He was genuinely fascinated by the ritual aspects but under no illusion that these peoople had any sort of traction on reality. “They glided from the room,” he wrote. “Yes, glided, for their gait was also practiced. It was this that made me suddenly become conscious of a word which had been waiting there during the entire audience and now appeared: ghosts.” He cared enough about them as people to wonder how they lived their lives but not enough to feel sorry for them. I was happy to read at the end of the piece that while all the other guests actually got down on the floor to bow to their hosts, he did not. “I have nothing against full obeisance and will occasionally employ it when needed, but I thought that this promiscuous kowtowing had nothing to do with me and so I politely smiled and merely inclined from the waist whenever looked at.” Continue reading →

Posted in Me | 3 Comments