41

Me, in hat
By Ritsuko.

Another birthday come and gone. As we do every year, we use our birthdays to try a restaurant we wouldn't normally visit. For Ritsuko's birthday we went to a very nice Portugese place in Umeda, and my birthday last year found us having pig's feet in a German restaurant in Kobe.

We continued the south-European theme this weekend with a visit to El Poniente Carbón near Yodoyabashi. It's part of a group of Spanish restaurants here in Osaka. Calling it a chain doesn't feel right, as each restaurant is different in style from the others, and indeed, two of them - a tapas bar and restaurant called Faro, and the grill Carbón - lie right across the street from each other.

Anyway, we'd eaten at Faro a few times and liked it, so we decided to try the somewhat more upscale Carbón for my birthday. It did not disappoint. For starters we had chorizo and grilled onion with anchovy. The chorizo was good, though a bit simple - just a plate of thinly sliced sausage - whereas the grilled onion was a hit. Onion halves burnt black on the ouside, with a large dollop of anchovy paste on top. Grilled asparagus was another hit, tender and juicy, with a bit of butter and lemon.

Our shared main courses were spicy grilled chicken and lamb chops. Ritsuko really prefers fowl overall but to me the lamb chops were the highlight of the whole meal. Juicy and fatty and nearly perfectly done, they were served atop a bed of potato gratin that was soaking up the flavours from the meat above. A glass of Rioja wine for the preliminaries and a glass of beer for the meat fit very well with the food. A coffee and brandy rounded it all of nicely.


In other news, daytime peak temperature has hit 30° here now, marking the official start of the Season of Misery for me. And if that's bad, spare a thought for poor Ashorochō up in Hokkaido that had 37° this weekend. Look for me under the nearest airconditioner up until October.

Swedish Election 2010

As I've said, there's a general election coming up in Sweden in September. I've been trying to write about this for a long time but I find it surprisingly difficult. The basic problem is that Swedish politics is pretty dull and uneventful, unlike the roller-coaster-on-LSD that is the Japanese political process. "Dull" may be good for the country, but it doesn't make for good blog posts.

The governing term in Sweden is fixed - four years, with election held on the third Sunday of September of the fourth year. Even if a government would fall and an extra election held, it would not alter the schedule; the new government would only sit until the next regular election. This pretty much removes any incentive for people to play politics with the election schedule or topple the government before its time, and is, I believe, one of three reasons governments are fairly stable.

Another reason for the stability is that we only have one chamber, so there's no Upper house to second-guess or derail governmental decisions, and no risk of split majorities. Lastly, no-confidence motions against the government need to be majority decisions. It's not enough that the government doesn't get a majority approval; a majority has to actively vote against the government. And of course, if you're a presumptive coalition partner, an active opposing vote isn't going to be looked at kindly by the other members of the coalition.


Historically, Swedish politics have been dominated by the Social Democrats. They were continuously in power for over forty years after the second world war and have only occasionally been out of power since. They're like the Japanese LDP in a way, as they are more or less the architects of the current society and political systems. Unlike the LDP, however, they have not turned sclerotic or collapsed, and they can probably thank the occasional loss of power for that. There's nothing like a few years in opposition to rethink your ideology and sharpen your arguments.

The current government is a center-right coalition. They have done a decent job, overall, and has managed to keep together for the entire term; having the coalition partners still speaking to each other after four years is a novel change from previous conservative attempts at government. They seem to really have developed into a genuine coalition more than a temporary governing union.

The current coalition has proved stable, popular and surprisingly capable of governance. This has forced the center-left Social Democrats - who have always formed governments alone even when they depended on other parties' support - to create a formal coalition of their own in response. They tend to poll around the 30-35% level, which ties them as the largest party but is still a far cry from the 45% or more they could count on a generation ago.


In the opposition center-left coalition, the Social Democrats are joined by the Green party, the third largest party overall in the opinion polls with around 10%. While they've historically been leaning left, the Greens aren't strictly left on the traditional scale. The currently dominant faction has a pragmatic outlook, values individual liberty and small business and would have little trouble cooperating with the centrist parties of the ruling coalition. It's fair to say the coalition needs them more than they need the coalition.

The third partner is the (un)reformed Communists, who get only about 5% in the polls - uncomfortably close to the cutoff point of 4 percent - and is completely dependent on the good-will of the Social Democrats to get a seat in power. They'd love to knock off some support from the Greens, partners or not, and they're not the most reliable people to have around. It doesn't help that Mona Sahlin, the Social Democrat leader and Prime minister candidate, didn't want them in the coalition, but was overruled by her own party.


The governing center-right coalition is dominated by the Moderates, which is formerly tax-cut pro-business right-wing, now pragmatically centrist, and polling at around 30% or so. They were opposed to the building of the modern welfare state early last century, and they spent a few generations trying to dismantle it in favour of a low-tax individualistic society in the mould of USA and Thatcherite Britain. Eventually - it only took half a century - they came to realize that most people, including a fair number of their own voters, actually like the high-tax, high-service welfare state, and they want to keep it. So the party has shifted from wanting to dismantle the welfare state to lower its cost and increase the efficiency, something that seems to resonate with a fairly large part of the voting public.

The Center party is formerly rural, with an environmental and small-business agenda not unlike the Greens. They're joined by the People's Party, which used to be classically liberal, but has swung towards the hard law-and-order right. Both tend to poll in the 5-8% range, uncomfortably close to the cutoff point, and it must be especially galling for the People's party that used to be the third largest party at 10% or more before their ideological lurch toward the right.

The final coalition partner is the Christian Democrats. They are the odd man out in the parliament with their opposition to abortion and gay marriage (they were the only party in parliament to vote against it) and a fundamentalist christian base. They hover right on the edge of the cutoff point of 4% and may not even make it into the parliament. Part of their problem is that while a fair number of voters like their pro-family and social conservative policies, they are put off by the religious content. So the less voters hear about their actual program the better they do in the polls. Every time voters get reminded of their background and their ideological similarity to conservative religious movements elsewhere their support drops.


There's a number of small parties vying for a seat in parliament. Most of them aren't really of any general interest, but two of them are worth mentioning here.

First, and distastefully, is the Sweden Democrats, polling at around 3-4%. They are a cleaned-up and polished political outgrowth of the xenophobic far right, with their members drawn from Neo-nazi and racist organizations. Their ideology, such as it is, is a thoroughly confused mix of social conservatism, xenophobia and a longing for an ethnically and religiously homogeneous 1950's Sweden that has never actually existed. They draw a fair number of their supporters from the same pool as the Christian Democrats, and they in turn have responded by sliding out toward the far right, trying to get those voters back. If these two parties would manage to keep each other out of parliament I'd be happy.

Second is the Pirate Party. It is largely a one-issue party, concerned with individual freedom, privacy and intellectual property rights, online and off. Of course, that one issue actually encompasses a number of very important questions such as the right to speech, regulation of the internet, the nature of property and so on. They managed quite an upset in the EU election last year, getting two members into the European parliament, but unless they pull an upset it doesn't look likely that they'll be able surmount the 4% cutoff point and get into parliament in September. Whether they do or not, their existence has given much higher visibility to these questions than before.


So, what would my ideal election result look like? Probably something like a governing coalition of the Moderates, the Center, the Greens and the Pirate Party; with the Christian Democrats, the Communists and the Sweden Democrats all failing to get seats in parliament. Not going to happen, I know, but I can dream.

Elections

So, we have some elections coming up. Now and again I feel the urge to write about them, but then I take a quick look at my work schedule for the year, re-enter panic mode and forget all about it.

But, in short: We have the Japanese upper-house election on July 11th, and the Swedish general election on September 19th (it's always on the third Sunday in September, four years after the last one).

For the Japanese election, it seems the exit of Hatoyama and Ozawa will indeed save the DPJ:s bacon. Moreover, Prime minister Kan has performed a neat little bit of political judo on the LDP. Basically, Japan's finances are a godawful mess. Serious budget cuts are necessary, but everyone knows that's not enough and taxes will need to be raised.

Specifically, the consumption tax - now a low 5% - will have to be raised at some point. Why the consumption tax? Because it's one of the few taxes that bring in enough money that raising it can make a meaningful difference. It's also one of the taxes that are "fair" and don't bring a lot of unforeseen side effects. A tax on wealth, say, would not bring in anywhere near as much money, and would have all kinds of undesirable side effects (pensioners losing their ancestral home or personal savings, that sort of thing) that would require special exemptions and odd solutions. The major drawback with the consumption tax is that it is regressive, in that poorer people (who have to spend more of their income on consumption) pay a larger part, but there are several possible ways to mitigate that.

Anyway, everybody knows about the consumption tax, and politicians have mumbled for years about the need to raise it at some unspecified point in the future. The LDP, recognizing that they need some hook, something to make a splash in the election, wrote in an increase to 10% in their election manifest just recently. The idea was probably to argue that they have specific proposals, specific solutions while the DPJ refuses to face up to hard realities or something to that effect.

But Kan basically took that number and ran with it; he stated that 10% is a reasonable figure, let's raise the tax soon as a way to improve public finances and shore up the pension system. Having the opposing team happily agree to your proposal was not what the LDP had in mind. They more or less stated that it was unfair of the DPJ to agree with them, and that there was no way they would support such an absurd proposal as the one they had in their own election manifest.

As Shisaku reports today, now the opinion polls are in, and the results are fairly encouraging. Cabinet support is dropping slightly - something likely to happen with or without the tax discussion as the novelty of Kan wears off. The LDP doesn't really move anywhere. Kan has in other words managed to grab a long-running problem - how to decide on a specific tax increase and break the news to an unhappy electorate - without taking a real hit in the polls, and without giving the opposition a boost. And he managed to do so a few weeks before the election, so a decent election result will be seen as a mandate to go ahead.

It's worth noting is that there's a second part to the tax proposal, a reduction in the corporate tax rate. I'm not knowledgeable enough to have any firm opinion on the matter, but I do note that the current quoted rate of about 40% sounds rather high; a quick look at worldwide rates puts Japans rate at about the highest in the world. Average rates seem to cluster around 25% or so. Perhaps a good idea, in other words, though I can't really say.

Doctor Ozzy

You may have heard that Ozzy Osbourne is getting his genome sequenced; basically, they want to know how he's managed to stay alive despite decades of heavy drug abuse and accidents. Good idea. You learn more from looking at extreme examples than normal ones.

But this is rich: he's starting a health advice column in the Sunday Times (no link; subscribers only). Ozzy Osbourne. Health advice. The man who's done enough drugs to support a small South-American nation, giving advice on healthy living? Of course, he probably knows as much about how to not live a healthy life as anyone still around to tell us about it¹.

Maybe it's not a bad idea. Perhaps anti-experience could be valuable. Elizabeth Taylor as marriage counsellor, anyone? And how about starting the "Abe-Aso-Hatoyama Good Governance Consulting Group". It'd give them something to do at least; we don't want gangs of former prime ministers drifting about town, getting into trouble.

#1 Except perhaps for Keith Richards. But they're like the Rembrandt and the Picasso of dissolution; how could you possibly rank genius?

Smog

Just a short post: Ikoma city (where I work) has issued warnings about "photochemical smog" for the second time in a week. We should avoid going outdoors and wash our eyes or throat if they start becoming irritated. It feels just a little surreal as we're sitting in a rural backwater, surrounded by fields and forested hills. But of course, this entire part of Kansai is pretty densely populated so the air is probably just as polluted here as in the urban areas the next valley over.

I wonder why you never hear about this in Osaka. It's feels unlikely that central Osaka avoids this problem while small Ikoma does not - of course, Osaka lies along the coast, not in a mountain range, so perhaps not enough pollutants accumulate to cause smog. Or there could be plenty of warnings, but I just manage to miss them; I never listen to radio or watch TV in the daytime after all.

Tsuyu

Tsuyu, the rainy season, is declared for the Kansai area. It's about one week late - spring and summer has all been later than usual this year. We can look forward to a month of damp, rainy weather. Everything has an upside of course; photography is often more interesting in bad weather than in bright sunshine.

We've set the first batch of umeboshi and have another two to make over the next few days. We also set a jar of dark rum-based umeshu; we'll see how that goes. Maybe we'll try whisky umeshu next year.

And finally congratulations to my little brother and his girlfriend, as they are pregnant (well, just the girlfriend obviously) and expect to become parents in January. I really have to start working seriously on my "disreputable old uncle" persona.

Brandy Umeshu

Last June, we tried making brandy-based umeshu. This weekend, almost exactly one year later, we tried it for the first time.

Delicious. Smooth and thick with a tart undertone. As you take a sip, you get a small, happy explosion of flavour hitting your nose and mouth. Then you get a raspy dark finish running down your throat. It's best taken neat. I did try to cut it with soda - it works well with normal umeshu - but that kills the thick, heady flavour. Waste of an excellent drink. I've yet to try it with ice and a splash of lemon.

So yesterday we started another jar of brandy umeshu. We'll probably make one jar of rum-based umeshu too, with more sugar than our previous attempt, and let it sit for a whole year this time. I keep thinking it would be interesting to try making umeshu on whisky base, but Ritsuko isn't convinced to say the least. Perhaps I can convince her to let me make a small bottle, just as an experiment.