Nakagawa

More politics, and no, not funny. Japanese finance minister Nakagawa was filmed giving a slurred speech at the G-7 meeting, after which he promptly fell asleep (can't find an online link to it anymore). He and his aides blame the combination of sleeping pills on the plane, some wine for dinner and cold medication. That may be true or it may not. He is suffering from alcoholism, something apparently an open secret up until now. He's had previous "cold medication"-related incidents, but never before on television during a international top-level meeting. He pledged to resign today as the result of the ensuing uproar.

Now, as much as you may dislike the man politically, he is not to blame for suffering a fairly serious stigmatized disease. His alcoholism may or may not make him unsuitable for his current position, but he is apparently unqualified for such a weighty post anyway, medical condition or not. This lack of ability is not something unique, but something he shares with several other members of the current cabinet, (still) prime minister Aso himself included. The blame for his appointment must be laid completely at the feet of Aso. He picked Nakagawa - a personal friend - for internal party political reasons, without regard for his ability to actually do the job and apparently with no regard for the medical consequences of such a high-pressure position on his friend. Callous, thoughtless or any combination thereof, take your pick.

The ministry of finance has of course not ceased working during the latest minister's stewardship, or that of his predecessors. People have undoubtedly worked around any issues or shortcomings of the minister. They've made sure policies are enacted and decisions are made whether the minister has been personally aware of them or not. The same certainly goes for any other minister or other elected official elevated to a position beyond their level of competence.

Now, here's the problem: the Japanese state bureaucracy is out of control. It has grown too big, too powerful, is frequently working completely at odds with the public it is supposedly serving and doing so with impunity. Elected officials may decide on policies and enshrine them into law, but ministries may simply decide not to implement them. The ongoing Pension Fiasco was caused by ministry workers that couldn't be bothered to do their job so they threw away pension records or neglected to update them.The practice of Amakudari is a major cause of the endemic corruption. To some extent the civil service is a state within the state and only tenuously subject to the same laws and regulations as the rest of society.

This is a major problem here. Politicians, Aso included, promise to "reform" the bureaucracy; cut it down in size and power, and bring it back under political control. The main tools for controlling the civil service are the ministers appointed by the prime minister and put in charge of their ministries. But appointments are made for political or personal reasons, to reward an ally or buy the favor of some political group, rather than competence and experience, and that effectively strengthens the bureaucracy to the detriment of the elected officials.

When a minister isn't really up to the task, as above, the ministry career officials will step in. But when they do - and even when it's for the best of intentions - they are effectively grabbing power that belongs in the elected political realm, and taking it for the use by the bureaucracy. The responsibility, of course, stays with the political appointee, further deteriorating the situation. Focusing on the political dimension over competence when populating your cabinet is directly contradicting the promise to reform the bureaucracy. And that is, of course, over and above all the other negatives of a cabinet with people unable to take command over their areas of responsibility. That responsibility falls on Aso of course, but also on the LDP leadership and voting party members more concerned with the right ideological bent and ideas of "who's turn" it is to play prime minister than with questions of actual ability.

Aso, We Know You Can Do It!

A note: I have been (very gently) berated by a friend for posting too much about Japanese politics. I understand of course; these are remote events, physically and mentally, for anyone reading this in Sweden. All I can promise is that I'll post less once the next election is over. Please bear with me until then. Anyway, here goes:

Japanese Prime Minister Aso Tarō is nothing if not persistent. He has a trail of verbal gaffes and bungling of policies that would be impressive in a prime minister serving for years, not months. With deteriorating support ratings and his policies (to the extent he has any) going nowhere, a lesser man would throw in the towel and call it quits.

But with such energy and drive entirely unfettered by reflection and self-restraint it should come as no surprise that he'll boldly grab this opportunity and go for the gold. We saw the first signs of greatness when he got support below the 20% level. Two weeks ago we saw the Aso cabinet hit 14% support and people started to wonder: are we seeing history in the making? Could he do it? Could he actually manage to break the 10% barrier before being forced out and tie or surpass Yoshirō Mori for least popular prime minister of all time? And not only a national record, mind you; those numbers would be strong contenders for a world record among democratically elected national leaders.

Mind you, he has to call an election by September, and might well be forced out once the budget is passed this spring, so time is short. He's not helped by those pesky hard-line party members that will support him no matter what; every party of any consequence have their cheerleeding squad that will need more than a mere policy reversal or political disaster to change their support. Fortunately for Aso, it seem he's found the right combination of hapless waffling and intraparty bickering to uproot even this obstacle to historical greatness: Mr. Harris reports that the Aso cabinet have made it below 10%, and in plenty of time to improve further on those numbers too. He was never close to an Olympic medal but this time it looks like the brass ring just might finally be his to grasp!

Darwin at 200

It's Charles Darwin's 200th birthday this year, on February 12th¹. He is one of the giants of science along with Newton, Gauss, Einstein, von Neumann and so forth. Darwin's greatest contribution really is in putting biology firmly on a naturalistic footing, obviating the need for theological or supernatural explanations for life or our own existence.

It's sometimes said that the reason evolution is controversial is because it's so easy to misunderstand. The basic ideas of evolution can be expressed in a few catchphrases, so people think they understand it. The consequences of those ideas are deep and far-reaching, though, and modern evolutionary biology has had a century and a half to build on Darwins initial work. Consider for a moment just how different modern physics or medicine is today compared to 1850 or so. That's not the reason some religious people refuse to accept evolution as settled fact, however.

Other controversies like heliocentrism, the age of Earth, germ theory of disease and so on are peripheral to most faiths, but evolution speaks about the fundamental causes of our own existence, and that challenges the very core of most religions. Literalist religious strains, especially, feel that the foundations of their faith are threatened. And with good reason; evolution and modern biology really is incompatible with it. You'll have to either accept a deep-seated contradiction between reality and faith, or accept a "god of the gaps" at the most, a hands-off deity that perhaps started the universe but lets things run their course largely on their own. Of course, if your hypothesized god is absent and inactive, why believe in it at all?

A teapot. Yes, it's on topic.

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#1 I know I'm a day late. I'm off by only 1 part in 72950 or 0.0014%, however; well within any reasonable margin of error wouldn't you think?

The Devotion of Suspect X - Chapter 3

First a mea culpa: it turns out that Misato is the stepdaughter of our recently bereaved Togashi, not his true daughter. Not sure why I missed that in chapter one, but I did. Anyway, onwards to

Chapter 3

..being a short chapter mostly intended to introduce our main characters. It's March 11th and we find ourselves not in the company of Yasuko and Ishigawa, but with two men sitting by a chess board in an ununsed classroom at the physics department of Teito University. One, winning the game and radiating contented smugness as a result, is none other than Prof. Yukawa, physicist, master sleuth and all-around hero in this series of books. The other, Kusanagi, is not winning, and radiating irritated bafflement as a result. When he is not losing at chess he is a detective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.

To nobody's surprise, Kusanagi gets called away as a body has been found at the bank of Edogawa river. The body (no prices for guessing who) has no clothes, a smashed-in head and burnt-away fingerprints. Nearby the victims' clothes are found, partially burned, along with an abandoned bicycle.

After some traditional police banter with their boss at the station, Kusanagi and his younger partner Kishitani are ordered to contact the bicycle owner (remember, bikes are actually registered here) to see what they can dig up. Not much, it turns out; on the 10th of March the owner had parked it near a station and found it gone when coming back. Other than that, nothing much seems to be gleaned from this whole episode.

We quickly jump forward as the police proceed to canvas the area and plaster the media with drawings and descriptions of the unknown victim, with no result. Only after they've searched flophouses and cheap inns for missing tenants do they finally find a place missing a tenant since the 11th. The name in the register is Shinzō Togashi. The hunt is on...

Cheap and Tawdry

The current government of Aso Tarō is not having a good year. With the economy in critical shape, they're being forced by their coalition partner New Komeito to do a very impopular 12000 yen cash giveaway to every resident in Japan. The money will worsen the already critically bad public finances further, and the whole giveaway scheme has also been handled in a remarkably hamfisted way, dragging the government approval ratings further down as a result. The government has support in the 20% range; the economy - and unemployment, and homelessness - is steadily worsening; and there's an election no more than seven months away.

No wonder, then, that LDP members are in full panic over the prospect of losing the next election. So a few of the dimmer stars in the LDP constellation have Come Up With A Plan: Give away more money to the public.

"But.. that's what they're already doing, and it's costing them votes, right?" Right. But they seem to have decided that the current cash giveaway is impopular for two reasons: it's too little, and it costs too much.

First, the thinking seems to go, 12000 yen per person is not enough to bribe comfort the electorate. 12k yen - $150, or SEK1000 - is not chicken feed (the chickens would choke on the tough paper bills) but it's not exactly going to change your life either. So they suggest not another 12k yen, but 600k yen - yes, sixhundred thousand yen, or $6700 or SEK55000 - enough to buy an election revive consumer spending just about anywhere.

The lawmakers suggest a giveaway of around 100 trillion yen, $1.1 trillion or SEK 9 trillion. That's some serious amount of money. Huge, in fact. "Absolutely freaking ginormous" comes to mind. That's about 15% of Japan's GDP. Just about the entire GDP of Sweden - for two years. Real money is what we're talking about here. A financially prudent observer may well pause for a moment and wonder just how they suggest paying for it.

Their suggestion: not pay at all. They propose printing more money - yes, quite literally run the presses and send out the results (by post, presumably) to each and every resident of the Japanese isles. The arguments in favour sound good: the export industry - engine of economic growth - is hurting badly from the expensive yen exchange rate. Also, deflation was a persistent plague on the Japanese economy during the last recession. By diluting the money supply and have people spend it you get a healthy dose of inflation, a drop in the value of the yen, and kickstart the domestic economy. Everybody wins, the LDP lawmakers are hailed as heroes and a grateful electorate will carry them on their shoulders into the Diet and another generation of complete political dominance.

Well, except for one thing - it doesn't really work that way. Printing money without assuming any obligation would generate inflation, sure, and a drop in the value of the currency. But it also destroys the trust in the currency, so there's no reason to expect inflation rate to stabilize or the drop in value to stop. After all, if the government are ready to print money once, why not do it again? And again? Nobody would want to hold Japanese yen, or being paid in yen anymore.

And of course, in aggregate the Japanese households are not poor. They have money; they're just not spending it. Why are they not spending? Worry about the future, worry about the lack of job security, worry about deteriorating social safety nets. Giving each one a big wad of cash is not going to change that. Giving each one a wad of cash in this way will if anything have prudent people lining up to save it in some other currency, on economically safer shores.

And it's the cash giveaway part that really exposes this as the rather amateurish election gambit it is: if you're going to print free money anyhow, how about at least use it to shore up those deteriorating systems - pension, health care, unemployment benefits, social security - that are the main reason people are afraid to spend in the first place?

You know, I wonder: when you become a banana republic, do the banana plants appear by themselves, does the UN send them as part of the first aid programs or are you expected to import them yourself?

The Way Things Are Done

There's a peanut-related salmonella outbreak in USA, so peanut-based products imported from there naturally become suspect. A company in Tokyo imported peanut-flavored popcorn, and the health ministry has now ordered them to stop selling the product.

But - and this is where things get interesting - no salmonella has been found in the popcorn so the health ministry apparently can't simply order them to recall the already sold product. Instead they order them to voluntarily recall the popcorn¹. Which seems to require some creative reinterpretation of "order", "voluntary" or both.

Now, this is where a certain kind of writer would make hay of this. They'd wildly overgeneralize the thing into some vast gulf of mutual cultural incomprehension, wax rhapsodical about different national characteristics and maybe even have a go at the Mysteries of the Orient and the Inscrutability of the Eastern Mind while they're at it.

That would be very silly. The reality is of course much simpler and less consequential. This amounts to an alert that an involuntary recall will be ordered - with legal repercussions, bad publicity and at considerable inconvenience to everyone involved - if the company doesn't do a recall on its own. The procedural and regulatory praxis has moved on over time while the terminology has not. The resulting mismatch creates anoher small, delightful wrinkle in the language fabric, adding a bit of spice, and nicely illustrating the difference between formal language theory and living, breathing languages in actual use.

It's easy to read too much into things; usually an expression is just an expression, nothing more.

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#1 No, it's not a translation error; the Yomiuri original says "自主回収を指導した" - "ordered a voluntary recall". And just to forestall an obvious objection, I have it on good authority (my wife) that while "指導" means "guidance" or "coaching" in the context of teaching, the implication is very much "order" when it involves a government agency like this.

New Job

I don't normally cover work-related things on this blog - I write it as a diversion from work after all - but occasionally work and private life will intersect. The project at ATR I've been working at is ending, and the department is moving into different directions in the coming year. As a result I am leaving ATR and joining a new project. Friday was my last day at ATR.

This is not a sudden development of course; neither is it unusual - project positions are inherently temporary and unstable, and research groups usually change constantly as people join and leave. At ATR for instance, more than half of the people in the group when I first visited almost three years ago are no longer there today. This instability has a lot of consequences - positive and negative - for research groups and people alike, by the way, but that's a subject better covered in a separate post.

My new position will be at NAIST - Nara Institute of Science and Technology - at the Theoretical Life-Science Lab, though I'll be an employee of Kyoto University as the project funding comes through them. The two-year project is briefly to create a neural simulation framework for early vision processes - the optic tectum and oculomotor areas, more or less. Our intention is to integrate this with models of the retina and other areas by other groups and get a complete early perception-action loop implemented. Two years is an ambitious schedule for this sort of thing - I leave ATR early to get a head start - but we'll manage it, I believe.

 
NAIST is fairly close to ATR, conveniently right on the same train line I already use. It's just one train stop earlier and a little closer to the station so my commute - and my study time - will be about the same as now, at slightly over an hour one-way. I've only visited once, but NAIST seems to be a pretty spacious, well-equipped facility. It's substantially larger than ATR so it has a better library and other shared facilities. The cafeteria seems like a distinct improvement from ATR too; there's just about nothing else around so that's actually pretty important.

Anyway, with a new job I may have my hands full until I get settled a bit; if posting is light in the coming weeks you now know why.