Form Over Function Much???

I know I’m not alone here when I saw that the Winter Olympics are such a bore! But more than a few residents of the City Under Red Sun have still found a way to get their collective panties in a bunch, and his name is Kazuhiro Kokubo (seen above). The problem was he showed up at Vancouver International looking like this!

My first (and second and third) thought was: カッコイイ!!! [read: kakkoii - dope!!!] But the Japanese media was not impressed! The ill sag, the untucked shirt, the nose stud and the locks to top it…. the media was NOT having it. Instead, they labeled him as  somehow “unrepresentative of Japan”. Even politicians were making statements about his “regrettable appearance”!

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And the Earth Moved… Black Love Below for Haiti

Living in Japan, I’ve developed a great respect for earthquakes. With my heightened gaijin senses, I am keenly aware that my beloved city is long overdue for its next “great” earthquake. And every respiration of the city immediately triggers my flight instinct only to later give way to the realization that it’s just the wind or the subway or…. anything but the end of the world disaster that I’ve so vividly envisioned in my mind.

But a month ago today, my worst fears were realized when I realized that that interesting fog of the Haitian capital wasn’t fog at all but the dust cloud covering a city of some 3,000,000 people in ruins. My heart sunk! Like most Black Americans I share a special affinity for Haiti. My affinity is even more personal because of my relationship with my fraternity and my resident Haitian old head, Etienne aka “Mr. Liberte or La Mort!”. Watching the sheer devastation of the city, my prayers were for my Brother and hiw wife, their families and all the people of Haiti who have too long been treated as the pariah of the Western Hemisphere.

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2009 Kanji of the Year

It’s that time again!!!

Japan Today reports that the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation has conducted it’s annual Kanji of the Year survery. And in a public opinion to find of which single character out of the 3,000 over so Chinese characters used in standard Japanese best represents and reflects the events of the past year, voters selected 新 [shin - new] as this year’s character.

With a new prime minister, new American president, and a “new flu”, 2009 has been a year of new things in both Japan and the that mystical land, known here affectionately as, 外国 [gaikoku - foreign country]. The announcement was made in Kyoto, with a priest at the famed Kiyomizu Temple ceremoniously writing the character on traditional Japanese paper. Ironically enough, the announcement was presided over by the new president of the foundation as the last was arrested for mispropriety. How’s that for “new”?

Anyway, it may be the Kanji of the Year for 2009, but I’m co-opting it for 2010. See, 2010 is a new year, one filled with endless possibilities to start over, do it better and get it right!  Here’s to 新!!!

World AIDS Day 2009

Yeah, I’m a day late but I was in-flight back to the City under Red Sun and didn’t get in until late…

So….. December 1st is (was) World AIDS Day! A day to stop and reflect on the plague of our time and the terrible toll it has taken worldwide. To date, this scourge has claimed the lives of some 28 million people, and another estimated 33 million people around the world are currently living with the disease. There is no cure!!!

By now, we all now the devastation this plague has caused. But today (and EVERYDAY), perhaps more than ever, we really need to stop and reflect on this disease and our lives in the shadow of AIDS/HIV. Too many of us see AIDS and HIV as an African problem. Too many of us see it as a African American problem. Too many of us still see it as a homosexual problem. Somehow we always manage to map it outside our spheres, outside of our personal definitions of ourselves. Perhaps it’s because we aren’t African, or African American. Perhaps we don’t live in DC, NYC ATL or San Francisco. Perhaps we aren’t gay. Then again, maybe we’re too young to remember those truly terrible days, before the anti-retroviral drug cocktails, when an HIV diagnosis meant certain death, and when we watched helplessly as our best friends and family and our idols wasted away and died.

Those days a gone! The fear has subsided, and in its place a terrible new disease has taken hold. This disease…. complacency. Here in the City under Red Sun, as elsewhere, people just aren’t very concerned with AIDS. More than anywhere else, it really is seen as something that happens to other people in some other place in some other other time. Too many times have I heard that AIDS/HIV is alternately a gay, Black, or foreigner disease. And if you’re a gay, Black foreigner (such as myself), then you’re the living embodiment of risk. Largely separated from these at-risk “others”, Japan is lulled in a false sense of security.

BUT AIDS/HIV IS EVERYWHERE. AND EVERYONE IS AT RISK!!!

What really scares me and where to get tested after the break

The Ubiquitous Mask

Swine Flu, err…. New Flu, err…. H1N1. This bug has so many names now, it’s hard to keep track. Whatever you call it, it’s everywhere and spreading. And although this new strain is powerful and highly contagious, it so far hasn’t proved itself anywhere near as lethal as it’s more traditional cousins.

Still, people are rightfully concerned and taking the necessary precautions. For those that qualify, these precautions include the highly controversial H1N1 vaccine. Is it safe? Does it work? Even the so called experts aren’t entirely sure!

These days almost every public space is equipped with a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool germaphobe, so y’all already know I’m thrilled because this means that I don’t have to wash my hands in ice cold water or wipe my wet hands on my pants But, I’m especially thrilled because, although Japan seems unwilling or unable to provide either hot water or paper towels, at the very least it seems people are finally embracing the one thing known AND proven to cut the spread of contagious agents… alcohol-based sanitizers.

All the sanitizer aside, Japan, like the rest of Asia, remains committed to its face masks. According to some, it’s to prevent the wearer from getting sick. But according to others, it’s to prevent the wearer from spreading his/her germs with others. Which ever you choose to believe, seems everyone ends up wearing one this time of year. Like, gloves… check. Scarf… check. Hat… check… Louis Vuitton… check. Face mask… check!
Continued after the break

Broke Gangsters III

I don’t know why but the yakuza, Japan’s infamous nine-fingered bad boys, remain one of my favorite subjects. They claim to be the last descendants of the samurai class, but live through to modernity as lords of Japan’s criminal underworld. Unlike criminal organizations elsewhere though, the yakuza operate as officially recognized corporate entities with control over not only the criminal staples of sex, drugs, and exhortion but also strong influence in finance and politics. Ummm, criminals with strong influence in finance and politics!? Sounds oddly like bankers, no?

Bankers have their exams, and now it seems the yakuza have theirs! In these tough economic times, yaks are getting their education on, hitting the books in an effort to more fully break into the greatest racket in the world… stocks! They even got a TEST! My boy, the Great Logistician, sent me this link the other day. Seems as though I’m not the only one who sees the yakuza as a barometer of economic indicator of an economy in decline.

Yakuza’s Series 7 Exam Is Harbinger for Economy
William Pesek

Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) — Japan’s underworld can tell you a lot about what’s happening in the legitimate economy.

Gangsters are on the run as growth wanes and deflation worsens. Yet the oddest development by far involves yakuza members sitting for exams covering key aspects of their work.

If you think this is just a law-enforcement issue, think again. It’s a sign Japan’s funk will be longer than economists predict. That may surprise those betting Japan is recovering. Oddly, though, the plight of gangsters tells the story.

Huddled over legal texts and documents isn’t the popular image of Japan’s storied mobsters. When they aren’t collecting debts, shaking down shop owners, overseeing prostitution rings or rigging stocks, members of Japan’s biggest organized crime group, Yamaguchi-gumi, are studying for 12-page tests.

Surreal? Yes, but also a telltale sign of the seriousness of Japan’s deflationary cycle. The yakuza are having to work harder than ever to get by and are stepping up education efforts. This column isn’t meant to convey sympathy for them. It’s that the advent of a yakuza version of the Series 7 exam that stockbrokers take is a bad omen — very bad.

“The yakuza are a real barometer,” saysJake Adelstein, a blogger and the author of a new book, “Tokyo Vice.” “When the yakuza are doing poorly, the economy is doing poorly.”

All this hints at the harsh environment facing even the most industrious of gangsters, never mind average households. And it says lots about the need for growth opportunities. And Japan has a disturbing paucity of them at the moment.

Mob Crackdown

News of all this first appeared last month in the Mainichi newspaper. Police found the exam during a mob investigation in western Japan. Its timing coincides with the fallout from organized-crime laws that went into effect in late 2008. Gangster groups can be held responsible for actions of even the lowest street-level associates. Kobe, Japan-based Yamaguchi-gumi alone has about 40,000 members.

Areas of study include everything from phone fraud to dumping of industrial waste to auto theft to securities laws. The exercise is aimed at avoiding lawsuits as stagnation eats into profits from real estate, construction and stock trading.

This latter category has kept authorities extraordinarily busy. The yakuza invasion of Japan’s financial industry has been amazing and rapid. And intimate observers joke about feeling nostalgic for the days when the yakuza were simply thugs wearing bad suits and sporting full-body tattoos.

Yakuza as Investors

A decade ago, it wasn’t hard to spot who they were and what they might be up to. Now, they are diversified investors in Tokyo’s stock market. Observers are learning finance and forensic accounting to keep up with them. If you don’t understand Japan’s system of stock trading, issuance and manipulation, you can’t understand the modern yakuza.

That diversification often makes the yakuza a more useful economic gauge than one finds elsewhere — and explains why their plight says more about Japan’s outlook than many realize. In late 2008, Adelstein said there might be 600 “yakuza- connected companies.”

There’s no sanitizing the yakuza’s influence — it’s huge. Hence the keen focus on training members on trends in financial markets and key industries. Think of Yamaguchi-gumi’s education push as an M.B.A. for gangsters.

What’s fascinating about the yakuza is how nimble they can be. The shift from old-fashioned crime such as prostitution and drugs to finance has accelerated. Gangsters were quick to exploit a crackdown on consumer-finance companies. The government’s bungling sent more business their way, making organized crime an early beneficiary of the credit crisis.

Signs of Weakness

That was then. The economic signs are getting worse. The strong yen is weighing on Japan’s export-driven economy as the jobless rate hovers near a record high.

Japan will remain in deflation until 2012 because of “significant slack” in the economy, the International Monetary Fund said last week. Proving the point, consumer prices tumbled 2.4 percent in August, the fastest decline on record.

The other dilemma is politics. Gangsters long enjoyed getting a piece of multibillion-dollar public-works projects. That gravy train ended when Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan took over last month. The prime minister’s government is actually halting projects, never mind devising new ones.

Business opportunities are evaporating, faster than many economists say. The bar owners that members pressure for protection money can’t pay much these days. Prostitutes aren’t raking in customers the way they did two years ago. Households are reluctant to take on fresh debt, especially at extortionate rates. Stock trading and real estate are languishing.

Have no doubt gang members are brainstorming on how to survive the recession. Crime probably still pays well enough to keep some yakuza in the style they are accustomed to. The tension among Japan’s 80,000 or so yakuza is palpable, though, as evidenced by violent altercations between rival groups.

Just don’t be fooled into thinking this isn’t about the economy. It absolutely is. Gangsters studying for exams are a clear sign of where the underworld finds itself today. That goes for Japan’s broader population, too.

Drifting?

Yo, y’all remember that last Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drifting movie? Maybe you don’t. It was gawd awful!!! I ain’t even gonna front…. I did see the movie few times. But with a gang of teenage and pre-teen nephews in the house I was bound to see a least a snippet of it where and there. Thanfully that snippet didn’t not include any real life ummmm, acting. LOL No, my precious neurons were spared that bit of abuse! That part I ummm, survived was a particular scene were the skilled Japanese racer drifts his way up a circular garage ramp. Shiiiiiit, I was impressed! And apparently, so were alot of you! ( The movie did pull in $160M USD!!!)

I had no idea that drifting is a actually something real people do with real cars. But it’s very real – just look here!

Or here:

With moves like that, how could you not love these guys?!? LMAO

The latest though from Japan Today, my favorite source of irrelevant news:

Drift gang leader, 19 others arrested

The leader of a gang of drifters, Tetsuya Okajima, 40, and 19 other drift racers have been arrested, police said Monday. Police said they had also ascertained the identity of a total of 84 drift racers.

The 20 have been charged with dangerous driving by the traffic enforcement bureau of the Metropolitan Police Department. According to police, Okajima was the leader of the hotrodding gang known as the “Blacks,” and is an influential member in the drifter world.

Okajima was quoted as saying: “No matter how many times you arrest me, I’m still going to cruise on public roads.”

The group was arrested for drifting in four vehicles around 1:30 a.m. some mornings at Oi Pier in Tokyo’s Ota Ward since May.

Broke Gangsters II

I wrote some time about the lengths the infamous Japanese mafia, also known as the mafia, have gone to to make money amidst this 世界不況 [sekai fukyou: global recession]. Skimming from poort country grannies, these dudes should be ashamed of themselves for real! SMDH Well, the boys with 9 fingers seem to have developed a new scheme! This time around they’re scamming on desperate singles looking for love. Cue the music….. “I was looking for in love in all the wrong places!” Yeah, folks, if you’re paying someone to help you find a short cut to love and eternal marital bliss, ummmm, you sorta deserve to get robbed. Is that harsh? Maybe but there really just no way to short cut your way in to truly meaningful, love-filled relationship! And when you do think you can outsmart the love gods, there’s always gonna be some goon there to try to outsmart you (and seperate you from your yen for his work)!

With Japan’s lastest 婚活 [konkatsu: marriage activity] craze, there’s more than a few suckers, errr customers, for the lil’ guys with all the tattoos!

This from Japan Today – July 18th, 2009:

Yakuza try matchmaking business to make ends meet

These are hard times for us all; hardest of all, says Spa! (July 21), for the yakuza. Once, organized crime bands pursued glory, as they saw it. Now it’s a brute, inglorious hustle for mere survival. Nothing’s beneath them, as long as it pays. Couple this fact with a surging marriage boom, and you get… yakuza infiltrating the matchmaking business? Sure enough, the magazine finds.

The buzzword is “konkatsu,” meaning literally “marriage activity” and written with characters suggesting a similarity to job-hunting. Singles once content to be that way are suddenly in the market for marriage partners, and brokerages, inevitably, are springing up to meet the demand.

In a sense, it would be strange if the yakuza wasn’t involved, so obvious is the potential. One lucrative undertaking Spa! looks into is the “marry-a-celebrity” scam. When 15 people, including a yakuza member, were arrested as suspects in May, it appeared that 200 men across the country had been bilked to the tune of 1 billion yen.

They were drawn by Internet and tabloid ads placed by “celebrity marriage producers.” The ads started appearing in 2007. Their tenor was, “Yes, even celebrities are looking for husbands, and yes, even you can qualify!” It’s interesting, notes Spa! in passing, that the libidinous pitch you’d expect is missing. The appeal is strictly to the burgeoning desire to wed.

The alleged scam is a variation of the purely sexual lures of yesteryear. Men pay a “membership fee” in the neighborhood of 100,000 yen and are fixed up with young women known as “sakura”—crudely, bait. Skillfully, the “broker” strings the client along: “She really likes you. She’s really getting serious about marriage.” Each date adds to the cost; then there are “deposits” to pay—and so on. So tempting is it all presented, so cleverly do the brokers and sakura play their parts, that some victims reportedly lost as much as 80 million yen.

The countryside offers fertile ground of a different texture. Tastes being plainer here, celebrities are redundant, and the profits to be made are consequently lower. On the other hand, victims, having lost less, are less inclined to go to the police.

Twenty years ago, there began a trend of importing brides from elsewhere in Asia to replace rural Japanese girls fleeing the hardships of farm life in favor of the big cities. That worked when Asia was mostly poor and a Japanese husband seemed a passport to an almost unimaginably better life. Asia’s growing prosperity punctured that mystique; the “better life” was available at home. “Now,” says Spa!, quoting a broker of international marriages, “with China’s economy on the rise, Chinese women aren’t interested in marrying a Japanese unless he’s making at least 10 million yen a year.”

So the yakuza and their attendant sakura go rural to fill the void. The client’s hopes are fed, and his wallet emptied, until finally, “after a month or so, contact fades out.”

By this time, the mark has typically lost 100,000-200,000 yen—“just this side of the line,” as one investigator puts it, “on which you bite your tongue and swallow your loss rather than face the embarrassment” of seeking legal redress.

Thanks, fellas! But I’ll meet my own spouse! LOL

http://cityunderredsun.com/2009/05/12/broke-gangsters/

http://cityunderredsun.com/2009/05/26/being-the-boyfriend-i-want-to-have/

“Man the Hell Up!”

Some time ago,  in a previous post there was a phrase that prompted some questions. The phrase – male herbivore – is apparently the latest Japanese cultural catch phrase, so much so that even CNN did a story on it. Read it>> According to CNN, male herbivores are “young, earn little and spend little, and take a keen interest in fashion and personal appearance.” In addition, they have little personal ambition and little to no interest in sex and relationships. Yep, it seems as though the post-Bubble economic realities compounded by this deep, global recession has a lot young J-boys feeling something like emasculated. Hell, some dudes are even turning to male bras, a one-time bestseller on Japan’s Rakuten online flea market, for the feeling of a little extra “support”! I kid you, not! LMAO

When I first heard the term, I was ready to dismiss it out of hand as the latest invention of the marketing and advertising machine. But I had to stop and think about it for a second: Young, check. Broke, check. Cheap, check. No interest in sex, check! Damn, my ex is a male herbivore! Yep, that explains everything!!! LOL Seriously though, I’ve met quite a guys – straight and gay – that fit the description.  All seem more than a little beaten up by life and resigned to live a life something less than fabulous.

But I say to them what I say to all their herbivorous brethren worldwide : Man the hell up!!!

Sure, the economy is in the toilet. G-d knows we’re all broke as hell. And we all have to put up with a lot ish just to make ends meet. On top of that, adult relationships are hard and time-consuming, and at the end of a long day at work the last thing anyone wants to do is to come home to deal with someone else’s ish. But for real, that’s what adult life is all about. Not to bash J-boys, because it’s not only a J-boy phenomenon really; no, it’s really a sign of a generation that’s been coddled to the point that they’re less than capable of dealing. The problem is even more acute here though because industrial output has taken a real hit in this recession and domestic output (read: the national birth rate) has been down for years. The City Under Red Sun needs all of its native sons to do their part and get it in. But noooooo… these guys’ll take the pass! I have to say it again: MAN THE HELL UP!

I feel bad enough for the pretty, young girls who have to deal with these scared (and broke) lil’ boys. But imagine my frustration as a man that loves men, only to find out that some of these men have no interest in sex (with me or anyone else). Like what is their purpose? Like what is gay man with no interest sex? Isn’t that what being gay is supposed to be all about??? SMDH

J-News Update: Swine Flu HERE! And Really? What’s Wrong with being Naked?

So I haven’t been able to post like I’ve really wanted, so lemme try to play catch up for a second. A few weeks ago I made a post on Swine Flu in the City. In that post I was more than a lil’ dismissive of the whole Swine Flu thing. Turns out maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so flip. The flu epidemic has hit the Second City pretty hard. And now, Japan Times reports that the virus is here!

Japan Times: Flu infiltrates Tokyo as patient tally leaps to 263

In other news, I also made a post about the drunk and naked antics of Tsuyoshi Kusanagi. The police arrested the SMAP star for public indecency after a night of drunken karaoke-ing… naked in a public park! It was expected that public outrage would put his career into a serious deep freeze. But instead folks have instead been critical of the police and the media for blowing this whole incident waaaay out of proportion. And just weeks after his arrest, it seems Kusanagi is already set for a big comeback.

From Japan Today: Kusanagi’s comeback – what was the big deal after all?