View at Picasa 9/11 Rememberance at the University of Pennsylvania’s College Green

Every day on the way to my office I walk through Penn’s College Green, past The Button and Penn’s replica of the famous Love statue. Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, the Green was adorned with a multitude of small American flags (the crummy picture is from my cell phone camera). I didn’t come across any information about who worked on it, but I imagine there’s a flag for each person who died that day.

The memory of 9/11 has been so cynically used and manipulated for political purposes over the years (the latest example being the timing of General Petraeus’ Senate testimony) that its anniversary has become a political and emotional minefield. Given all that, I thought this remembrance was very nicely done. It reminded me of the loss we experienced that day, it made me think of the families of the victims, and it evoked a quiet patriotism. It let you experience those feelings without feeling like you were being used in someone’s political agenda, and these days that’s not an easy thing to achieve.

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Prof. Hans Rosling uses software from Gapminder debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. This global health visionary has discovered a powerful new way to communicate complex data about the world; his remarkable interactive graphs help deliver profound insights about global trends and will change forever the way you think about “us” and “them.” Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings vital global data to life. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

Japanese police have nabbed a former gangster, ending a more than 24-hour standoff during which the man shot a policeman dead after wounding his own son, daughter and another police officer and holing up in his suburban house.

This would be a big story anywhere, but is even more so here, where gun-related violence is rare. All day yesterday most of the TV stations here placed a box on the top corner of the screen, showing a live feed of the standoff. Over the past several weeks, sensationalistic gun violence in Japan seems to be up:

The stand-off comes a month after a gangster shot a fellow mobster in a Tokyo suburb and hid in an apartment before shooting himself, and another gangster shot dead the mayor of Nagasaki, shocking a country where gun control is tough and shootings rare.

I think what really matters is the point mentioned in the last paragraph of the article:

Gun-related crimes are rare in Japan and on the decline. The number of shootings fell to a record-low 53 last year, with most involving members of organized crime. Of those, 36 were thought to have involved gangsters. Only two resulted in deaths.

The population of the US is about 2.3 times the population of Japan. As a starting point for comparing the two countries, let’s adjust Japan’s number of shootings by population: 53 times 2.3 is about 122. Take a a guess at the actual annual number of shootings in the US? Don’t Google it – take a guess: 10,000? 30,000? Not even close. I couldn’t find numbers for last year, but looking at 2004 and 2005 numbers, it’s about 83,000 annual shootings (not counting suicides, but including accidental shootings – I couldn’t find a breakdown excluding those), with about 12,000 of those being homicides (compared to 2 in Japan last year).

Looking at this table comparing 25 industrialized countries, Japan is at the lowest end of the spectrum for gun violence, and the US is at the highest. Looking at just gun-related homicides, the country coming closest to the US is Northern Island, but the US rate is almost twice as high. The next closest is Italy, and the US rate is over 5 times higher.

I’m not going to hold forth on some simple (or even complex!) explanation for all this. It’s not something I’ve done a lot of research on. But here’s some food for thought:

• Guns are virtually prohibited in Japan. But, if that table I mentioned is correct, Finland has no restrictions on gun ownership, has an even higher rate of gun ownership than the US, but a homicide rate that’s about one-seventh of the US’. So what’s going on is more complex than just whether or not guns are readily available. (I’m not saying the US’ lax gun laws are ok; I’m saying you would have to look at more than just gun laws to fully understand what drives overall gun-related crime).
• For a shooting to count as a homicide, the victim has to die. I heard an interview a while back with a doctor at the U Penn Hospital who had developed innovative surgical techniques for dealing with gunshot wounds that were eventually adopted by the US military. He said what sent the murder rate off the charts, at least in Philadelphia, was semi-automatic pistols, which hit the streets in the 80s. Instead of people coming into his emergency room with one bullet in them, they started coming in with three or more bullets in them, making it exceedingly difficult to save their lives.
• In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, law professor Jack Balkin wrote a thoughtful post on the Second Amendment. He doesn’t formulate any specific form of regulation, but he does make an even-handed, thought-provoking comparison between the legal limits placed on the First Amendment’s freedom of speech guarantees (restrictions often sought by the Right and disliked by the Left) and restrictions on the Second Amendment (usually advocated by the Left and resisted by the Right).
• In the 1980s and 1990s, I recall the gun control debate was often in the public spotlight. But in the age of terrorism, it’s moved way down on the agenda. Death by firearms, at the hands of fellow Americans, is one of the leading causes of death in the US (the only other major cause that’s not a disease is car accidents). Unfortunately, that simple fact cannot penetrate the political minefield that engulfs the gun control debate in the US. Look at how quickly the public policy debate on gun violence receded after the Virginia Tech shootings. Our political process is utterly paralyzed on an issue that should actually concentrate minds like almost nothing else.

VIDEO – Two local assembly candidates in Minato-ku try to drown each other out View at Picasa VIDEO – Two local assembly candidates in Minato-ku try to drown each other out21-Apr-2007 11:09

A local assembly candidate in Minato-ku blasting her message through our neighborhood View at Picasa A local assembly candidate in Minato-ku blasting her message through our neighborhood18-Apr-2007 11:34, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 4.0, 10.8125mm, 0.005 sec

A banner in Shinagawa station: April 22 is election day for the local assembly in Minato-ku View at Picasa A banner in Shinagawa station: April 22 is election day for the local assembly in Minato-ku17-Apr-2007 11:05, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.017 sec

Check out this video I shot from our balcony (click the first thumbnail on the left) – it offers a real glimpse into Tokyo political campaigns. For the past week or so there has been an almost non-stop cacophony from the blaring PA systems mounted on politicians’ campaign cars, buzzing around our neighborhood like mosquitoes around the head of an Alaskan moose. I picked that particular analogy because a friend of mine told me once that persistent swarms of mosquitoes can drive a moose so crazy that, in desperation, it will charge headlong into a tree, sometimes killing itself. That’s about where I’m at.

In the video, there’s one candidate (or possibly one of his surrogates) who has pulled over on the left side of our apartment building, to give a speech to the buildings. Well, OK, to the people in the buildings, whether they want to listen or not. The PA systems the candidates have are loud – closing your windows and doors does absolutely no good. They usually just keep driving while they talk, so stopping like this is uncommon. One of the several other candidates driving around has noticed he’s stopped, and – not wanting to let the other guy have the full attention of the local residents – he stops only half a block away, on the right side of our apartment, and starts his own speech. This makes it impossible to understand what either one is saying, but I imagine that’s the point: the candidate who pulled up to drown out the other guy is mainly concerned about blocking his message, not necessarily getting heard himself.

About a month ago I wrote a post on the Tokyo race for governor, which is over now (Ishihara won). I mentioned that politicians aren’t allowed to advertise on TV here. If you combine that with the fact that door-to-door campaigning is impossible, since the vast majority of people here live in secured high rise apartment buildings (the Japanese actually call them “mansions”), then this aggressive, blaring, drive-by campaigning is the unfortunate result. It’s actually created a real problem for us: Eidan has been sick for the past few days with the stomach flu, and the poor kid keeps getting woken up from his naps by these massively amplified voices that are so loud that I don’t have a prayer of shielding his room from the noise. Political ads on American TV may be annoying, but at least you can control the volume (or even change the channel, or turn it off!). Eidan is napping as I’m writing this, and I can hear at least 3 different campaign vans driving around the neighborhood right now – if one of them comes down our street, that may be the end of Eidan’s nap.

The election is tomorrow, April 22 – I can’t wait for this to be over. The election that was on April 8 was the first part of the “national unified elections,” and now we’re in part two. The FPCJ has a good explanation of how the process works:

The unified local elections are held once every four years to select the heads and assembly members of regional governments. These will be the 16th unified local elections since 1947. The local elections are held at the same time to cut costs, improve efficiency, and stimulate interest in regional autonomy. There will be a total of 1,120 elections within a single month with voting taking place in two parts, first on April 8 and later, April 22. Because of the so-called Great Heisei Mergers of local cities, towns and villages, the number of local municipalities has been greatly diminished with 60 percent fewer mayoral elections and roughly half of the assembly seat elections compared with the number of elections that were held in 2003.

Maria expressing her opinion on the Tokyo governor’s race – yay for Asano, the reformer, and nay for Ishihara, the nationlist and incumbent. View at Picasa Maria expressing her opinion on the Tokyo governor’s race – yay for Asano, the reformer, and nay for Ishihara, the nationlist and incumbent.24-Mar-2007 14:45, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.008 sec

We spent the day today in the small town Kawagoe, but I’m too worn out now and don’t have the energy to write about it or part 2 of my Day Off. I’ll get to those soon, but tonight I’ll write about politics, which is actually much easier for me to do (go figure).

Japanese political campaigns are very different from the US’. On the face of it, the Japanese constitution’s guarantee of free speech is similar to the US’. I don’t know the legal history, but it seems that the definition of “speech” here is much more narrowly defined than it is in the US. During campaign season here, politicians spend a lot of time making speeches near major train stations, and in that environment they can say just about anything they want, just like politicians in the US. The reason they spend so much time out on the street is that they can’t advertise on TV. Ads for political parties are allowed, but not for individual campaigns. Even the party ads are very limited in what they can say. They can’t attack their opponents, and they can’t say too much about all the great things they would do (as that’s just another way of making their opponents look bad). So the end result is typically short, banal ads showing one of the party leaders saying something like “Go Japan!”

The campaign season also has a defined starting date – candidates can’t campaign before that date. The current race for governor of Tokyo started a few days ago on March 22, and it ends on April 8 when the election is held. That means the campaign “season” is 17 days long. (Tokyo prefecture is roughly equivalent to a state in the US. The governor is sometimes referred to in the Western press incorrectly as the mayor. Tokyo has no mayor, as the city was technically abolished in 1943 – each of the 23 wards that made up the city now has its own government, with its own mayor). Campaign posters can go up on privately owned buildings as their owners sees fit, but posters in public spaces have to go on boards that are put up by the city specifically for that purpose. The picture above shows Maria and Kai in front of one of these boards, with Maria expressing her opinion on the race.

She’s giving the incumbent governor, Ishihara, thumbs down. He’s famous in Japan as the co-author of The Japan That Can Say No – a collections of essays from the late 80s arguing for Japan to be more independent from the US and more assertive in foreign affairs. “Ishihara is generally described as one of Japan’s most prominent ‘right-wing’ politicians. He has also generated controversy due to his support for Japanese nationalism, frequent visits to Yasukuni Shrine [where several convicted war criminals from World War II are interred] and several displays of alleged racism, historical revisionism and sexism.” Asano, the challenger, gets Maria’s thumbs up. “Asano earned a reputation as a committed reformist when he was governor of Miyagi Prefecture, and has promised to bring the same qualities to the job of running the nation’s capital …Asano says his vision includes more transparent government and greater consideration of the needs of the socially disadvantaged.” Bloomberg has an excellent summary of the race and some of the issues involved. (I’d also like to point out that the only article published by CNN so far on the race is deplorable. Ishihara and Asano – far and away the two top candidates – get nothing more than a shared sentence near the beginning of the article, and then a few sentences at the end. Almost the entire article is about the goofy dark horse candidates, because y’know, all Americans really want to hear about Japan is how crazy those Japanese are.)

Ishihara has been popular, but his popularity has fallen recently into the low 40s. With multiple candidates in the race that still gives him an edge, but not much of one. Maria tells me Asano has been smart in his campaign so far, directly going after Ishihara’s nationalism, which is a key source of his popularity. Asano has been pushing the question: how can Ishihara expect to achieve his goal of a more independent and globally respected Japan, when his sometimes racially charged and historically distorted rhetoric does little more than make the world mad at him and not want to deal with him?

This will be my first post since we arrived in Japan that’s not about Japan. Thanks to the “series of tubes” that make up the internet I’ve been keeping up with US politics from here. I’d like to share some thoughts on a few foreign policy matters.

• First, since it’s Presidents’ Day in the US, here are some wise words from Abraham Lincoln that I came across recently. Even though Congress is in no mood to authorize military action against Iran, there are strong indications the Bush administration is nonetheless seriously considering some kind of military strike, so these are words worth keeping in mind:
  

  Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — ‘I see no probability of the British invading us;’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.’

  The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

  - Abraham Lincoln, letter to William H. Herndon, Feb. 15, 1848 (Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, had written him arguing that the president as commander-in-chief possessed the right to initiate a war against Mexico without specific Congressional authorization)

• Both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have behaved shamefully in the current Iraq debate (with a few exceptions: namely Feingold, for recognizing the pointlessness of the anti-surge resolution, Biden, for actually offering a plan of his own, and Hagel and Snowe, for trying to keep the Senate in session until a vote was taken). After years of hammering the Democrats for “up or down” votes in the Senate (where the minority party can block votes), the Republicans have blocked a vote on the Democrats anti-surge resolution. By blocking the vote, the Republicans avoid having to go on record one way or the other as to whether they support the President.

  At the same time, this non-binding anti-surge resolution is at most a side-show. In the latest AP poll, 63% of Americans favor “setting a time-table for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of next year,” yet we are not anywhere near having our Congress debate this question. Instead, the Senate has been debating whether to have a debate on a non-binding resolution saying they don’t very much like the President’s plan to send more troops.

  Despite the Democrats’ decisive victory in November, which was largely based on the public’s frustration with the Iraq war, they are still driven by fear more than principle. Fear of being hit with the “endangering the troops” line if they write a withdrawal timetable into law (i.e. defunding Bush’s open-ended commitment), and fear of having to take responsibility for the outcome, good or bad, if they force the President’s hand. Bush has made it abundantly clear that he will never willingly take our troops out of Iraq, so if the Democrats want to do something meaningful, they have to go after the money. That doesn’t mean pulling the rug out from under troops in the field, but it does mean developing and taking responsibility for an alternate plan.

  The Democrats fears are illustrated by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent comment that they don’t want to debate funding the war because “If you did have this vote, the radical left would eat every Democratic hopeful for president alive.” Graham and other Republicans are hoping that the Democrats won’t notice that it’s not just the “radical left” that wants the US involvement in Iraq to end in the foreseeable future, it’s a clear majority of Americans. The Democrats have yet to figure this one out. They also haven’t figured out the absurd “defunding the war means endangering the troops” canard, which has become a common Republican talking point and is quickly becoming conventional wisdom. As Glenn Greenwald states:

  This unbelievably irrational, even stupid, concept has arisen and has now taken root — that to cut off funds for the war means that, one day, our troops are going to be in the middle of a vicious fire-fight and suddenly they will run out of bullets — or run out of gas or armor — because Nancy Pelosi refused to pay for the things they need to protect themselves, and so they are going to find themselves in the middle of the Iraq war with no supplies and no money to pay for what they need. That is just one of those grossly distorting, idiotic myths the media allows to become immovably lodged in our political discourse and which infects our political analysis and prevents any sort of rational examination of our options.

  That is why virtually all political figures run away as fast and desperately as possible from the idea of de-funding a war — it’s as though they have to strongly repudiate de-funding options because de-funding has become tantamount to “endangering our troops” (notwithstanding the fact that Congress has de-funded wars in the past and it is obviously done in coordination with the military and over a scheduled time frame so as to avoid “endangering the troops”).

• Steven Clemons at the Washington Note has been closely following the unfolding story of the 2003 overture from Iran on reaching a “grand bargain” with the US, which the US completely ignored. It appears to have been a very serious offer, and it “[put] on the table such issues as an end to Iran’s support for anti-Israeli militants, action against terrorist groups on Iranian soil and acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.” Exactly how the offer was buried is turning out to be a somewhat bizarre story.

  It looks like Powell shelved it because he was deep in working on the North Korea issue, which was the only policy area he had much control over, as his influence in the Bush administration was on the wane at this point. Since his more traditional diplomatic approach did not square with the ascendant neocon vision of Cheney and Rumsfeld, he concluded that if he tried to push for diplomacy with North Korea and Iran at the same time, he would end up shut out of both completely. So he sacrificed possible progress on Iran in favor of hoping to make progress with North Korea.

  And what of Condi Rice? She claims she knew nothing about it, but a former member of her National Security Council says that she must have known about it. And it’s recently been confirmed that Karl Rove and congressman Bob Ney knew about it. Either way this is very bad for Condi Rice: she’s either being dishonest, or – despite being the National Security Advisor at the time – she was considered such a weak or irrelevant player that others were able to keep her out of the loop.

  The larger point here is this is more evidence of Bush’s failed “CEO Model” of the Presidency. The CEO model only works when the President is strong enough to keep his cabinet in line, working toward common goals. Instead, each member of his cabinet has pursued his or her own agenda, often in conflict with others, and the national interest has been lost in the shuffle.

• I will leave you with another Presidential quote. This one is from Teddy Roosevelt, writing during another war:
  

  [The President] should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.

  Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

  To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

  - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1918, in his essay “Lincoln and Free Speech”

Now a new film about wrongful arrest by one of Japan’s most respected directors, Masayuki Suo, has just opened to critical acclaim. The movie, entitled “I Just Didn’t Do It”, is based on a true story about a young man who was accused of molesting a schoolgirl on a crowded train—and refused adamantly to sign a confession. Thanks to support from friends and family, the real-life victim finally won a retrial after two years of protesting his innocence, and is today a free man.

The film, which was premièred in America and Britain before opening in Japan, depicts how suspects, whether guilty or innocent, are brutalised by the Japanese police, and how the judges side with the prosecutors. Mr Suo argues that suspects are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and that the odds are stacked massively against them being so proven.

The statistics would seem to bear him out. Japan is unique among democratic countries in that confessions are obtained from 95% of all people arrested, and that its courts convict 99.9% of all the suspects brought before them. Prosecutors are ashamed of being involved in an acquittal and fear that losing a case will destroy their careers. Judges get promotion for the speed with which they process their case-loads. And juries do not exist…

If you want a sense of what it’s like to go through an arrest in Japan, Stippy.com has a three part story by an American who was arrested in Japan and kept a detailed journal of his multi-week lock-up and rounds of interrogation for an offense that would probably not have involved him being locked up at all in the US. Part 3, which I linked to, is the most interesting so I recommend starting there.

If you were to pick a person at random in Japan and compare his life to a random person in the US, the Japanese person has much better odds of having decent housing, decent medical care, and a decent education. It’s interesting that you’d be much more likely to get a fair shake from the US justice system though, even with the many problems the US has in this area.

A big part of what makes Japan tick culturally is its very broad sense of community. The older generation is worried that the younger generation is becoming more individualistic and self-absorbed, and ads like this are efforts to counter that trend.

My experience so far is that kids feel safe here and aren’t shy around strangers. I know this because some of the kids at Kai’s school don’t hesitate to climb all over me. Also, adults are not shy about playing with kids they don’t know. Several times now random people on the street or on the train have come right up to Eidan in his stroller and started talking to him and playing with his hands and feet. Kai had a little bag of snacks tossed to him on the train by an old man. It’s the kind of thing that would make you want to call the cops in the US, but here it’s completely ordinary. Probably the main reason why it’s so ordinary is that crime rates are much lower in Japan than in the US:

This is all extremely significant considering just how tightly packed the Japanese population is. It would seem that the population density would lead to a very high crime rate, but that is not what happens in Japan. This helps to show that crime, especially violent crime, is dependent on external factors (the lack of availability of guns) and cultural factors (emphasis on honor and group harmony.) In the U.S., with the incredible ease of obtaining weapons and the emphasis on people “doing their own thing,” a much higher level of violent crime should not be a surprise…

Another factor that may play a large part in the lower crime level in Japan is the use of their police forces. There are kobans, (fairly small police stations) in profusion in Japanese cities. The police there seem to work much more closely with the community than in the U.S. where there is a “us vs. them” mentality on the part of many communities and even some police forces…

There are a couple other factors I would add. One is that Japan has a 99% conviction rate for those charged with crimes (as people here do not have the same rights they have in the US), which likely serves as a strong deterrent. The other, which is more to do with perceptions of crime, is that local news here is quite different – it does not suffer from the “if it bleeds it leads” mentality that pervades US newsrooms. I believe this is related to many Americans thinking crime rates were going up when they were actually going quite significantly down. When the news you see on TV every night is about murder and mayhem, it’s likely to add to your fear about strangers who approach you, and make you less likely to approach anyone you don’t already know. There is a certain degree of anxiety about crime that’s definitely warranted in the US (especially in certain areas), but – IMHO – local news coverage distorts it out of all proportion. If all you knew about your community was what you saw on US local news, you’d probably be afraid to leave your house, no matter where you lived.

Indicators of the infrequency of crime are visible just about everywhere here. I provided some pictures about this in my 2004 post Things You Don’t See in the US during our last trip here. There’s the unlocked bicycles everywhere, the pay phones that get electricity from regular wall outlets (suggesting no worries about vandalism), the availability of completely realistic toy guns, etc.