The New York Times has an interesting article about the shortage of engineers in Japan. It’s really an astounding fact given how Japan is such a leader in science and technology. A big theme of the article is the Japanese attitude towards foreigners since allowing engineers to immigrate - as U.S. high-tech companies do to a large extent - would help ameliorate the shortage. 

By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers. Some companies are moving research jobs to India and Vietnam because they say it is easier than bringing non-Japanese employees here.  

Since 1999, the number of undergraduates majoring in sciences and engineering has fallen 10 percent to 503,026, according to the education ministry. (Just 1.1 percent of those students were foreign students.) The number of students majoring in creative arts and health-related fields rose during that time, the ministry said.

Mr. Hikita and other engineering students say their dwindling numbers offer one benefit: they are a hot commodity among corporate recruiters. A labor ministry survey last year showed there were 4.5 job openings for every graduate specializing in fields like electronic machinery.

ESPN has a *very* long article on 21-year old pitching phenom Yu Darvish. It covers his interesting background (his Iranian father met his Japanese mother in the U.S.!), impresssive ability, and celebrity status.

The article discusses whether (or when) Darvish will go to the U.S. to play and then pivots to discuss a lot about Japanese professional baseball including the impact of the exodus of top talent to the U.S. Case in point was the impact Ichiro’s departure had on his team; attendance plummeted and they were eventually merged with another team. Xenophobia, real or perceived, is also mentioned. Some found it suspicious that Darvish’s obvious talent was ignored by many teams.

The article ends by pivoting once again to discuss the future of Japanese baseball via little leaguers playing all over Japan and the contrast with American little leaguers.

It’s really an interesting article, as long as you have the time to read it!

The NPR sports show Only a Game has a 6 1/2-minute segment on Sumo.  It’s largely a primer on the sport but also focuses a lot on Asashoryu, the controversial, Mongolian, grand champion who is one of one of only two top-ranked yokozuna.  In brief, he seems to get himself into trouble such as breaking a car mirror after a match, playing soccer in Mongolia on a supposed-sore knee, and not appearing in the expected kimono.  The story also touches on other topics such as the controversial death of a 17-year old stable apprentice.

The New York Times recently ran an article on horse breeding in Japan.  I have to say, horse breeding and horse racing are not my thing, but if you’re into it, give the article a read.  It mostly focuses on a horse named Casino Drive who is related to many big-name horses and is living and training in Japan under racing manager Nobutaka Tada and chief executive Hidetoshi Tamamoto who bought the horse for almost $1,000,000 in 2006.

The NY Times ran a Reuters article on Japan’s wealthiest people.  Topping the list Hiroshi Yamauchi of Nintendo who is worth $7.8 billion.  The source material for the article is actually Forbes magazine which has a much more in depth piece.

Property developer, Akira Mori fell from 1st to 2nd place at $7.7 billion and pachinko machine maker Kunio Busujima is 3rd at $5.4 billion.

Tidbits from the Forbes article:

• The rising yen (against the dollar) helped everyone on the list appear wealthier.
• The youngest member of Japan’s wealthiest 40 is 32-year-old Kenji Sahara who founded Mixi (which my fiancee is addicted to).
• Some people from last year’s list fell off the list, most due to the falling value of the Nikkei index.
• Among the 40 wealthiest, just 3 are women: Hiroko Takei, Chizuko Matsui, and Keiko Erikawa.  Only Erikawa participated in the creation of the wealth; the other two inherited it.

Sure you know about the biblical plagues of flies, gnats, frogs, and locusts, but do you know about the crows?  The New York Times reports about this recent scourge afflicting Japan. The article reports that crow populations are increasing and causing annoyance by getting into garbage and harm by causing blackouts.  Personally, when I lived up in Kawasaki, I walked by many brazen crows on my way home and often had flashbacks to Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Attacks, though rare, do happen. Hungry crows have bloodied the faces of children while trying to steal candy from their hands. Crows have even carried away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said.

Behind the rise, experts and officials say, has been the growing abundance of garbage, a product of Japan’s embrace of more wasteful Western lifestyles. This has created an orgy of eating for crows, which are scavengers.

The birds seem to be winning. Mr. Kyutoku said despite the twice-weekly patrols, which have removed 600 nests since they began three years ago, the number of nests keeps increasing, as have blackouts. The utility says there were three major cutoffs last year.

Crows have also shown a surprising ability to disrupt Japan’s super-modern technological infrastructure. In the last two years, utility companies in Tokyo reported almost 1,400 cases of crows cutting fiber optic cables, apparently to use as materials for nests.

This is really a fascinating article - definitely worth a read.  Of note is also the hand-wringing going on about what to do about the problem with some wanting to kill the crows and others adamantly opposed to that solution. 

Kyoto is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Japan - for good reason.  48 million people visited in 2006! (That is the equivalent of 40% of the population of Japan and comes out to over 125,000 per day!) The New York Times recently offered a travel guide to Kyoto for the frugal traveler.  Check out the recommendations including restaurants, bars, hotels, and attractions including some links and photos.

Diane Rehm interviewed (audio) Martha Sherrill the author of Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain.  Sherrill spent some time in Japan and found out about the story of the Akita, its near extinction, and its preservation by Morie Sawataishi around WWII.  If you’re a dog lover, you’re sure to enjoy the interview and the book.

 Here’s the Publishers Weekly review via Amazon.com:

Morie Sawataishi had never owned a dog, but in 1944, when the Japanese man was 30 years old, the desire for one came over him like a sudden… craving. During WWII, snow country dogs were being slaughtered for pelts to line officers’ coats; working for Mitsubishi in the remote snow country, Morie decided to rescue Japan’s noble, ancient Akita breed—whose numbers had already dwindled before the war—from certain extinction. Raised in an elegant Tokyo neighborhood, his long-suffering wife, Kitako, hated country life, and his children resented the affection he lavished on his dogs rather than on them. The book brims with colorful characters, both human and canine: sweet-tempered redhead Three Good Lucks, who may have been poisoned to death by a rival dog owner; high-spirited One Hundred Tigers, who lost his tail in an accident; and wild mountain man Uesugi. To Western readers Morie’s single-mindedness may seem selfish and Kitako’s passivity in the face of his stubbornness incomprehensible, but former Washington Post staffer Sherrill imbues their traditional Japanese lifestyle with dignity, and Morie’s adventures (he is now 94) should be enjoyed by dog lovers, breeders and trainers.

In a Reuters article a few weeks back, I got a history lesson on four disputed islands north of Hokkaido.  The article discusses these sparsely populated islands and their history.  A few tidbits:

• 17,000 Japanese fled or were forced from the islands after the invasion in August, 1945 — just after Russia declared war on Japan and just a week before Japan surrendered.
• About 7,900 Japanese who once lived on the islands are alive today and their average age is 75.
• About 16,000 Russians live there now.

The NY Times has a straight-up report of the visit of Hu Jintao to Japan. Interesting points from the article:

• It is the first visit by a Chinese leader in a decade.
• They discussed some thorny issues including control of an underwater natural gas field in the East China Sea and an unsolved case of poison found in frozen Chinese-made dumplings sold in Japan.
• China said it would lend Japan a pair of giant pandas, after a panda died of old age at a Tokyo zoo last week.
• The two leaders will face each other in table tennis.

Danica Patrick became the first woman to win an Indy Car race by winning the Japan 300 in Motegi. I’m not a huge motor sports fan myself, but it is certainly a historic first and worth noting. Here’s ESPN’s take on the event.

Patrick finished 5.8594 seconds ahead of pole-sitter Helio Castroneves on the 1.5-mile Twin Ring Motegi oval after leader Scott Dixon pitted with five laps left and Dan Wheldon and Tony Kanaan came in a lap later.

The 26-year-old Patrick won in her 50th career IndyCar start, taking the lead from Castroneves on the 198th lap in the 200-lap race.

On NPR’s Talk of the Nation, author Misha Glenny discusses his new book, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (audio).  Around the 15:00 mark he talks about the Yakuza for about 2 minutes.

A few tidbits from the interview: The author says that 80% of the women who entered Japan between 1990-2000 came on entertainment visas and most were prostitutes connected to the Yakuza.  The Yakuza maintain semi-legal status in Japan and submit a list of members and candidate members to Japanese police!  Lastly the aging population and globalization has affected the Yakuza, too; they now find it more difficult to recruit and are outsourcing some of the violence to Chinese gangs!

The NPR program, All Things Considered recently had a six-minute segment (audio) on a comparison of the Japanese and U.S. health care systems.  The program indicates that the Japanese pay less, get more, and cover everyone (45 million Americans - 15% - are uninsured in the U.S.) but that it is tightly controlled by the government even though the doctors and hospitals are private and that profits are low or non-existant.  In every system - health care and otherwise - there are winners and losers.  Based on the story, in the U.S., doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and well-insured patients are the winners.  In Japan it appears that the patients are the winners. Oh and Japan has the healthiest people and longest life-span.  They must be doing something right.

CNN has an entertaining and revealing 2-minute video on Tokyo’s lost and found.  In a city of 12-or-so million people, it’s staggering how much gets turned in.  The piece discusses the 130,000 umbrellas, the change in policy of holding items from 6 months to 3 months due to storage issues, and cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan.  Suffice it to say that in the U.S. if you lose something, most of the time you will never see it again.

Two separate pieces ran yesterday which in different ways ask ‘is Japan conservative’? Of course that is a sweeping generalization to make about an entire country, nevertheless, I would think that few would argue that Europe (especially western Europe) is generally more liberal than the United States.  Europe has socialized (er, socialised) medicine, and more government activism (liberals would call it minding social welfare and conservatives would describe it as “nanny state intervention.”).  Back to Japan…

Roger Cohen, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, posits that Asia including Japan lean Republican (conservative) vs. Europe which leans Democrat (liberal).  

The three largest powers — China, India and Japan — have all had reasons to view Bush with favor, and all have nagging fears about a Democratic administration. At a deeper level, they’ve felt comfortable enough with a United States playing power politics, while that strut-your-stuff style has appalled consensus-driven Europeans.

China does not want an America that turns inward.  Nor does Japan, which has reacted to China’s rise by reinforcing its strategic ties with the United States, and has been reassured by the Bush administration’s unequivocal commitment to America’s Asian military alliances. America-in-Asia remains a Japanese priority, ugly incidents at Okinawa notwithstanding. 

The second article which comes from Japan Today describes how 4 inmates were executed by hanging.  On the left-right spectrum, capital punishment is aligned with the right (conservatives).

Four death row inmates were hanged Thursday, Justice Minister Yukio Hatoyama said, bringing the total number of inmates executed under his orders to 10 in three rounds of executions during a four-month period.

The 10 executions under Hatoyama mark the fastest pace of executions since the Justice Ministry resumed executions in 1993 after a pause of three years and four months.

The cumulative total of inmates executed reached 67 after Thursday’s executions, while the number of inmates on death row now stands at 104. 

I have not been here long enough to have an educated opinion of Japanese politics (although I have observed 3 Prime Ministers in about a year!).  I am interested to see readers’ opinions of Japanese politics although I will add the caution to please keep posts respectful of those with differing opinions and please stay on topic.

You can’t make this stuff up…Police in Saitama Prefecture arrested several people for filming a porn flick in McDonald’s!  Maybe they saw something Freudian in the golden arches which beckoned them?

One of the suspects was quoted by police as saying, “We didn’t think it would be a problem as long as nobody noticed what we were doing.”      

Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran a long article on Charles Robert Jenkins, aka “The Reluctant Communist.” Edward also discussed Jenkins in a recent podcast.  Jenkins was a U.S. serviceman serving in South Korea and took a drunken soujourn north and remained a captive there for 40 years!  He ended up marrying a Japanese captive and they had 2 children together.  In 2002 his wife was released and in 2004 he and their daughters were released.  This is a fascinating tale because so little is known about North Korea and Kim Jong-Il.  He spent some of his time there teaching English and a lot of his time in misery:

Jenkins devoted the bulk of his time, though, to survival — an endless grind of shoveling coal for heat, scrounging for food, hauling water and standing guard at night so hungry, marauding soldiers wouldn’t steal his peaches, his corn, his chickens or his kimchi.

He now lives with his family on Sado Island off Japan’s northern coast where he is a local celebrity.

Norimitsu Onishi offers another insightful article on Japan in the New York Times today.  It deals with Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, specifically in Shinkamigoto, an island on the western extremity of the country, about a 50 km (30 mile) ferry ride from Nagasaki.

Today, one quarter of the roughly 25,000 inhabitants of the district, a collection of seven inhabited islands and 60 uninhabited ones, are Roman Catholic, an extraordinary percentage in a country where Christianity failed to take root. It is by far the highest level in Japan, where Catholics account for about one-third of 1 percent of the overall population and where the total number of Christians amounts to less than 1 percent.

Most Japanese follow a combination of Buddhism and Shintoism, though Christmas and weddings in chapels, stripped of their religious meaning, have taken root in Japanese society.

I have to say that religion in Japan confounds me and offers a very interesting comparison to western countries such as the United States. I wonder what percentage of people in general, and young people in particular, in both countries are believers in a religion and where the trends are going.

The Washington Post is running an article from Reuters about the consequences of a big earthquake in Tokyo. It contends that the foot traffic from 12,000,000 people would create incredible crowd densities of more than 6 people per square meter! The article also states that:

The Tokyo metropolitan government said in 2006 that a magnitude 7.3 earthquake under Tokyo would probably kill more than 5,600 people and injure almost 160,000. Official estimates of economic damage have topped more than $1 trillion.

It’s easy to forget in normal day-to-day living just how vulnerable Japan is to huge catastrophes.

The story of the murder of a Japanese taxi driver has been in the news since the March 19th crime.  This Washington Post article has more information on the murder and its alleged perpetrator who is a U.S. serviceman and intriguingly a Nigerian citizen.  The article also discusses the backstory about the U.S. military presence in Japan.  This whole episode brings up many issues.  A few weeks ago in his podcast (and in a follow-up) Edward discussed the alleged rape of a Japanese teenage schoolgirl by another U.S. Serviceman and the dropping of those charges and (correctly, I think) discussed how few incidents there really are considering how many military people there are here (50,000).  Nevertheless all incidents become high profile, as should be expected given the high level of anxiety the U.S. military seems to cause.  Should the U.S. still be in Japan 60 years after WWII?  Should Japan stop hysterical press coverage of crimes, especially those committed by foreigners (not that the U.S. press is any better)?  Why does the U.S. have a Nigerian (or any foreign nationals) in its ranks?