If there are any managers of housewares departments reading, may I ask you a favor? When hiring men, please make sure they’re queens.

Straight men are great–my very own father is a straight man, and I just love and respect him to pieces–and there are plenty of roles they can fulfill in society that constitute a real contribution. Just not when they’re supposed to be selling you vases, endtables, or curtains.

I thought I was going to end up making this guy cry yesterday by asking whether he could measure the depth of a vase for me. You know, I wanted to buy flowers for it on the way home, and I needed to know how long the stems had to be without unpacking it right there at the flower shop. (You can eyeball these things sometimes, but it can be tough to gauge how thick the bottom of something is.) If the flowers are too short, they have to be entirely defoliated and end up looking as if they were being garroted, which isn’t a pleasing decorative effect unless you happen to live in a dungeon, and maybe not even then. The more I tried to explain this, the more traumatized he looked. By the time the ordeal was over (the first vase got marred when they tried to scrape off the brand label for me, so they had to bring a second one out of the stockroom–yet more agitated activity for one of these foreigners with their strange requests), I was feeling traumatized myself.

Luckily, one of my friends was back from a week home in Australia, so we went out for a restorative drink and catch-up. Less luckily, just as the vase encounter had blissfully slipped from the memory, I was beset by two guys who had been talking and flirting with my buddy.

It was the usual round of questions: How long have you been here? Where are you from? Oh, and where did you grow up? Oh, where on the East Coast? Pennsylvania? Where in Pennsylvania? Oh. Well, then, where on the Philadelphia end of the state?

At this point, I know I’m in for it. Long draught of vodka. Sigh. “From just outside Allentown.”

One beat. Two beats.

Oh! You mean like the Billy Joel song?

Now, that everyone I will ever meet in my entire life will respond to the mention of Allentown with that exact sentence is a harsh reality to which I have long been inured. That everyone seems to think he’s the first to think of it also doesn’t bother me–we’re all less original than we like to imagine we are.

But rarely do two people utter it at the same time.

And then start singing the song at me in stereo.

My buddy, who’s seen this conversation and my wearied reaction many times before, stifled an uncharitable chuckle and excused himself to go to the toilet. (Bitch. I’ll remember that.) Fortunately for me, another friend, one who actually understands the meaning of loyalty, was on my other side. At the first opportunity, he commandeered my empty glass and waved one of the bar guys over. “Oh, darling–not just the Allentown comment, but impromptu karaoke as well? I saw your fist clenching and unclenching–just be glad it’s over now and relax and drink this.”

*******

And while I’m mewling, why do delivery services find it necessary to play head games with you? Tokyu Hands originally told me my latest acquisitions could be delivered between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., but that I’d be called with a more exact time this morning. Fine. I get a call at 8:30: “I’ll be arriving at your place between 11:00 and 13:00.” Okay. At least that’s a reasonably narrow range.

At 10:30 I’m getting ready to get in the shower so I can be out, dressed, and maquillage-èd by the time the guy comes. (Just because I want to be able to leave for work right after receiving my delivery, not for the other reason that may occur to the image-conscious gay mind. Japan must be the only country on Earth without hot delivery men and construction workers.) My keitai rings. “Hi! It’s XX from Tokyu Hands. I’m at your building in less than five minutes.” Granted that being early is better than making you wait around endlessly, I was just lucky I hadn’t decided to go out and run some errands under the assumption that it would be okay to be back at my apartment by 10:55 or so. (I’ve done so before with unpleasant results.)

On the bright side, the apartment is nearing completion.

Wow. Honor-saving suicide is common here, but rarely is it the way taken out by someone so high up in the government hierarchy:

Toshikatsu Matsuoka, the farm minister who stubbornly refused calls for his resignation over money scandals, died Monday after hanging himself at his Tokyo residence, government officials said.

…

He is the first incumbent Cabinet member to have committed suicide since the current Constitution took effect, and the seventh Diet member since the end of World War II.

…

Opposition lawmakers in the Diet as well as the media had demanded Matsu-oka explain shady expenditures by his fund-management group for utilities and other costs for his office. He refused.

He was also criticized for political donations that allegedly came from organizations connected to a bid-rigging scandal.

The Asahi article doesn’t elaborate on the utilities thing, but my understanding–I haven’t been following the story all that closely, but it’s been in the news a lot–is that he double-charged for utilities, getting reimbursements for charges that were already covered by the Diet. There’s already been a raid on a semi-governmental agency in relation to the bid-rigging charge.

Added later: I meant to link to the Nikkei story, which I didn’t quote except in the post title but which was where I first saw the news. Somehow I forgot. Of course, since this morning, there’s been time for all the relevant parties in the Abe administration to get their (stunned) comments in. Reuters sums up pretty well in English. Interestingly, the Yomiuri is reporting on the Reuters report, among others. Headline: “Suicide of Agriculture Minister Matsuoka ‘will be serious blow to Abe administration,’ say major foreign news services.” It’s not that they needed the AP to tell them that, of course; what’s presumably of interest is that the foreign press has latched onto the political significance of the event faster than the Japanese media. Since this is a local story, we’ve been mostly hearing about what kind of hook Matsuoka was hanging on and what tie his aide was wearing when he discovered the body. Well, okay, it’s not that bad, but you get the idea.

Minister of the Environment Wakabayashi is set to become acting Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries on 30 May. The Asahi has posted a roundup (in the original Japanese) of Matsuoka’s more choice soundbites in response to charges of malfeasance.

BTW, if you’re wondering about that quotation from Abe, I think what he originally said that was translated as “I am overwhelmed with shame” was “慙愧に堪えない,” and it’s not entirely clear what he was referring to. Shame that a minister under his leadership was driven to suicide? Shame that he didn’t manage the scandals better before they ended up here? Everyone is going to be watching how he maneuvers in the next few days.

Just finished using my ice cream maker for the first time; there’s no better way to assess how nimble the temperature control is on your burners than by making custard. (Double boilers are for sissies.) Things turned out fine, though even on the lowest setting, we got perilously close to Scramble City. So we’ve now established that I can contrive all my staple foods without incident here.

I think I accidentally took Atsushi’s grater and a few other kitchen-drawer things, too. Will have to give him yet another parcel of items now. We’ve been meeting pretty regularly; the still-friends thing is working, if still a bit awkwardly. This weekend, I finally had a chance to give him back my key to the apartment, and there was a sense of finality to it that put me a little out of sorts. (Silly, I know, given that we broke up in October and I moved out a month ago.) I’ve been on a Fleetwood Mac jag since then. Mostly Tusk . Yeah, yeah, yeah– Rumours is the break-up classic, but it doesn’t fit. Between Atushi and me, there’s neither Lindsey-Stevie hostility nor a John-Christine thing in which one helplessly watches the other’s spiral of self-destruction. We’re just kind of wary around each other–acutely attentive to boundaries and things. So it’s mostly Tusk with Interiors thrown in occasionally.

In other news, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous here. Time to start thinking about houseplants, actually. Hope everyone else is enjoying the slide into late spring.

Wendy Kaminer has a column in Opinion Journal about the ACLU’s increasing political slant, visible more through omission than through commission. The shift is bad enough simply because it’s a corruption of the organization’s supposed mission, but it has the nasty side-effect of playing into the sort of condescending gays-are-emotionally-frail-and-need-to-be-shielded-from-hostility malarkey that’s a real impediment to progress:

[I]n 2004, when Tyler Chase Harper was disciplined for wearing a T-shirt declaring his religious objections to homosexuality, civil libertarians might have expected the ACLU to protest loudly. Mr. Harper was barred from attending classes when he wore the antigay T-shirt to school on an official “Day of Silence,” when gay students taped their mouths to symbolize the silencing effect of intolerance. Represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, he sued the school district. That same year, the ACLU initiated the first of two actions against a Missouri school that punished students for wearing “gay supportive T-shirts,” eventually securing a promise from the school to “stop censoring,” the ACLU Web site boasts. Mr. Harper, however, was unsuccessful in his quest to stop school censorship. In a patronizing, antilibertarian decision in which Judge Stephen Reinhardt stressed the imagined feelings of gay students, the Ninth Circuit rejected Mr. Harper’s First Amendment claims. (There was a sharp dissent from Judge Alex Kozinski.)

Perhaps the ACLU was observing its own prolonged Day of Silence, because, while it pays close attention to federal appellate court decisions on civil liberties, it effectively ignored this terrible precedent, even when Mr. Harper appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed the case as moot because Mr. Harper had graduated but took the unusual step of vacating the decision so that it no longer exists as precedent (no thanks to the ACLU).

Yeah, I’m focusing on the gay thing because it’s a pet peeve of mine, but Kaminer has more on the Muhammed cartoons and counseling related to abortion. None of it’s really news, but it’s disturbing to see it all laid out together and coherently.

In better news, Kaminer is one of the bloggers at thefreeforall.net. Good reading if you were won over by the likes of I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional .

You will doubtless be shocked to hear that, in the wake of the fatal roller coaster accident a few weeks ago, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport is finding safety lapses all over the place:

Seven roller coasters examined in emergency inspections following a fatal accident at an amusement park in Osaka Prefecture had problems such as worn wheels and cracked axles, it has emerged.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport on Wednesday announced the results of its emergency inspection of roller coasters around the nation. A total of 306 roller coasters were to be subject to the inspections, and problems were found with seven of the 256 roller coasters whose inspections have already finished.

Ministry officials said that failing to deal with the problems could lead to an accident.

The inspection also found that operators of 119 roller coasters, nearly 40 percent of the total number, had not carried out annual flaw inspections as required by Japanese Industrial Standards. A total of 72 of the 306 roller coasters, or about 24 percent of the total number, had never once [!!!!–SRK] been inspected for flaws, the ministry investigation found.

Nice. Of course, we should all be used to this by now. Every time something like this happens–the JR West derailment springs readily to mind–it’s discovered afterward that there’s a record of laxity. Often there’s no cover-up involved per se, just a failure to focus attention on addresing problems or attending to things that aren’t going to be immediately visible to people on the outside.

The bill for the restructuring of United States military forces stationed in Japan was passed yesterday. There are still complaints about its incentives for municipalities that will be taking installations. The federal government (of Japan, I mean, of course) will be providing subsidies:

However, for some in the opposition parties and the regional governments affected, opposition remained deep-rooted, and there remained a lack of transparency about the progression of the development plan: “The autonomous judgment of region[al governments] will be distorted.”

The Yomiuri has an English report. It’s hard to dispute that offering subsidies tends to motivate local governments to play along as they must to get them, even if it’s something they (or their citizens) might not otherwise like. But this is hardly a special case in that regard, and at least military installations serve a more obvious purpose than cultural halls and multi-lane highways to depopulated hamlets. Bases, nuclear facilities, and waste treatment plants all have to go somewhere.

While we’re on the subject of blame-shifting losers, I may as well point out that James Kirchick at IGF has a very good piece on why James McGreevey should be excommunicated from gay community life. Yes, the point has been made already, but gay leaders keep feting the guy, so it bears repeating:

There are millions of gay people in this country. Most of us are not as politically powerful and connected as Jim McGreevey once was. We work hard, pay our taxes, put up with discrimination, and, I’d like to think, if we ever get caught doing something wrong, do not rashly blame our fate on an inability to deal with sexual orientation. But Jim McGreevey was too much of a coward to admit that what he did was just plain wrong and that he was entirely to blame for his misfortune.

The world is unfair to gay people and the higher rates of suicide, depression and personally destructive behavior amongst gays, especially gay men, has a great deal to do with external homophobia. But let there be no mistake: McGreevey was forced to resign because he was a corrupt politician who shared more in common with the men in his administration now serving time in jail than he would care to believe.

Rather than own up to his abuse of office, McGreevey conflated his political corruption with his own struggles as a gay man. In so doing, he lent credence to the ignorant meme peddled by conservatives that gays are emotionally unstable and shifty people who cannot be trusted as individuals, never mind as public servants.

America loves a redemption story; ace image manipulators like McGreevey and Stephen Glass know that. Unfortunately for them, there’s a fly in the ointment: To pitch yourself as shriven and reborn, you have to be able to admit to wrongdoing. For some people, that’s an unbearable prospect. So they end up twisting themselves into moral-ethical pretzels along the lines of, “Oh, my, yes…I totally betrayed the trust of people close to me, people who counted on me to fulfill my responsibilities. I’m just sick with guilt. But, you see, I wasn’t quite myself at the time…it was all the pressure…the pressure…so, uh, you do love me again, right?”

At Reason.com, Steve Chapman gives a very Reason-like rebuttal to claims that Generation Y is so coddled, lazy, and fatuously self-loving as to spell doom for America:

Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, reports that college students increasingly agree with statements indicating oversized egos, such as “I am an important person.” Marian Salzman, a senior vice president at the advertising agency JWT, told The Christian Science Monitor, “Gen-Y is the most difficult workforce I’ve ever encountered,” because they “are so self-indulgent.”

But before Gen Y-ers start to feel bad about themselves, they should know that worse things were said about their parents. Back in the 1960s and ’70s, it was universal wisdom that the kids of that era suffered from too much coddling. Vice President Spiro Agnew blamed student unrest and other problems on “spoiled brats who never had a good spanking.” Best-selling author Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” complained about youngsters whose parents felt a duty to “satisfy their every desire.”

The indicators Chapman cites–lower rates of teen smoking, drinking, and pregnancy; tightened acceptance rates at top colleges–make sense as evidence that These Kids Today aren’t irredeemably screwed up, although there are useful qualifiers to add. Chapman doesn’t cite anything to disprove the allegation that those arriving at their first jobs have unrealistic expectations. Also, while the acceptance rates for individual colleges have gone down, the number of colleges to which the average student gunning for the hoity-toity schools applies has gone way up. It’s not really certain how much harder it is for a given student to get into top-tier schools in general than it would have been for a student with the same qualifications a decade or two ago.

The stuff about pressure to perform in Chapman’s article was interesting because, looking for a DVD to play in the background while I did stuff around the apartment, I idly picked out a copy of Shattered Glass . Because my mind was on kitchen equipment and grocery orders, I didn’t fully register the title; I thought someone had made a movie version of Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass , which I’d seen performed a dozen years ago and been unimpressed by. Maybe I’ll feel differently this time around.

When I got home and actually looked at the cover, I realized I’d made a mistake: Shattered Glass was a dramatization of the Stephen Glass story-fabrication scandal at TNR nine years ago. It turned out to be pretty well done, and it did a good job of avoiding the specific annoying pitfall I feared it would fall right into.

There’s a point early on when one of Glass’s colleagues confronts him about applying to law school. He whines that he’s under tremendous pressure from his parents in Lake Forest to become a lawyer, not a journalist. I was afraid that, as the movie developed, that pressure would be presented as a possible sympathetic explanation for his motivations: chilly phone conversations in which his mother pointedly informs him that the boy he grew up with down the street is doing his residency at Massachusetts General, or his father casts aspersions on his income potential as a political commentator.

It turned out that no such scenes were forthcoming, and I was pleasantly surprised. Glass was, after all, one of thousands of graduates of Penn and comparable schools with pushy, demanding parents. To the extent that one wants a more specific explanation for his behavior than sheer amorality (which is enough for me, frankly), his problem seems to be less that he was under pressure than that he couldn’t stand the idea of not always being the golden boy. Miss Manners once wrote something to the effect of, “Anyone who expects to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral is in for a difficult life.” There are few things more salutary–when you’re in your 20s and everyone is constantly going on about how smart and sharp-witted and charming and capable you are–than to be assigned a load of scut work you disdain, do a half-assed job of it, and later discover that you overlooked something important that comes back around and bites you. (Yes, this is experience talking.) Glass only wanted to do the glam stuff, so when the right subject matter didn’t come his way organically, he invented it. Buckling down and making the best of a boring story or lackluster quotations would have been beneath him.

No one is accusing Generation Y en masse of such extremes, of course. I was more thinking in terms of pressures in the workplace and how people can be expected to respond to them. Self-esteem is notoriously difficult to quantify, so I’m not sure that an increase in the number of students who agree with such squishy propositions as “I am an important person” says much. And my sense is that, even if Ms. Salzman is right about college grads who’ve just been hired, most of them will adjust pretty quickly to reality and learn to perform.

Added later: It goes without saying that if Glass had had a fraction of Alice’s sense, he wouldn’t have gotten himself into such a pickle.

The apartment is basically assembled now. There was no DIY that would pass muster as such at, say, Casa d’Alger, but I did manage to set up a kitchen in which you can actually cook.

You know how it is when you find an apartment you like–there’s always one thing so seriously wrong as to be a possible deal-breaker. Everything about this place was fine except for the kitchen, which has no counter space. I mean none at all. There’s not quite a sheer drop from the edge of the cooktop into the sink, but the space between them won’t even accommodate a dinner plate. By Tokyo standards, Atsushi’s apartment was a cook’s dream: task lighting; work space wide enough for your extra-long cutting board, a bowl or two off to the side, and your glass of wine; three burners; and acres of cabinet space. But then, it’s a two-bedroom place, the assumption being that it will be occupied by a couple with children and that the lady of the house will not be satisfied with a kitchen she can barely turn around in.

My new apartment was designed for a (heterosexual) single person, so the assumption is that there will be nothing more complicated going on than the warming of a bento from the convenience store. (Okay, fine. That parenthetical was a little unfair. I have gay friends who can’t boil water, too. But even they recognize that you need room for fabulous equipment on the countertop.) The only solution was to eat some space from the living room and set up a counter of sorts there. I had an old set of steel shelves kicking around that cleaned up fine, and the manufacturer still makes modular wood tops in the right size. I had a piece of cobalt blue acrylic cut to fit at Tokyu Hands and fastened it on as a serviceable backsplash. It works just fine and looks, frankly, much better than I’d expected. In Tokyo built environments, better than expected often has to be enough.

Still no plans to compromise on the throw pillows, though.

Wow. Just, wow. Perhaps we’ve found an explanation for Japan’s extraordinarily low murder rate:

Forensic doctors ridicule certain facets of this country’s medical practices, saying, “The living are offered advanced care, but the dead receive Edo-period treatment,” meaning that while sick people receive excellent medical treatment, those who die of unnatural causes are cursorily examined only by sight or touch–a practice not much different from that used during the Edo period (1603-1867).

With a shortage of forensic doctors, equipment and funds, the autopsy rate for unnatural deaths is lower than 10 percent–a figure that continues to fall.

…

When someone dies of unnatural causes, doctors working for the police, on a commission basis, are asked to examine the body at the site. But these doctors are private practitioners who lack forensic expertise.

Since they determine the cause of death purely by sight or touch, they cannot determine whether a person died from poisoning or drugs, or whether the person suffered internal bleeding or broken bones.

In a field where even experienced forensic doctors make false diagnoses in 40 percent of cases, police officers–laymen in this area–and private practitioners are entrusted with the job.

A senior police officer experienced in the matter said most people who die unnatural deaths are cremated, and are presumed to have died from causes such as heart failure or stroke after an initial examination, which rules out the possibility that they died at the hands of a criminal.

Of course, it’s not just crimes that it’s helpful to uncover; it’s helpful to know about unnatural causes such as accidental poisonings or reactions to medication, too. One contributor to the worsening situation is that medical school students are staying away from forensic medicine.

Some medical facilities even lack autopsy tables and basic medical equipment.

Administrative rigmarole is also seen as a hurdle to increasing the autopsy rate.

When an initial examination determines that a death may be crime-related, the public prosecutors office is put in charge of the judicial autopsy under the Criminal Procedure Code.

In the case of an unnatural death unrelated to crime, autopsies fall under the supervision of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.

Under the law for conserving cadavers for autopsy, prefectural governments should determine whether an autopsy should be conducted from the standpoint of public hygiene, but bereaved families are usually allowed to have the final say.

I doubt the official murder rate would, like, double if practices were brought more into line with those of other countries. Even so, being offed by a family member (it used to be for life insurance money) is the stock Japanese sort of killing, and the likelihood that it will be discovered is seriously decreased if families get deciding power over whether even an initial autopsy is performed.