Too much time, too little to do!

No, wait. That’s not it.

Anyway, quick link to this Open Source radio interview with Camille Paglia about the resignation of Larry Summers from the presidency of Harvard (via Rondi Adamson).

I haven’t actually heard her speak for a decade or so, so I was interested to hear what she sounded like at fifty-nine. Believe it or not, she’s mellowed. I mean, she talks at a more leisured pace. Of course, you can still tell she’s spent her entire life chatting with artfags–Girlfriend italicizes all her adjectives: everything is “extra-orrrr-dinary!” or “un-pah-latable!” But she actually talks slowly enough that you can digest what she’s saying now. She certainly didn’t the few times I heard her lecture in college, which was part of the fun.

Even more, I think, than Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, or Jonathan Rauch, Paglia gave me a feeling of assurance–her media fame was skyrocketing on the other side of the city while I was in college–that you could be bookishly gay without being either a picturesquely noble AIDS sufferer or a high-strung spoiled brat. I’m glad she’s still materializing to talk about educational reform and PC perniciousness sometimes, because the problems she was addressing in 1991 are still with us.

So. You know when your copy of Bruce Bawer’s new book has just come from Amazon and you’re all like, Cool! I shall recline languourously on the sofa and drink tea and eat madeleines and read about what happened While Europe Slept , and Life is like, Wait a minute, there–you have people at the OFFICE who are DEPENDING on you to work LATE, and you’re like, Wah! and Life is like, Look, bitch–no GAINFUL without EMPLOYMENT…?

Yeah, me too.

I’m sure it’ll be great when I get to it, possibly this weekend when Atsushi’s home again and we can do the tea thing together.

Of course, excess employment is not everyone’s problem right now. A prominent DPJ member has resigned over the whole e-mail flap:

Following its admission that what it claimed to be an explosive e-mail was inauthentic, the Democratic Party of Japan announced Tuesday one of its executives had resigned from his post as the party publicly apologized for the accusation made by a party lawmaker about a son of the Liberal Democratic Party’s secretary general.

DPJ Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Yoshihiko Noda resigned Tuesday. He told the party’s executive committee he made the decision to step down from his post in order to take responsibility for giving lawmaker Hisayasu Nagata the green light to make an allegation that turned out to be false and which resulted in a nearly two-week-long dispute that stalled other Diet business.

Nagata, meanwhile, was suspended from the party for six months. He was also dismissed as vice chairman of the party’s Diet Affairs Committee and director of the House of Representatives Financial Affairs Committee.

An interesting cultural point is made by DPJ leader Seiji Maehara’s reaction:

“Though I’ve decided to continue in my position and make a fresh start for the party, somebody must take responsibility so I had to let the Diet affairs chief, whom I trust most, go,” Maehara said.

At least he stopped short of “This hurts me more than it hurts you, Yoshi-kun.”

Another resignation that may bode well for us JAL fliers was announced today:

JAL officially announced on 1 March that JAL Group CED Toshiyuki Shinmachi (63) will accept responsibility for the corporation’s internal conflicts, step down from his post and assume the position of Chairman of the Board, which carries no right to representation; he will be succeeded as president by Haruka Nishimatsu (58). At a press conference, Shinmachi explained the reason for his stepping down: “We must attend to the situation sooner rather than later to recover [the public’s] trust.”

…

Nishimatsu said, “The JAL Group is in danger of not surviving. I want to get the board and our employees on the same page in order to recover [the public’s] trust.”

The Mainichi has an English report here.

Shinmachi apparently considered pulling a Maehara:

The president of the holding company of the Japan Airlines (JAL) group, Toshiyuki Shinmachi, is poised to step down to settle internal strife that began after four executives demanded he and two other top executives resign to take responsibility for the company’s poor performance, company officials said.

…

Vice President Katsuo Haneda and Senior Managing Director Hidekazu Nishizuka, who had been urged by the four executives to step down, will also leave their positions, while the company will apparently demand that at least one of the four rebel executives resign.

Shinmachi had initially intended to propose that both of the two top executives and the rebels should be punished to take responsibility for the internal strife while he remained as president for now.

We’ll see what happens, of course. Luckily this is all anticipatory. Unlike, say, JR West, JAL has lost trust not because of a horrifying fatal accident but because of debate and a series of bad-PR warnings from the JAA and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport.

The Iranian foreign minister met with Prime Minister Koizumi today:

On 28 February, Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki at the Prime Minister’s residence. About the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, Koizumi stated, “We would like you to do whatever you must to win the trust of the global community,” requesting an immediate cessation of Iran’s experiments with uranium enrichment and activities related to nuclear development. Mottaki responded, “We have a right to the peaceable use of nuclear power” and rejected the idea of ceasing nuclear development.

…

LDP Secretary General Shinzo Abe, also on 28 February, stated emphatically to a press conference, “We seek Iran’s cessation of uranium enrichment and complete fulfillment of the terms laid down by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board so that it may avoid being isolated from the global community.”

No surprises, no revelations–as expected. Japan has affirmed that it’s on the side of (blech) the global community, and Iran seems not to have taken Japan’s position as a sign of enmity.

FWIW, the part I didn’t bother translating states that Speaker of the House Yohei Kono requested that Iran accept the proposal from this weekend for a joint initiative with Russia, whereby the uranium enrichment Iran needs would be attended to there.

I’m afraid that if I don’t stop reading Jeff and Joanne, I am going to lose my mind, collar Atsushi and take him away from this topsy-turvy world to an uncharted island, where we can read poetry and history beneath a shady lean-to woven from leaves and I can feed him on green mango salad and roasted fishies and we can live out our days in peace without constantly being reminded how many TOTAL NINNIES there are abroad in the land.

Apparently, Oriana Fallaci is now a fascist. Who knew, huh? Cathy Seipp says that a friend of hers wanted a copy of the English translation of Fallaci’s latest book and thought, foolishly, that City Lights would be an apt place to pick it up:

So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was in yet.

“No,” snapped the clerk. “We don’t carry books by fascists.”

Now let’s just savor the absurd details of this for a minute. City Lights has a long and proud history of supporting banned authors — owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted (and acquitted) for obscenity in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and a photo at the bookstore showed Ferlinghetti proudly posing next to a sign reading “banned books.”

Yet his store won’t carry, of all people, Fallaci, who is not only being sued in Italy for insulting religion because of her latest book but continues to fight the good fight against those who think that the appropriate response to offensive books and cartoons is violent riots. It’s particularly repugnant that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by a snotty San Francisco clerk.

Strangest of all is the scenario of such a person disliking an author for defending Western civilization against radical Islam — when one of the first things those poor, persecuted Islamists would do, if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the United States, is crush suspected homosexuals like him beneath walls.

Not only is it helping free speech not to stock a book by a noted free-thinker, but it’s apparently liberating to a teenager to tell her she should shut her mind to a major academic subject. Joanne Jacobs retains her ever-unflappable demeanor while posting a critique of this incomprehensibly dumb Richard Cohen column:

I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time–the only proof I’ve ever seen of divine intervention–somehow passed geometry and resolved, with a grateful exhale of breath, that I would never go near math again. I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.

Here’s the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know–never mind want to know–how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later–or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note–or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.

The column is over a week old and has been whaled away at by several education bloggers linked by Joanne. Most of them have done an admirable job of defending the usefulness of algebra. But another aspect that deserves attention is Cohen’s corresponding (and self-congratulatory) balderdash about writing.

Certainly, too few people can write well–no one can gainsay that point. However, there are far too many people who think that style is a substitute for substance. The world now has plenty of English and sociology and history majors who got by by producing essays using the approved template–organized into paragraphs, featuring footnotes in MLA style, relying on the occasional po-mo wordplay to score points for insouciance–without being schooled in cold, hard facts. These are the people you encounter whose arguments sound great when you first hear them–because their internal logic is sound–but fall apart a few hours later when you have time to test them against real life and think, Wait a minute! She never even CONSIDERED the possibility that…. The more facts you have in your mental database, the more likely you are to have some sense of what you don’t know and, thus, to be able to diagnose and address your own assumptions. Pooh-poohing the rigidities of math and overpraising the flexibilities of writing is a good way to reinforce the too-common American belief that you can bluff your way through anything.

The Iranian foreign minister is now in Japan for talks; the build-up was covered in the Japanese press, though there never really seemed to be any developments interesting enough to comment on. In any case, Japan has normal relations with Iran and buys quite a bit of its petroleum, so it has a lot of incentive to smooth some of the recent conflicts over:

Iran and Russia on Sunday agreed in principle to establish a joint uranium enrichment venture, a breakthrough in talks on the U.S.-backed Kremlin proposal. But it was not known whether Iran will entirely give up enrichment at home, a top demand of the West.

Japan, which relies on Iran for much of its oil imports, has been keen to play a role in resolving the standoff. Tokyo also has a special link with Mottaki, who served as ambassador to Japan from 1994-1999.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was slated to meet Japan’s Foreign Minister Taro Aso later Monday. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi also was to greet Mottaki, the Foreign Ministry said.

This TEPCO page puts the percent of Japan’s 2003 oil imports that came from Iran at 16.1%.

The Nikkei doesn’t have one of its quickie five-line stories posted about the visit, which suggests that the meeting with Aso hasn’t yet produced anything quotable.

The US may give some of the Yokota airbase back to Japan. The issue is airspace rather than land:

Each day, about 470 commercial flights in and out of Haneda and Narita airports must take alternate routes to avoid airspace controlled by the U.S. military’s Yokota airbase, according to a calculation by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

Some flights detour around the space and others make steeper ascents than needed.

The number of flights affected will rise to about 650 in 2009 with more traffic at the airports, the study said.

The extra fuel cost is 8 billion yen a year, likely to climb to 10.9 billion yen in 2009.

If a southern section of the airspace were returned to Japan, the extra cost and the flight times could be minimized, the report said.

While Japan’s population isn’t rising, the number of flights in and out of Tokyo is. The closest Japan has had to a civil aviation disaster since the Otsuka crash in 1985 was in 2001, when two JAL jets came within thirty feet of colliding. Tokyo Metro Governor Shintaro Ishihara blamed the strictures on flightpaths imposed by having US military airspace so close to Haneda and Narita, though it must be noted that weird ascent and descent patterns were not exactly the only problem on display:

Transport ministry officials said the post-accident report filed by the DC-10 pilot, Tatsuyuki Akazawa, 45, also indicated the two planes missed each other by a whisker. “Altitude difference little, lateral distance none,” Mr. Akazawa’s report said.

The incident occurred early Wednesday evening. The Boeing Flight 907 was ascending to a cruising altitude of 11,300 meters, while the DC-10 Flight 958 was descending from 11,900 meters to prepare for landing at the New Tokyo International Airport in Narita, Chiba Prefecture, transport ministry officials said.

Both planes were equipped with the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, a computerized device that would alert pilots when they were flying too close to each other.

…

Ministry officials said air traffic communications records kept at the Tokyo Air Traffic Control Center, based in Tokorozawa, Saitama Prefecture, show that air traffic controllers repeatedly used wrong flight numbers in telling the pilots of the two airplanes to change course.

The official in charge of the two flights, a 26-year-old man in his third year of training as an air traffic controller, first realized that the flight paths of the two planes were too close and initiated warnings to the two pilots under the supervision of a 32-year-old controller who served as his coach.

According to air traffic communications records released by the transport ministry, the male air traffic controller twice ordered the Boeing 747 to lower its attitude and the DC-10 to turn right.

As there was no response, the coach broke into the radio channel and told ” Flight 957″ to immediately lower its altitude.

The record shows that the coach again misspoke the flight number when the Boeing 747 pilot radioed in that there was an alert on the aircraft’s collision avoidance system and he was descending. “Roger, flight 908,” she said, in a message meant for the Boeing flight 907 pilot.

Moments later, the DC-10 flight 958 pilot reported to air traffic control that alert also sounded on his collision avoidance system, and the trainee controller responded, “Roger, flight 908.” “The situation was extremely dangerous,” Mr. Watanabe told air traffic control after the near-fatal collision was averted. Analysts said that had the Boeing not dived to avoid a collision, “the worst ever accident in aviation history” could have occurred.

The Boeing 747 was carrying 411 passengers and 16 crew members, and the DC-10 had 250 passengers and crew members on board.

Poor communication about the collision avoidance system was the major cause of the midair collision over Germany in 2002, though the air traffic controller involved was undone by circumstances and didn’t blurt out non-existent flight numbers.

Speaking of changes in US military facilities, several thousand Marines may or may not be moved out of Okinawa as part of the Futenma restructuring plan. They would be relocated to Guam.

Just saw Atsushi off at the station. I have to go in to the office today, and things are easier for him at work on Monday if he doesn’t take the last flight and get back to Kyushu late. That meant I had about twenty-six hours to help him recharge.

Yesterday he was tired as usual–insufficient sleep is really common among office workers here–so after we had tea in our new Froot Loops-inspired cups, he napped while I finally got around to writing a few letters. (You’ll have no trouble believing I’m the fountain-pen-and-linen-paper type, yeah?)

One envelope for my best friend from high school. She lives in Toronto now, and up until a year or so ago, we were really good about calling and writing once every two months or so. But you know, you get busy, and you figure you can always e-mail, and then you just sort of don’t. Meaning that I’m just now answering her Christmas card.

Inside another envelope, a letter to my first American gay friend in Japan, a former colleague now in his late forties who’s been with his Japanese boyfriend for…jeez, it must be going on fifteen years?…anyway, they’re two of the buddies who helped me through my twenties by listening to my bitching and doing their you’re-not-seriously-going-to-date-that-organism-are-you-sweetie? duty when necessary. No, I’m not going to tell you how often it was necessary. I will say that, naturally, they love Atsushi.

They moved back to the States a few years ago, and they’re going to kill me if I don’t take them up on their invitation to visit them in Oregon one of these days; but for now, all I can manage is to answer not only their Christmas card but this random package they sent me a few months ago. It had a bag of truly frightening cheap-o candy in it–garishly-colored fake hamburgers and french fries and stuff–with a bunch of jokey post-it notes attached and a thinking-of-you message scrawled in magic marker. It came on a day that really needed some brightening up (some friends seem to have a sixth sense about that), and I wrote a thank-you e-mail right away and swore I’d produce a real, proper, witticism-filled, intimate letter that weekend. I think that was…November?

Look, at least I e-mailed right away.

And no, those are not the only people I owe letters. Everyone else gets tackled tomorrow.

Speaking of tackling–hell, speaking of e-mails–while I was making brunch this morning, we had one of the Sunday political yak shows on, and the whole deliciously inane debate over that supposedly incriminating e-mail from Takafumi Horie instructing that money be paid to Chief Cabinet Secretary Tsutomu Takebe’s younger son ( Nikkei Japanese report, Yomiuri English report–love the headline!) was the story of the day.

Those who haven’t lived here seem to assume, because of the Japanese cultural reputation for inscrutable politeness, that government proceedings are executed with a “With all due respect to my esteemed colleague from Aomori Prefecture, I believe that he is under something of a misapprehension” tone.

Ha-ha.

They showed Takebe getting windily indignant in front of a press conference, which was only marginally entertaining. Then they showed Prime Minister Koizumi and DPJ leader Seiji Maehara (is it my imagination, or does he look more like Nefertiti every time he appears in front of a camera?) blustering at each other in the Diet. I couldn’t pay close attention from the kitchen, but it was the expected “You’ve proved nothing!” and “We need time to see whether we can prove something–it’s a freakin’ Swiss bank account!” stuff. As always, there was angry burbling in the background that you figured might erupt, which would have been all kinds of cool. We LOVE uproar in the Diet. Unfortunately, things didn’t explode. Papers didn’t fly through the air, water pitchers remained un-upended, and things just sort of stayed at the percolating-animosity level. But hey–there’s plenty of time for things to get more complicated and vicious, and this is already more fun than Rathergate!

Off to work.

Added over slovenly-bachelor busy-day lunch of Big Mac, fries, and Coke: Atsushi reads this blog and asks me questions about cultural references and slang he doesn’t get, so I know that tonight, I’ll pick up my cell phone when it rings and hear, “Hi, dearest. What are Froot Loops?” Froot Loops are a super-sugary breakfast cereal. When I was little, I only ate at friends’ houses or my grandmother’s. My parents bought only unsweetened cereal most of the time. But of course, you couldn’t miss the ads unless you didn’t have a TV, and it’s a pretty universally-known consumer-culture artifact.

This is also a good opportunity to point out that the pro-Denmark gathering in DC took place as planned over the weekend. Instapundit naturally has pictures.

I should be in bed, but I couldn’t raise Atsushi on the phone earlier. It turned out (by no means unusually) that his company had had a drinking party after work.

Fortunately, he called me back at 00:45-ish to say that he was going to make his flight here tomorrow as planned. Unfortunately, he also said that he can’t stay until Tuesday as we’d hoped. (He has vacation days stored up, and we were figuring that this would be a good time to burn through some of them.) At least he’ll have 36 hours or so of being tended to, since tomorrow I don’t have to go in to the office, so when he arrives, we can go buy whatever he’d like me to make for lunch. Then he can veg on the sofa for a while as usual. No, of course, I’m not using that as an excuse to get him to help with the weekly household shopping.

Okay, maybe just a little bit.

But the POINT is that I at least have two days to work out the stress he’s accumulated from living in his designated hovel and working in Kyushu, so we’ll make the most of it as always. If there’s big news here, I may post about it; otherwise, hope everyone has a good weekend.

Getting about time for spring poems to be appropriate again. The Vernal Equinox is still a while off, but not spring according to the traditional lunar calendar. I posted one of my favorites when I first began this blog:

岩間とぢし氷も今朝はとけそめて苔の下水みちもとむらむ

西行法師

Iwama todjishi / koori mo kesa ha / tokesomete / Koke no shita mizu / michi motomuramu

Saigyou-houshi

Even the ice that shackles the rocks has begun to melt this morning–the water under the moss will be seeking a pathway.

the Priest Saigyo

The Japanese are very big on what you might call “the moment before.” As in, the cherry trees are considered most poignantly beautiful immediately before they bloom–when you can see the buds straining to burst open. What Saigyo describes above isn’t the return of spring, exactly–it’s that moment when you get a sense that something is stirring under the remaining cover of winter.

Of course, the Japanese can also poeticize the moment after. Another of my favorite poets, Yosano Akiko, included this among the first poems in her most famous collection:

ゆあみして泉を出でしわがはだにふるるはつらき人の世のきぬ

与謝野晶子

Yu-ami shite / izumi wo ideshi / Waga hada ni / fururu ha tsuraki / hito no yo no kinu

Yosano Akiko

Finishing my bath
and emerging from the spring,
I could hardly bear
their chafing against my skin,
the silks of the world of man

Yosano Akiko

I have a vague memory that the きぬ may have been glossed, in an old annotated version I read years ago, as just meaning “robe,” but if Akiko isn’t going to use kanji, then I’m going to assume she means “silk,” which in any case intensifies the heightened, raw sensitivity she feels. My guess is that the poem is from, if not now, some time in the winter, because that’s when you get out of an open-air hot spring and think, Man, it’s cold! Well, if you’re not a poet, like me. If you’re a poet, like Akiko, you think in tanka.

Damn. If your US residence is in the 15th District, you can get something called the Dent Dispatch, which feeds your inbox with the latest news from Charlie Dent’s website. Most of the time it’s the usual “I managed to snag $3 million in federal money for a Memorial to Pennsylvania Dutch Settlers to be erected in front of the old Hess’s Main Store” or whatever. But Reason has reached back a few months for one of his more wacky overreaches. I find that when reading whatever his latest post is, it helps to linger a few seconds on the very adorable picture he has posted at the top of each page first, because once you get to the words…well, look here:

“The growing availability of methamphetamine is a form of terrorism unto itself,” Congressman Dent said. “This bill will help reduce the supply of this deadly drug by making it more difficult to obtain the ingredients necessary for production. It will also stiffen existing penalties for anyone caught producing or trafficking in meth.”

You know, if Pennsylvania politicians keep talking nonsense like this whenever they open their mouth about terrorism, I’m going to have to start telling people I’m from “near New Jersey.”

Okay, no, it’ll never get that bad. But still.

The availability of meth is a form of terrorism? I can see how buying illegal drugs, which puts money in the hands of shady characters who sometimes funnel it to terrorists, can be seen as abetting terrorism. That doesn’t mean I’m in favor of the War on Drugs, I hope it’s obvious. I’m just saying that someone who managed to brush past rationality in a crowded hallway within the last week could see a connection.