You know, I still think of myself as a commenter on a handful of my favorite blogs who just happens to have a site of his own, dilettante-like, now. I kind of looked through the features my host had because I wanted to know how to set up e-mail at my domain and stuff. Didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the stats pages. But over the last few days, my host (Verve) changed servers, so the layouts and things are new, and I decided to see what I could see.



Sakes alive.



There are actually people reading this. Estimating as well as I can based on the fact that (like me) there are probably quite a few people who click through from different ISP’s at different times of day, it looks as if I may have 100 regulars and change. Never expected that. I mean, of course, if I’d thought I was going to be writing pointless bilge, I wouldn’t have started. But the combination of Japan expat + gay stuff + how-the-world-would-be-better-if-everyone-just-listened-to-me stuff seems to me to be a real niche among niche markets. But I suppose there are 100 people of just about any type you name in the world.



So anyway, I occasionally write gushy letters of thanks to my favorite bloggers, several of whom do me the honor of visiting here, for providing an American-style forum where you can debate ideas aggressively without people’s taking things personally all the time. Thanks to them again for the links that probably brought most of you here. And thanks to the people who are reading. I have yet to receive a single disrespectful comment or e-mail–lest anyone get any big ideas, I’m not saying that to issue a challenge, though I know I’ll get clobbered eventually, the ‘net being what it is. To my knowledge, no one’s linked to me for the express purpose of talking about what a stupid jerk I am. I’ve been very, very fortunate with the site, as with the rest of my life. Thanks to all.



The other thing I saw when I looked at my stats page was, of course, the search keyphrases that had led people to the site. There were, apparently, four searches for “sean kinsell,” which means there could be people who know me from “real” life lurking here at this very moment. The one that made me laugh, though, was “how to detect a gay guy?” I’m not infoplease, and I don’t know whether whoever put that phrase in has kept reading here. (I hope it wasn’t Dina McGreevey, although if it was, she shouldn’t still need an answer.) But just in case: If a guy has a pink, purple, and green website with a category labeled “i like men” in two languages, you should assume he’s gay.



There, don’t say you’ve never learned anything from me.



And thanks again for reading.

Narita and Kansai International Airports are talking about tightening up security again. They’re going to create a single intelligence center to deal with information on illegal entrants and, presumably, terrorist suspects. This is a good thing; you wouldn’t expect it in a country with such a highly-developed bureaucracy, but coordination among agencies (and departments with agencies) vertically is not something Japanese organizational structures are strong in. In my experience, the people who work at departures/immigration are very thorough, but I have little trouble believing that the information they work with on actual people is very scattershot. (As a point of reference, there were 8000 people denied entrance at those two airports last year, up 9% from 2002.) Let’s hope the new body devotes itself to addressing the problem and doesn’t get caught up in the cycle of finding new ways to score and spend appropriations.



BTW, I haven’t really heard anything about the case of the al Qaeda associate they think might have been money laundering and setting up a cell in Niigata last year.

The requisite Jonathan Rauch piece about the McGreevey resignation is up at The New York Times. As is frequently the case lately, I agree wholeheartedly with about 80% of what he writes and have reservations about the other 20%. Rauch thinks that the bizarre circumstances surrounding McGreevey’s climactic announcement make the whole thing so weird that it won’t really affect gay advocacy, but he himself can’t resist taking the opportunity to use it to plug for gay marriage. Here’s the middle of the article:

I coped by struggling for years to suppress every sexual and romantic urge. I convinced myself that I could never love anybody, until the strain of denial became too much to bear.



Others coped differently. Some threw themselves into rebellion against marriage and the bourgeois norms it seemed to represent. Some, to their credit, built firmly coupled gay lives without the social support and investment that marriage brings. And some, determined to lead “normal” lives (meaning, largely, married lives), married.



At what point Mr. McGreevey realized and acknowledged he was gay I don’t know. I do know that many gay husbands begin by denying and end by deceiving. Perhaps that was so in his case.

That’s a nicely even-tempered way of putting it. But given that this is an op-ed, in which opinions and editorializing are expected, is it too much to ask for even a parenthetical acknowledgement that the kind of coping that involves long-term deception is wrong?



It’s true that we don’t know exactly when McGreevey realized he was a gay American [Cue: Rapturous applause by assembled press corps], but it appears that his sexuality has been pretty much an open secret for at least several years. No human being can make the best decision in every difficult circumstance he ever encounters. But even so, people don’t just wake up one morning, after a lifetime of doing their best to live decently and honorably, to find that they have to deal with two sham marriages, accusations of cronyism and corruption, a possible sexual harassment lawsuit, and a sudden desire to resign as Governor of the ninth-most populous state in the Union. And while I understand that I don’t know first-hand what life was like when the gay men and lesbians now in their 40’s were my age and younger, the fact remains that 1979 was over some time ago. Fags get 365 days in a year just like everyone else; on any one of them before last week, McGreevey could have faced up to reality and started being honest.



In other words, if the accusations against him are true, McGreevey’s problem is self-centeredness. That’s a character flaw that, to coin a phrase, does not discriminate based on sexual orientation–as the reality of sex and corruption scandals among straight politicians attests. Nevertheless, the craftily self-serving among us gays have learned that they can get sympathy by playing the emotional-upheaval card when their misdeeds catch up with them.



It’s a poor idea to abet such a maneuver. I think McGreevey’s case makes an excellent argument for being honest with yourself and others, conquering your fears, and coming out of the closet sooner rather than later; it does not help the argument that gays are responsible enough for marriage.



Note: I guess I should point out that I know the reporters actually at his press conference weren’t applauding; it was apparently the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Look at this story. The headline says, “Cuba’s Brilliant Ballerinas Wow Dance World.” The spin of the story is that, unlike nasty, evil capitalist countries where people have to pay for dance lessons, Cuba has a national ballet whose grande dame plucks the talented from the streets and turns them, for free, into world-class performers. The article is positively choked with adulatory adjectives to describe Cuba.



But I’m used to that. What’s funny to me is that all the dancers discussed in the article, except two, are men who talk about how Cuba’s tradition of virility in dance has helped them in their art. Aren’t they ballet dancers instead of ballerinas?

Colin Powell follows Richard Armitage’s remarks last month:

“We understand the importance of Article 9 to the Japanese people and why it’s in your Constitution,” he said in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun and other Japanese media representatives here.



“But at the same time, if Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council and have the kinds of obligations that it would pick up as a (council) member, then Article 9 would have to be examined in that light.”



Powell added, however, the decision is “absolutely, entirely up to the Japanese people to decide because it is in your Constitution, and the United States would never presume to offer an opinion.”

I don’t know. That sounds like an opinion to me. It’s not an order, perhaps, but it’s a pretty clear recommendation. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that. Renouncing aggression, by a country that had just tried to take over half the neighboring continent and had a known history of belligerence, was a good thing for the post-War constitution. At that point, Japan’s job was to take its place among free societies.



Of course, we want any free society to be committed, as Prime Minister Koizumi said at his war commemoration speech last week, to a world without war. But times have changed. Japan is rich and influential and is a possible target for terrorists. The US is still its protector, but we may be planning to shift forces out of Asia. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have become the Tiger Economies (and the former two have democratized, while the last remains freer than the Chinese mainland). And the PRC has awakened from its Mao-era economic disasters and is showing renewed geopolitical ambitions.



You know, it’s funny. When you live in Japan, this little row of rocks at the edge of the Pacific, you suddenly realize that China is a VERY LARGE country. From the viewpoint of the US, China is an ocean away. It’s big, but we’re big, too. We do have a neighbor of larger land area to the north, sure, but Canada has always been an ally and has a very low comparative population. When looking at a globe or map means reflexively putting that “You are here” sign in Tokyo, South Korea and Japan start to look like morsels being dangled in front of the Red Chinese. (And I mean right in front, since most of China’s power centers are in its east-central region.)



Yes, I’m overdramatizing–and I’m leaving out the even larger Russia, though the farawayness of Moscow and St. Petersburg and the vast wilderness of Siberia make it seem less psychologically threatening–but the point remains. It’s all very well for Japan to resolve that it won’t just up and start wars to take over more territory…I’m sorry…to liberate Asians from their Western oppressors, just because it’s feeling neighborly. It’s another thing to say that “self-defense” is practicable if Japan is always going to wait until existing conflicts actually arrive on its shores.



It’s nice for Japan’s UN delegation to keep submitting nuclear disarmament resolutions, but surely it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the PRC and North Korea were among the abstainers when last year’s model came to a vote. I think we could all “express concern about the existence of a black market in nuclear weapons technology,” but now that it exists, something with a bit more teeth than “concern” will be needed to deal with it.



(BTW, I know I’ve said this a billion times, but I never, ever get used to the fact that North Korea is allowed to be a member of the UN.)



Clear we-had-to-do-it combat to protect citizens or infrastructure will probably always be hard to distinguish perfectly from the use of defense issues as a smokescreen for securing access to strategic resources. But officially remaining a sitting duck–even if, as most analysts seem to believe, Japan has been for years quietly developing the ability to project force outside the archipelago–may be erring excessively in the direction of avoiding the appearance of evil. The structure of the UN Security Council is decades out of date, but as long as it exists, it would be wise for Japan to position itself for permanent membership.

Classical Values did comment on the McGreevey thing, including the gay angle, overnight:

Tell me about my generation! I am three years older than McGreevey, I came of age in the 1970s.



The 1970s, folks! Free love, wild parties, orgying, and coming out of the closet.

Well, that needs to be qualified some. My parents were born in 1948 and 1951, and while they listened to psychedelic rock and played in cover bands after high school (that’s how they met), they and their friends weren’t orgying. The cultural eras called the ’60’s and ’70’s certainly happened, but they didn’t happen equally everywhere in America.



Still and all, it sure is interesting that, until this week, McGreevey’s choices in dealing with his “lifelong turmoil” always just happened to come down on the side of preserving his access to power and money. Even in small towns and conservative religious families, there are self-aware, self-critical people who are willing to come out and take the hit for it–before they end up with a line of spouses, children, conniving lovers, and shady wheeler-dealers to cope with when they’re pushing 50.

When you live in Tokyo, you’re the first to find out when there’s an accident at a Japanese nuclear facility and the last to find out when the Governor of New Jersey comes out and announces his resignation.



Every gay guy linked to the left of this page, along with many others besides, has offered an opinion (well, not Eric at Classical Values, though I’d be interested to hear what he thinks). I think the one I agree with most is Agenda Bender, who wants to restore sexual purity and discretion to the Governorship of New Jersey by taking it over himself. I’ll campaign for him.



But seriously, looking at the transcript of the speech, I worry:

I am also here today because, shamefully, I engaged in adult consensual affair with another man, which violates my bonds of matrimony. It was wrong. It was foolish. It was inexcusable.



And for this, I ask the forgiveness and the grace of my wife.

Discount Blogger says that yesterday’s press conference may, not surprisingly, be a defensive move against coming charges of misconduct in office. We don’t know yet. But just taking what the Governor said at face value, I have to wonder at some people’s reactions. I don’t see how McGreevey’s speech can be construed as saying that gays are unfit for office. I also don’t think that the pressure to be closeted, which I detest as much as any out homosexual, can be summarily blamed (though Right Side of the Rainbow does imply that McGreevey made a bad choice in a bad situation).



One of the arguments most gay marriage advocates use is that it would help keep gay guys from screwing around on their partners. McGreevey–looking at the content of his speech and leaving aside his sincerity, which we can’t assess–believes that it was wrong to break his vows and screw around on his partner. Shouldn’t people who think gay and straight relationships should be taken equally seriously be paying attention to that part, too?



Given what he says about the pain caused to his wife, it does not appear that she was the sort who agrees to look the other way while her husband picks up a guy every few weeks to keep the jones from driving him crazy. Pointing out that, in a better world, none of this would have had to happen…that’s fine. But McGreevey accepted responsibility for a marriage and child, and he wants to avoid piling public scandal on top of private upheaval. If he believes that’s more important than proving that out gay men can be respectable politicians, I have a hard time thinking ill of him for it. We’ll see what happens.

There’s apparently a great deal of self-deception going around over the upcoming election. A few weeks back, Virginia Postrel chided libertarians about citing Bush’s betrayal of free trade principles as a reason to vote for Kerry. Everybody and his grandmother thinks Andrew Sullivan is being soft on Kerry because he feels spurned by Bush.



Contrariwise, Michael Demmons says Boi from Troy is delusional for comparing Bush-Cheney favorably to other Republican presidential tickets on gay rights. And Dale Carpenter has a piece up at IGF about the nerve-abrading contortions of gay Democrats at and after the convention–a topic that’s been flogged lifeless by others but that Carprenter treats with characteristic point and clarity:

What to make of the Boston Democrats? They really like gay people, but they’d really rather the American public didn’t know that. And what of gay Democrats? They’re high-minded idealists when they criticize gay Republicans for working within a party that doesn’t much like gays; but they’re sober-minded pragmatists when assessing their own party’s treatment of gays. Yes, they acknowledge, the Boston convention was a retreat from gay visibility at past conventions. But, they quickly add, that’s necessary to defeat the evil Republicans.



Kerry announced his obligatory respect for diversity in language so general President Bush himself could have used it. He also tried to undermine Republican moralism by claiming to support

Amritas has a post up today about Japanese-Americans who are clinging like death to their connection to Japan as a way to feel as if their pampered suburban lives are really records of noble struggle.



It seems to be a good week to be aggrieved. One Ryan Joseph Kim has an article on advocate.com about some recent gay and Asian references in pop culture:

A few months ago Details, the metrosexual men

Susanna Cornett sent me a link to this Instapundit mini-post about the latest spate of violence committed by Japanese children, and she flatteringly asked me for my thoughts on the issue. She also gave me her own interpretation, which I mostly agree with and will discuss below.



First, though, I’d like to note that, when you’ve lived in Japan for a while, you start to notice that the same stories surface in American news publications periodically. One of these is, “After suffering years of discrimination and sexual harassment, Japanese working women are laying claim to their rights to be promoted on merit, to work even after they have children, not to be considered eye candy for visitors, and not to have to arrive two hours before the men to sweep, dust, and make tea.”



A second (the writer Alex Kerr had a whole segment on this in his last book) is, “Japanese youths are known for their school uniforms and conservative grooming, but a recent wave of adventurous teenagers is making dyed hair and body art the funky new norm.”



Another is, “Unlike their antecedents, the latest crop of slatternly female J-pops stars write their own lyrics and can actually sing!”



Still another is, “Financial analysts have been shocked and horrified to find that XYZ Bank’s bad debts may total several times the figure it released at the end of the last fiscal year, which raises new questions about the viability of the Japanese economic recovery.”



And yes, yet another is, “The famed obedience culture in Japanese schools appears to be giving way as disturbed pre-teens take up knives to avenge bullying and insults.”



Now, of course, none of these things is outright untrue or not worth reporting on. The problem is that journalists like to write stories that read like great novels: setup, conflict, technical climax, dramatic climax, resolution. That predisposes them toward pushing the never before seen! angle, even if the same reporter wrote essentially the same story for the same magazine two years ago. It also gives them a tendency to leave out facts and factors that don’t fit the most compelling narrative arc.



The WaPo article Instapundit linked to is a good compilation of the more grisly child-on-child crimes that have captured national attention here over the last decade. Here’s Susanna’s take on it and on Glenn Reynolds’s wife’s piece:

The newspapers, as well as the communities

they’re reporting on, seem to feel that it’s about anomie (a sense of

disconnectedness from society) resulting from lack of obvious parental

affection and the violent video games/movies. Glenn’s wife points to

building frustration and no one to listen, also a facet of anomie. My

brother (not in a post, in a private conversation) thought that it was the

influence of Westernization (the bad bits of it). I tend to think it’s a

crumbling national culture in the face of changes, where traditional social

controls have lost much of their power but nothing has swept in to replace

it – which is actually a fairly classic setup for Durkheimian anomie.

Westernization *is* part of the force that’s crumbling the old ways, but I

think it’s also from the inside. And I think part of that is the lack of an

internalized moral code based on belief in a spiritual being (God), so that

when the exterior culture crumbles there’s nothing inside to offer moral

guidance – so you see things like the prostitution for new purses mention in

the WaPo article, as well as the obviously horrific violence.

I think the closest we can come to a complete explanation is a synthesis of the points Susanna talks about here. (Well, I take exception to one thing. As a Christian, she understandably sees God as the necessary source of an individual’s moral code; as an atheist, I don’t agree with that part, though I think belief in God is more a positive than a negative force in most people’s lives in practice. In any case, Japanese religion doesn’t have the single Creator with a big, benevolent plan for mankind that we’re used to in Judeo-Christianity. You have the various nature deities, and the spirits of the ancestors, and the manifestations of Buddha, and you do what they say because…well, they’re wiser and more powerful than you are.)



The post-War Japanese educational system developed to go with the employment system developed to go with the regulatory system. After WWII, the Japanese needed a national goal, and economic advancement became it. This served two main purposes: It rebuilt the wrecked infrastructure and gave the returning soldiers something to do. The idea was to turn citizens into interchangeable units by standardizing their behavior and pushing them towards the mean in intelligence and achievement. That way, the country as a whole could move forward by allocating human resources where needed without impediment. So responsibility for childrearing was in many ways ceded to the school system. Children went to regular public school classes and then cram school. Fathers worked long hours of overtime. Mothers took care of the households (often including in-laws). Everyone was overworked and sleep-deprived, but the children could see prosperity increasing around them, and they could see how proud and purposeful their parents were. Students could see themselves as the next generation to score world-class achievements: the textile-metallurgy boom, the single-minute exchange of dies, the Walkman.



Now that Japan is no longer poised to take over the global economy, the incentives to conform beyond normal limits don’t exist for a lot of kids. But the school system hasn’t adjusted its relentless do-what-you’re-told-do-what-you’re-told message. Children aren’t taught how to be resilient–the practical principles of morals and ethics that they can adapt to different situations with a little imagination and goodwill added. Additionally, many of them aren’t home enough (remember, 2/3 of Japanese students go to cram school, meaning that they may get home at about 9 or 10 every night) for their parents to teach them good behavior through repetition. So when the vulnerable kids start to go off the rails, there isn’t much to brake them. Naturally, even normal children aren’t infinitely malleable, but most of them are pretty sturdy. The Japanese people I know wouldn’t willingly go through their K-12 experiences again; but despite the hazards along the way, they ultimately became lively, centered, responsible adults.



And yet, to read reports in the Western press, you get the sense that the streets are a hair’s breadth away from being mobbed by hysterical, X-acto knife-brandishing teens. It’s that aspect that I wish they’d rein in a bit. Japan has social problems that I don’t think are going to improve before they get worse for a while, but I don’t see society collapsing. For one thing, the 30% of the economy that’s world-class competitive is still robust enough to make up for the 70% that serves the domestic market and is plagued by duplication of effort, redundant personnel, and red tape. For another thing, families are slowly finding the benefits in not having Dad ready to drop dead from overwork and Mom driving herself nuts over whether the chambray of her jumper will meet the approval of the rest of the neighborhood housewives. (These are not exaggerations, BTW.)



Which is to say, Japan is still affluent enough to provide the average student incentive to study hard–not to study like a maniac, but to do well–with the prospect of making a decent living when he finishes school. There’s no more direct conveyor belt from college to company to easy retirement, to be sure, but most people know they’re unlikely to end up in tent villages. And families are rediscovering what it’s like to be involved in the rearing of their children. This transition is proceeding in fits and starts, and there are always dangers involved (the economic threat from China is the most obvious), but I do think it’s happening.



The big issue, again, is that Japan has not set itself up to help the most emotionally vulnerable children deal with pressure, and now that there are more of them, the problem is correspondingly larger. I’d love to have a fix for that one, but I think that what we can realistically expect is for changes to the relationship between schooling and child-rearing–and therefore improvements–to happen very slowly.



Added at 21:38: The latest crime just happened Sunday. A 15-year-old boy found that the classmate he wanted to stab wasn’t home, so he murdered the classmate’s mother instead.