Sadly but not unexpectedly, a fifth worker injured in the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant accident a few weeks ago has died in the ICU of multiple-organ failure. His first daughter had just been born in May. I was going to say that I hoped he never knew what hit him, but the article says that despite being burned over 80% of his body, he escaped from the site of the pipe break on his own power (自力で). The poor guy. My father was burned in a pretty nasty accident at the steel plant when I was little. I don’t remember it; he just described later going in and having the wounds scrubbed with wire brushes so they wouldn’t scar over (this was the ’70’s); that sounded bad enough. Fortunately, one of the eleven injured workers was released on Tuesday, so maybe there’s some hope for the remaining five.

The Japanese bid for permanent membership on the UN Security Council has been moving along, too. Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoriko Kawaguchi spoke to one of Kofi Annan’s underlings a few days ago, and Prime Minister Koizumi announced today that the petition (I assume that’s what it formally is) will go ahead with no promise to amend Article 9 of the constitution appended. I hope things work out.

So everyone from IGF to the expected gay blogger types to Virginia Postrel is talking about Vice-President Cheney’s remarks about gay unions the other day. Some people are also reminding us of President Bush’s statements on the only 3.5 seconds of Larry King Live in recent memory that haven’t been devoted to Laci Peterson or Lori Hacking.



Apparently, there’s some sort of inconsistency somewhere. Personally, I don’t get it.

“That’s up to states,” Bush told CNN’s Larry King Thursday night. “If they want to provide legal protections for gays, that’s great. That’s fine. But I do not want to change the definition of marriage. I don’t think our country should.”



When asked about federal benefits for same-sex couples Bush pointed to inheritance taxes which are lower for people who are married Bush said gays should support Republican moves to get of inheritance taxes altogether.

And here’s Cheney:

“My general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want,” Cheney, 63, said in response to a question at a campaign “town hall” meeting in Davenport, Iowa.



Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian and works for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said during the 2000 presidential race that he held homosexual marriage to be a state issue.



…



“I made clear four years ago when I ran and this question came up in the debate I had with Joe Lieberman that my view was that that’s appropriately a matter for the states to decide, that that’s how it ought to best be handled,” Cheney said.



“But the president makes basic policy for the administration. And he’s made it clear that he does in fact support a constitutional amendment on this issue,” he added.

I’ve spent my whole adult life around people who say whatever’s politically expedient at the time and force you to sift through every statement, flicker of an expression, and chance unstudied gesture to figure out what they really believe. I don’t think I’m too naive to go looking for those hidden meanings when they’re likely to be there.



But this strikes me as pretty straightforward. Neither Bush nor Cheney talks about not wanting government policy to “encourage” or “condone” homosexuality, which seems to be the favored formulation for those conservatives who don’t want us taken out and shot but are perfectly happy to make our relationships as hard to sustain as possible. As Christians, the President and Vice-President probably think that homosexual behavior is wrong. But there’s nothing to make that necessarily incompatible with thinking American gays who form long-term relationships should be able to take care of each other without interference.



Of course they’re both treading carefully in political terms. That’s what happens when an issue is made during an election year of something that’s deeply controversial. I wish, based on my beliefs, that Bush hadn’t supported the FMA; furthermore, I don’t think he needed to, given what I can figure out of his own position.



His deciding that he did need to, though, wasn’t clear evidence of illogic or a cowardly cave-in to the religious right. Every homosexual public figure that’s twitched in the last year, it seems, has invoked “second-class citizenship” to characterize what people who oppose gay marriage want for us, with no middle ground. In that context, I’m almost grateful to Bush and Cheney for being willing to take on the subject in public at all, even if they are watching their backs politically.



Added on 28 August: Ann Althouse summarizes pretty well, I think, what we can glean from this recent clutch of soundbites about what the candidates think of gay marriage. Basically, even those against the FMA oppose it (of course, we don’t seem to be hearing from Edwards about this).



Added five minutes later after avoiding impulse to put posthole digger through monitor: Flamin’ Norah! I turned off TrackBack auto-discovery the other day, and when I posted this, no pings went through. Golden. Now I republish and the poltergeists decide they’re going to ping five people. それって何のことだろうッ？！

Whoops. I thought I was being funny when I left a comment on this Joanne Jacobs post (how does our Ms. Jacobs keep a straight face while documenting this stuff?) about the use of non-red correction pens in schools to avoid bruising children’s egos. Apparently, it’s a bad idea to mark errors with a color that connotes mistakenness. Amritas caught me in an elementary PC slip-up, though [bracketed]:

Isn’t anyone going to stick up for poor, marginalized indigo? After all, it has associations with South Asian vegetable dyes, so it recalls the thrift and nobility of the time-honored household labor of women [wom y n, Sean, wom y n! -A] of color. It’s organic and cruelty-free, too.

Man, I spent 1991-95 as a comparative literature major. At Penn. How’d I miss that one? I feel like that guy in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes who asks for ketchup.

Maybe this is why my Atsushi has such contempt for The Asashi Shimbun. One of its op-eds today is by a veteran correspondent about Japan-China relations, which is a topic that certainly demands attention. I’m not so sure the “high-minded” approach recommended by Yoichi Funabashi has legs, though:

This summer, I met a number of Chinese officials and business people in Shanghai and Beijing who are well versed in Japanese affairs. Here’s what some of them said:



“China is about to acquire reflexes not to make China-U.S. relations worse than they are from a strategic viewpoint and is learning to be patient. But China-Japan relations show no signs of maturing. I’m worried that they could fall into a bottomless pit.” (A senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official)

Yeah, I bet China’s “about to acquire reflexes not to make China-U.S. relations worse than they are from a strategic viewpoint”–also known as trying to destabilize and unseat a rival quietly enough to avoid arousing its suspicions. I mean, I’m no hardened geopolitical strategist, but I’m not a Pollyanna, either. Antagonizing China is a dumb idea–can’t dispute that. Market liberalization in China, distorted and disfigured as it is by being filtered through the appalling corruption in every crack and crevice of its economic and political systems, will keep taking the country in all kinds of unpredictable directions. As a free market guy, I believe in making people, ideas, and capital mobile. But the unequal way its happening in the PRC is going to continue to cause unrest in the short term that could boil over. We can’t afford to ignore that, however much we don’t want the place to go back to its old policies.



But Funabashi glosses over the conflicts of principle. With unintentional comedy, he waxes nostalgic about a former high Chinese official:

In advancing such initiatives, we must not forget that China once had a leader who seriously worked at reconciling Japan and China. This person was former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Hu Yaobang, who aimed for political reform and was ousted. In my view, no postwar Chinese politicians had a higher opinion of Japan’s postwar peaceful development nor made a greater effort to seek cooperation with Japan than Hu.

Three cheers for Hu, then. But, um, are we supposed to glide over that “aimed for political reform and was ousted” bit? Maybe I’m just tactless, but it kind of caught my eye. Granted that the China of today is not the China of 20 years ago, that doesn’t mean that we can just buy that the only factor that makes Japan-Korea and Japan-China relations different is who’s received a written apology for Japan’s wartime abuses. That kind of thing shouldn’t be underestimated, certainly–Japan, China, and Korea all set great store by ceremonial gestures of respect. Recommending that officials not visit the Yasukuni Shrine, or that they make public apologies to China for the occupation, is fine. But Japan and Korea, though no strangers to corruption, still have stable, dynamic free societies that make them more systemically compatible with each other than either is with the PRC. High-mindedness should not be indulged in to a degree that obscures that.

So the headline on this Reuter’s story says, “US Military Sodomy Ban Upheld in Narrow Ruling-NYT.” Okay. But then the article says:

In a limited ruling, the highest U.S. military court said that under certain circumstances, the military’s ban on sodomy was constitutional, the New York Times said on Tuesday.



…



The case in question, United States v. Marcum, concerned the conviction four years ago of former Air Force Sgt. Eric Marcum on charges that included consensual sodomy, for his having sex with men under his supervision, the newspaper said.



He is on parole after first being sentenced to 10 years in prison, a term later cut to six years.



Marcum, a linguist at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, appealed the conviction on the consensual sodomy charge, saying the Lawrence case invalidated it.



The five judges gave considerable weight to military regulations barring sexual relationships between superiors and subordinates in the same command.



They said several subordinate airmen testified they engaged in consensual and nonconsensual sexual activity with Marcum, including one who said Marcum might have taken advantage of him. On that basis, the court said the Lawrence decision did not protect Marcum.

That “men under his supervision” puts a slightly different cast on things (“under certain circumstances”!), does it not? I’m not quite sure what the “considerable weight” part is; if you’re not supposed to be banging your subordinates, that seems to me to settle it, vociferously committed to gay rights though I am. Emotional upheaval and conflicts of loyalty probably aren’t as potentially disastrous in the linguistics department as they are closer to combat; but if Marcum’s people can argue that Lawrence v. Texas invalidates the ban on homosexual contact between supervisor and supervised, why can’t some straight Lieutenant who’s screwing a woman underling (so to speak) get out of punishment by pointing out that heterosexual sex is legal nationwide?



I really, seriously hope I’m being an idiot and missing something here. I did look for the NYT story to see whether it clarified things a bit; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be on-line. Past references to the case don’t clarify things much for non-lawyer me. Maybe he wasn’t originally tried on the supervisor-subordinate charge because the same-sex charge would so plainly hold up, making it not worth the bother?



Added on 26 August: I’d managed to miss this on 365gay the other day; it makes the reasoning behind the ruling seem clearer.

So you know how they were talking about redoing the food pyramid a few months ago? Apparently, they were not just fooling around. I had to read the opening of this CNN.com article five or so times before I was sure I was really seeing what I was seeing:

A federal dietary advisory panel is considering whether its revision of nutrition guidelines should let some people treat themselves to guilt-free desserts.



Such treats would be bonuses for healthful living, under proposals being considered by the advisory panel that’s drafting an update of the nutritional guidance.



The experts are looking at what are called “discretionary calories.” Those could be allowed for people who get nutritious meals while staying below the calories they need to burn for energy.



The panel is looking at ways to write discretionary calories into the recommendations that the government is to issue early next year, in tandem with an update of the food guide pyramid.



Discretionary calories are what’s left when the calories needed to meet all of a person’s nutrient needs are subtracted from the greater number of calories needed to meet energy needs.



To gain discretionary calories, people would eat a balanced diet of foods that are high in nutrients such as vitamins and minerals, but not high in calories. This could include vegetables and fruits, for instance, as well as protein from meat and carbohydrates from bread. But consumers would have to eat in moderation, so they get all their nutrients while staying below their energy ceiling.



The payoff: They could pick up the extra calories for energy without having to worry about nutrition. And this allows a variety of high-calorie fun foods. Ice cream would be one possibility, said committee member Joanne Lupton, a nutrition professor at Texas A&M University.

I’ve sliced out a bunch of paragraphs in a row because it was the overall effect that bothered me. Unless there’s something here I didn’t get, the content of all this is: (1) Dessert contains sugars that give quick energy. (2) If you want to eat dessert in a fashion that gives you access to its quick energy without suffering ill health effects from its otherwise empty calories, be sure your actual dinner consists of especially nutritious foods. (3) For those who haven’t heard of it, ice cream is a food that some people might enjoy as a dessert. Why don’t I ever get recruited for federal panels that can proclaim that fruits and vegetables are healthy and have it treated as news?



And then there’s the creepy, solemn tone with which servings of “fun foods” are described as being “allowed” as “bonuses” to those of us the panel thinks can be trusted with “discretionary” calories. It makes me feel as if the home ec teacher had just singled me out for making the shapeliest lasagne in the whole eighth grade.



I realize that while this is pretty much a waste of tax money (reason enough to oppose it), it’s not strictly coercive. But I have no trouble imagining that if, say, some of those inane lawsuits against fast food outlets result in settlements or–heaven forfend–victories in court, one way restaurants might conceive of to protect themselves against future litigants might be to make sure the set meals they offer can be shown to adhere to the new food pyramid.

Oh, yeah. I just remembered: The other night I was hanging out with some friends, and this new video by Wilson Phillips came on. It was a remake of “Go Your Own Way.” Absolutely hideous, with the melody all denatured and slushed together with aaaahhhhh-ooooohhhhs and junk. You-all who are still at home are not, by permitting this stuff, making it easy for us patriotic expats to extol the wonders of America here, you know? I understand that, now that Madonna lives in England, you couldn’t stun-gun her out of posing as Che Guevara for the cover of American Life. These things happen. But Chynna, Carnie, and Wendy are still on native soil, right in front of your noses. Work for us, already.



I guess it could have been worse. If they’d put their Montessori-schooled mitts on “You Make Loving Fun,” I’d be on a plane to LA to scratch their eyes out right now. Then, too, my understanding is that they have some new concept album out about California, and the fabulous Christine McVie was from the British contingent in Fleetwood Mac, so she would have been mercifully inappropriate.



BTW, what did Carnie do to herself? I’m glad that, being morbidly obese, she was able to get surgery and bring her weight and health under control. But she used to have that gorgeous, glossy dark hair and mischievous eyes that were really set off by her plumpness. And she was the only one of the three with an actual vocal personality–Chynna and Wendy both looked and sang like Barbie dolls. Now all three of them have the same weedy hair and muddy make-up. It’s a shame.

I know I have this tendency to point out Japan-related stories and then kind of drop them. I figure that interested people are probably looking at the same news sources I do. For anyone who’s been wondering, though:

Charles Jenkins–US Army deserter, defecter to North Korea, and husband of Japanese abductee Hitomi Soga–is considering making a plea bargain to avoid being imprisoned by the US, with which Japan has a mutual extradition treaty.

Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and UFJ Holdings are moving ahead with their plan to create the Bank That Ate the World, despite noises from Mitsui-Sumitomo Financial Group about UFJ’s broken promises and its own continued desire for a merger (especially the trust banks, I believe). UFJ is in bad shape; MTFG has actually officially repaid its federal bailout, so the idea is for money to start flowing UFJ-ward as soon as possible.

Speaking of banks, Ashikaga Bank (for anyone who knows The Princess Mononoke, that’s the same compound as the hero’s name: 足利) will be the object of first bank bailout in a few years. Ashikaga had bad credit totalling around 36,000,000,000 yen (US $327,000,000). I don’t know whether there’s a connection, but it’s also well-known here as the only Japanese financial institution with normal relations with DPRK banks.

Amritas writes that Arthur Golden’s book Memoirs of a Geisha is going to be made into a movie. Now that it’s mentioned, I’m surprised it didn’t happen long ago, when the book was an event.



Not that I’m sad the movie hasn’t been made or eager to see it once it is. I hated that freakin’ book. And for once, I’m not heaping the usual Japan specialist’s disdain on someone who didn’t get things right. Golden has a lot of experience in Japan, by all accounts–and while the cutesy, contrived is-it-fact-or-fiction controversy was annoying, there were many passages that seemed genuinely revelatory of contours in Japanese thinking. (I should note, though, that the book is set in Kyoto and all my experience in Japan has been here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area.)



No, what I detested about Memoirs of a Geisha were two things. One was its prose. People writing about Japan or in the voices of Japanese characters just can’t stop themselves from giving each word equal rhythmic weight. You know, that every-syllable-is-a-cherry-blossom-petal-floating-softly-to-the-surface-of-the-lake -while-a-crane-glides-by monotone that’s supposed to convey Zen-like contemplativeness, or something. There are writers whom it’s hard to translate without slipping into that, even if you try to put some gusto into it; Kawabata Yasunari is notorious for being difficult that way, for example. In Golden’s case, he was probably just giving the paying customers what they want out of their Japan fantasies.



I’d imagine that’s the source of my second problem with the book, also. That is, Golden breaks faith with his readers from the very first paragraph:

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, “That afternoon when I met so-and-so…was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.” I expect you might put down your teacup and say, “Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the worst? Because it can’t possibly have been both!” Ordinarily I’d have to laugh at myself and agree with you.

Surely Golden could reasonably assume that the way many in his book’s potential readership were introduced to the very concept of the great novel was through reading Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities in junior high school (at least, those of us who managed to squeak through before Dickens was thrown over for Toni Morrison). It’s hard to follow Sayuri into the world of the geisha when one is involuntarily giggling at the thought of putting down one’s chocolate (dutifully fussed over by four servants, of course) with a rattle and demanding, “Well, now, which was it? The best of times or the worst of times? Wisdom or foolishness? Come on! Belief or incredulity? Which, then? Huh? HUH?”



But even for people who don’t remember their Dickens, this opening is a micalculation. It’s exactly because we’ve all felt simultaneously happy and sad, or triumphant and frustrated, that we go to novelists. The great ones, from Dickens to Austen to Melville, help us sort out and interpret and contextualize our own conflicts. The lesser-but-fun ones, like Agatha Christie, entertain us by turning human conflict into puzzle or drama. But whatever you’re looking for in a novel, contradictory feelings are part of it. This passage requires you to confront, consciously, the certainly that Golden thinks either you or his own narrator is a simpleton. And that’s before you even turn the first page.



Of course, things get worse from there. Golden can’t be content to get some sexy good fun out of the fact that he’s writing about geisha. Whenever something amusingly trashy happens–the heavy-handed way our heroine’s rival descends from being one of the most popular and classiest performers to being a prostitute in the gutter is only the most obvious example–you’re not allowed to just enjoy the pulpy soap-operaness. Golden has to have Sayuri jerk back into that reflective tone that signals Mysterious Oriental Wisdom, as if she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in The Joy Luck Club.



All in all, an annoying read. The movie might actually be an improvement if it just gives way to stereotypes and, without asking to be taken seriously, titillates people for an hour or two.