March 16, 2007
News flash! America doesn't have a monopoly on bigoted, violent hate speech.
In this movie on a popular Korean video site (link only works in Internet Explorer), two Korean teenagers engage in a mock "debate" on Dokdo. That is, the Korean presents a couple of maps, while the "Japanese" (referred to as "Zzokbari," a derogatory term for Japanese that I'm told means "pig's feet" in reference to geta sandals), in his fake mustache and coke-bottle glasses (what is this, 1980s Hollywood?) spouts mousy insults over images of Japanese war crimes.
The Korean finally says, "I'm gonna kill ya" and drags the Japanese out of his chair, beats him up (under a card showing a mannequin holding a chainsaw) and finally forces him to surrender his claim to Dokdo at (fake) gunpoint before finally shooting him in the head.
These kids are way too young to have been involved or even for their parents to have been involved in the Japanese occupation. And they're way too young to be so hateful. I thought I'd seen everything when it came to nationalist wackos on both sides of this, but that video shocked me.
This next one off YouTube is just weird. An anti-Japanese rap song, the gist of which is that if Japan wants Dokdo Korea should just take over Japan, blares over a slide show of images. Some of them are about Dokdo, but others don't have anything to do with Japan, like TV images of Korean and Italian soccer players abusing each other during a World Cup game, the notorious "Baekdusan is Ours" sign held up by the Korean women's skating team at the Winter Asian Games, several shots of Korean protesters struggling with American soldiers, some screen shots of articles about Korean ninjas (?) . Gradually it becomes clear that this is in fact an anti-Korean piece, as shots of Japanese products -- magazine ads, merchandise, TV shows, motorcycles -- are positioned next to Korean copies, with "ORIGINAL" and "COPY" crudely superimposed. I happen to think the Korean copies of Japanese products -- particularly media -- are a rather creative and harmless form of infringement since, after all, most Japanese pop culture was banned back then.
But the remarkable thing about both these steaming turds is that they are subtitled in English. I'm not sure what these two sides expect to accomplish by exposing their diatribes against one another to the rest of the world. I think we've made it abundantly clear that we don't care. And yet, like cult missionaries on a street corner, people like these continue to preach at us, while programs like the Dokdo Riders receive support from the Korean social and corporate mainstream.
I really and truly don't know how to begin to approach a nationalist youth campaign of this magnitude. All I know is, not only would that first video be entirely unfunny in the U.S., it would get both those kids expelled from whatever school they were in.
Posted by b-applegate at 7:25 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 30, 2007
Lennon put Grandpa in prison
Doing nothing to help the current image of copyright alliances as full of huge dickheads, the JASRAC (the Japanese RIAA) has sent a 74-year-old bar owner to jail for 10 months for letting local college students who play classical piano part-time at his bar take requests for the Beatles and other more modern musicians. Fortunately he's got three years left to appeal, but yikes. It doesn't get much worse than slapping the cuffs on someone who could die tomorrow because he helped out a few music majors and liked listening to Hey Jude.
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January 29, 2007
More on "The Truth About Nanking"
The film Web site is here, and it contains a video of the press conference by the director, calling the planned Chinese documentary propaganda based on historical misunderstanding and saying Japan must communicate the correct history to the world. All the typical garbage.
What I want to know is, couldn't they think up a more creative title than "The Truth About Nanking?" I mean, that's not just revisionism, that's lazy revisionism. How about "We Didn't Kill Your Grandmother" or "Japan: We Didn't Do All That Stuff We Did"? The Yogi Berra reference would at least lighten things up a bit.
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January 27, 2007
Ahmadinejad's Japanese soulmates
So there's a Japanese right-wing revisionist "documentary" about how the Nanking Massacre never happened coming out. One of Ishihara's buddies. These guys really need a visit from Mr. Peabody or Dr. Who or whoever it is takes you back in time to show you the error of your ways these days. Just goes to show you that denying horrible war crimes isn't just a hobby of the developing world.
The below item appeared in Daily Variety.
Docs offer rival visions of Nanking
Mizushima, Leonsis take on massacre
By MARK SCHILLING
Satoru Mizushima's docu will refute 'Nanking.'Helmer Satoru Mizushima
will make a documentary correcting what he describes as the "myth" of
the Nanking Massacre.
Click for the rest.
Mizushima is irked by the spate of docs about the 1937 event in which
Japanese soldiers killed 200,000 Chinese in the city, also known as
Nanjing, over eight weeks.
These documentaries include "Nanking," produced by AOL vice chairman
Ted Leonsis. Fortissimo acquired rights to that doc at Sundance on
Wednesday.
Mizushima announced his plans Wednesday at a Tokyo hotel, surrounded
by right-wing politicos and others backing the production. His
supporters include Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara.
The massacre has long been a matter of dispute between China and
Japan. Japanese revisionists set the numbers of dead far lower than
Chinese figures, while exonerating Japanese troops of atrocities now
accepted as fact by the vast majority of Chinese.
References to the massacre have been cut from Japanese school tests
despite vigorous Chinese protests.
Mizushima claims Leonsis' doc is "based on fabrications and gives a
false impression" of the Japanese military's actions.
He plans to release his pic, with a distrib yet to be announced, to
coincide with the 70th anniversary of the event.
China plans its own anniversary release with a film jointly produced
by Gerald Green's Viridian Entertainment and the Jiangsu provincial
government.
Hong Kong action director Stanley Tong and London's Transworld
Pictures also have announced projects on the subject.
Posted by b-applegate at 5:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 17, 2006
The Slippery Slope
Welcome to Gattaca, boys and girls.
Encouraged by Britain's ruling on colon cancer, a London hospital is proposing to prevent autism by eliminating male embryos, which are more likely than females to get the disease. Two weeks ago, the New York Times described an American patient who plans to screen her embryos for an arthritis gene. The probability that the gene will cause the disease is only 20 percent, and if it does, the disease is highly manageable. ... A PGD technique unveiled three months ago can find genes that won't harm your child but might, if combined with other genes, cause disease in a later generation. British patients are already asking clinics to filter out embryos carrying such genes.
It gets worse. Embryos are being genetically tested to see if they are suitable to donate cord blood or other body parts, then they're carved up. Insane. But what really gets me is this quote:
Another patient, described in the same article, set out to scan his embryos for colon cancer and ended up chucking two more for Down syndrome. "You kind of feel like you shouldn't be doing it," his wife confessed. "But then why would we go through all of this and not take those extra precautions?"
That's true. If you're going through IVF anyway you might as well screen for these things, because these embryos are either going to be killed or die frozen anyway. But I can't help thinking about the German doctors who "kind of felt like" they shouldn't be conducting experiments on live subjects. Eliminating genetic diseases is a good thing. But that so much time, money and lives are spent on IVF when there are so many children around the world who need adoptive parents seems vain and decadent.
I mean, aren't these parents concerned about passing on whatever gene made them not fertile enough to conceive naturally? Hmm?
Posted by b-applegate at 11:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 23, 2005
My job is to ask questions and not spend money.
Can't believe I missed this when it first came out. Timothy Noah at Slate highlighted a "press pool" at a ribs restaurant with the President in the lead-up to the election. It's unbelievably hilarious.
Remarks by the President to the Press Pool Nothin' Fancy Cafe Roswell, New Mexico11:25 A.M. MST
THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.
Q Mr. President, how are you?
THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some ribs.
Q What would you like?
THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I'd like.
Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven't spent enough to keep the country secure.
THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that's exactly what we're going to do. But I'm here to take somebody's order. That would be you, Stretch -- what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It's part of how the economy grows. You've got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?
Q Right behind you, whatever you order.
THE PRESIDENT: I'm ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?
Q But Mr. President --
THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?
Q Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?
Q Ribs.
THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let's order up some ribs.
Q What do you think of the democratic field, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I'm here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?
Q An answer.
Q Can we buy some questions?
THE PRESIDENT: Obviously these people -- they make a lot of money and they're not going to spend much. I'm not saying they're overpaid, they're just not spending any money.
Q Do you think it's all going to come down to national security, sir, this election?
THE PRESIDENT: One of the things David does, he asks a lot of questions, and they're good, generally.
END 11:29 A.M. MST
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September 30, 2005
And the Lord said, "Go to sleep, little grad students."
The problem with science has always been that each new discovery unleashes thousands of new questions and ambiguities. So really, the more we discover new stuff, the stupider we get. Clearly, that isn't working. [Intelligent Design] says we shouldn't bother ourselves with resolving scientific inconsistencies or untangling puzzles. We should recognize that what God really wants is for us just to stop learning.
Why didn't I see it before? It's so obvious!
From Slate's Dahlia Lithwick's Modest Proposal in "favor" of intelligent design.
Posted by b-applegate at 4:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 11, 2005
One-Sided Love
The Japan Times runs an editorial today that discusses polls of perception of "warmth" by national populations toward Japan and vice versa.
In China, 83 percent of the pollees say they feel little or no warmth toward Japan. The corresponding figure in South Korea is 75 percent. Both figures represent a worsening of sentiment toward Japan since the previous poll in 2002. At that time, people who felt little or no warmth toward Japan accounted for 67 percent in China and 69 percent in South Korea.By contrast, 48 percent in Japan hold either some or strong feelings of warmth toward China; and 58 percent toward South Korea. Interestingly, while the figure for China represents a decrease of six percentage points from the 2002 poll, the corresponding figure for South Korea has gone up by five percentage points probably due to the "Hanryu" boom or heightened interest among Japanese in South Korean movies and TV dramas.
In the other poll conducted in early July in Japan and the U.S., to which some 1,000 people responded in each country, 52 percent of the Japanese pollees say the U.S. government cannot be trusted, an increase of 26 percentage points from a similar poll in 1991. By contrast, 59 percent in the U.S. regard the Japanese government as trustworthy.
Americans' general warm feeling toward Japan is not reciprocated by Japanese. While 81 percent in the U.S. say they feel some warmth or have a strong warm feeling toward Japan, only 68 percent in Japan have such a feeling toward the U.S.
What a fascinating interplay of culture and politics. It'll be interesting to see if Koizumi goes through with his Yasukuni Shrine visit this year.
Posted by b-applegate at 2:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 10, 2005
The end of an era... again?
Koizumi is all in on his Japan Post plans. I'm not sure what to think about the upcoming elections-- part of me wants Koizumi to win. The privatization plan is a good idea and it would finally make good on Koizumi's reform promises. Plus a win by the "new" LDP would, as the IHT said, mean a more ideological party. I would certainly like to see a return the Democratic Party to their earlier, more ideological roots, though that's probably not going to happen. And yet I find Koizumi's foreign policy (including the LDP's continued abuse of Okinawa) misguided, so I can't say I'd be unhappy if they lost. It's going to be an interesting month in Japan, that's for sure. Reminds me of Robert F Kennedy's "Chinese curse."
Posted by b-applegate at 2:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 1, 2005
Return to Korea
This weekend I review The Island. Saw it yesterday, and alas, it was pretty awful. However, it is unique in that it's the first science fiction film I've ever seen that explicitly comes right out in favor of the rights of the unborn. At one point there's a "product recall," and employees of Big Evil Corporate Cloning Man walk among the artificial wombs and destroy them. Some of the clear sacs of fluid get hacked to pieces and some get a drug injected into them that looks very much like saline solution (which is injected into the amniotic sac in certain abortion procedures). Subtle, no?
Thus it's a crazy coincidence that the ever-dispassionate, remarkable William Saletan came out with a series on arificial wombs and embryo harvesting this week. Anyone who wants to call themselves informed on the issues of cloning and use of humans for research owes it to themselves to read the articles. They are incredibly objective, but very reminiscent, to me, of Brave New World.
Posted by b-applegate at 1:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 15, 2005
My first bomb drill
Well, apparantly on the fifteenth of every three months (or "something like that" according to my officemates) there's supposed to be a drill for air raids/terrorist bombings/various and sundry calamities, and I am experiencing my first one as we speak. The building's speaker system sent out the crazy siren noise, but I had headphones on and didn't hear it and since nobody even batted an eye I didn't even realize it was going off under I pulled off my headphones. Now we're listening to what I'm told is a radio panel-style conversation between a host and experts on terrorism. People are supposed to stop their cars immediately and stay in them for fifteen minutes after the alarm, but looking out the window it seems people just keep driving until they hit a traffic light (all of them are red). I'm also technically supposed to be crouched under my desk right now, but no one does that either. I take comfort in the fact that if the building were actually hit by a shell, I would be incinerated instantly since I'm right next to the window.
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