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In case you missed it over on the main website:

This Tuesday, May 13, Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City will be hosting a signing for Nobuko Takagi, author of Translucent Tree. An amaranthine love affair written for the modern day romantic, Translucent Tree was released in stores May 6th. Alive with sexual exploration, Nobuko Takagi’s prose is the perfect by-the-beach romance novel. For all of you who did not get your copy of the book, here is your chance to get the book and an autograph from the author!

The signing will be held from 5PM to 7PM at Kinokuniya Bookstore, directly across from Bryant Park, between 40th and 41st St..

Kinokuniya Bookstore
1073 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10018
Tel: (212)869-1700

A recent survey shows that Germany and Japan are currently the two countries viewed most positively by the rest of world, while Iran and Israel are viewed most negatively. The U.S. ranked better than North Korea but worse than Russia.

Had the poll been taken, oh, 65 years ago, I think the results would have been vastly different. Maybe the moral of the story is that getting your ass comprehensively kicked in a war that you started is a necessary rite of passage on the path to national maturity and responsible global citizenship.

I just recently came across this site, which offers curious readers English translations of Japanese laws.

I just love how every new translation made available gets the tag line: “Hot New Releases.”

For example:

Hot New Releases:

Regulation concerning Terminology, Forms and Method of Preparation of Consolidated Financial Statements of Japan, 2008 edition, English edition, 112 pages, 10,500 yen.

The regulation concerning the terminology, forms and method of preparation of consolidated financial statements of Japan may be many things, but one thing it is not is “hot.” Useful, yes. Important, maybe. Interesting… well, okay, maybe to an accountant. But hot? No way.

And do you know how I know this? Because when I do a Google Image Search for the word “hot,” Japanese accounting regulations are not what come up. Try it for yourself! (And if you’re really feeling bold, turn off the “SafeSearch.”)

When I first went to Japan in 1995 the dollar was worth around 90 yen–which was fine by me, because I was getting paid in yen.

In the intervening twelve-plus years the dollar never fell back below 100 yen–until yesterday. Even the Canadian dollar still continues to be worth more. Which means that, in addition to having to dodge the Europeans who walk around Times Square like the Kings Who Own the Place that they are, we can also expect the Japanese and Canadians to join their ranks.

So this is what it feels like to live in one of those poor developing countries that people from the rich countries visit on holiday.

U.S. gov’t report criticizes Japan’s criminal court system

I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand how the U.S. State Department thinks it has the moral authority to pass judgment on anyone’s court system. It’s been about two decades at least since anyone with intelligence greater than that of a gerbil on acid thought that the U.S. court system was a model for anyone to follow. One look at Amnesty International’s report on human rights in the United States is enough to show that the U.S. lecturing other countries about their criminal justice system is like… well, like Eliot Spitzer lecturing would-be criminals about how not to get caught.

I have no desire to jump on the blogging bandwagon and share my thoughts about the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal… EXCEPT to point out that every single article about the guy today features this photo of his mouth turning into some kind of vacuum that seems in danger of sucking in not only his face, but the entire known universe in a kind of reverse Big Bang.

Just thought I’d point that out.

There’s been a spate of research in the last few years about cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. The trend seems to have been started by Richard Nisbett, and now people can’t seem to get enough of it.

Two new studies further reinforce the notion that culture influences cognitive style: this one suggests that Japanese people check for contextual markers (namely, the expressions of other people in the scene) to read a person’s emotions, while Americans remain fixated on the individual whose emotional state they’re supposed to be deciphering. This finding supports earlier results found by Nisbett and others regarding East Asians’ greater attention to contextual and holistic cues.

More interesting, to my mind, was this study, which concluded:

Although both cultures showed a similar developmental pattern, overall the Japanese were more optimistic than the Americans about the possibility of changing negative traits to positive attributes. The Japanese also were more likely to credit these changes to a conscious effort to do better. According to Lockhart, “cultures that value the individual, like the United States, are more likely to attribute a person’s behavior to ‘They were born that way,’ while interdependent cultures, such as Japan, are more likely to consider effort and other situational factors as determinants of behavior.”

I like this finding because it upends the whole silly notion that Asians are somehow more “fatalistic” than Westerners. In this case it was actually the Americans who were more fatalistic about people’s capacity to change for the better.

I don’t think Americans were always like this. Whatever happened to the frontier spirit, the lift-yourself-by-the-bootstraps grit of the poor immigrant, the American Dream?

Here’s a guess: the dual cults of genetic determinism and sociobiology have conspired to strip human beings of any free will or meaningful cultural diversity. Though both of these discourses are couched in the lingo and “ambience” of science, they’re actually intellectual fads that will inevitably be replaced by more nuanced descriptions of the profound effects of environment, lifestyle, and culture on things like gene expression, neuroplasticity, and cognitive style.

In the meantime, though, “It’s all in my genes,” or “I was born that way,” will continue to serve as convenient excuses for whatever it is about yourself that you have no interest in changing.

In what has to be one of the most ridiculous controversies of recent years, the Somin Festival in Iwate prefecture has come under attack for being a form of “indecent exposure.” The controversy was sparked off after a poster publicizing the festival was banned by East Japan Railway Company on the grounds that showing men’s hairy chests constituted a form of “sexual harassment.”

Whoa, that must mean that Tom Selleck and Matthew McConaughey are practically rapists.

If this isn’t proof that civilization is a form of mental illness, I don’t know what is. When all the basic needs of survival have been met (and then some), people turn their surplus energy to every trivial non-issue under the sun, besieging one another with stridency, censure, and in some cases, persecution. That’s the real harassment.

I’m reminded of a poem by the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva:

I know the truth - give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look - it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

(Translated by Elaine Feinstein)

Anyone who’s spent any time in Japan has probably heard the words “gaman” (endurance, making do) and the verb “ganbaru” (to persist, to keep trying, often heard in the imperative forms “ganbatte” and “ganbare”). This dynamic duo forms the flip side to, and coexists with, an equally conspicuous hedonism and appreciation of the finer things in life.

If you want to see a perfect example of what it means to “ganbaru” (with a dose of hedonism to boot), read this article.

The big brouhaha in Japan over the last couple of weeks has been the poisoning of a number people by gyoza dumplings from China that had been tainted by pesticide.

I remember back when the toxic toothpaste and toy scare was going on here that more than one Japanese official was heard to claim that the rest of the world could learn from Japan about how to maintain strict safety controls on Chinese imports… that theory, clearly, may need to be revised.

And speaking of toys,  this article offers a badly-needed warning about where the next source of trouble may be.

There’s a reason I haven’t updated this blog in so long: For the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling on a painful odyssey through the swamp of indifference and mediocrity that passes for a health care system in this country.

I have insurance. Very good insurance, in fact, thanks to good old Vertical. It makes no difference.

I live in a major metropolitan area, with some of the “best” hospitals and doctors in the country. It makes no difference.

According to a World Health Organization survey in 2000, the United States ranked 37th in the world in terms of the quality of its health care system–below Oman, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Morocco, Chile, and Costa Rica, among others. France was #1, Japan was #10. This might be a respectable outcome if we actually spent less than these countries on health care, but in 2003 the U.S. spent $5,711 per capita (no doubt much more by now) on health care while France spent $3048 and Japan only $2249. Meanwhile, Japan’s overall life expectancy is 82.2, France’s is 80.59, and the United States’ is 78 (which places a full 28 full UN members ahead of it in the world rankings).

Conclusion: We are so incompetent and inefficient that our outcomes lag far behind the rest of the developed world even though we spend far, far more than any of them. Of course the chattering classes in the media like to point out that the high levels of poverty here skews the results. As if somehow that made it better.

There’s one area in which the United States excels: Emergency medicine. Trauma surgery. Saving the lives of people who have experienced horrible, unnatural violence.

This is not surprising, if you think about it. As a nation at perpetual war, we thrive on horrible, unnatural violence. Our military surgeons deal with it on a daily basis, and many of them have years and decades of experience doing so. Not that our civilian emergency surgeons have any shortage of practice either: 44, 933 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents in 2004 (a fatality rate twice that of most other industrialized nations) and it’s long been common knowledge that the United States leads most of the world (including places like Brazil) in gun deaths (11,624 gun homicides and 16,750 suicides in 2004). And for every fatality, you can be sure there are many other potential victims who survived thanks to emergency medical care.

Medicine is, for the most part, one of the arts of peace. But it seems the only time we’re any good at it is when it is also one of the arts of war.

Ye shall know them by their fruits.

- Matthew 7:16

I swore to myself I wouldn’t comment on the U.S. presidential race in this blog, but this is just too much.

It seems that Mike Huckabee has equated homosexuality with bestiality and abortion with slavery.

“Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view, to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal,” he added.

Let’s take a look at what the sacred institution of Mike Huckabee’s marriage produced:

This guy.

A guy. Who hangs. Stray Dogs. For Fun. Full stop.