It’s nice to see a mass-market film be so overtly anti-establishment (there’s a line in the film where some evil bureaucrat says that Japan’s democracy only needs to be a democracy on paper, or something to that effect)—maybe that’s why the film had to cast a Korean-born actress to be Erika Yoshioka, the journalist in the film? Unfortunately, I found the film a little boring, with odd pacing and an anticlimactic ending.
What seems more interesting is Tetsuya Mori’s documentary on Isoko Mochizuki herself, called iー新聞記者ドキュメントー (the trailer is embedded above). The documentary appears to promise plenty of verbal altercations with politicians and Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet minister. Tetsuya Mori himself has produced plenty of non-judgmental films about people in the news, like Fake (about a video game music composer who lied about being deaf). Mori seems to be on the same wavelength as Mochizuki about Japanese mass media, so I hope to see this documentary someday.
Even if Tokyo-to (the area under Ms. Koike’s jurisdiction) goes under lockdown, which could be possible (?), according to the graphic, 2.91 million travel in and out of Tokyo-to everyday from the surrounding prefectures. The joke is that the television graphic, which has pictures of all the prefectural governors, looks like something from a NHK period drama, where all the governors are coming to capture Ms. Koike.
So the question of when the coronavirus outbreak will happen is on everyone’s mind—at least everyone who works in mass media.
Why have there been so few cases (so far)? This Reuters article from March 18 thinks it’s because only the most sick patients receive tests:
“Just because you have capacity, it doesn’t mean that we need to use that capacity fully,” health ministry official Yasuyuki Sahara told a news briefing on Tuesday. “It isn’t necessary to carry out tests on these people who are just simply worried.”
The health ministry’s statement however contrasts with a study by the Japan Medical Association, reported by public broadcaster NHK on Wednesday, that 290 coronavirus tests requested by doctors had been refused by health centers.
The doctor’s organization cited its nationwide poll showing the refusals happened in 26 prefectures in a 20-day period through March 16, NHK said.
“Strong social norms” despite hanami parties, commutes to work, and kickboxing matches is the reason that this orientalist graph from the Financial Times suggests:
Japan’s secret weapon: “Strong social norms around obedience and mask-wearing” 😂 pic.twitter.com/TsufqWPWNf
The explanation on the graph mirrors this Bloomberg article from 19 March, which said:
Japan may have some built-in advantages, such as a culture where handshakes and hugs are less common than in other G-7 countries. It also has rates of hand-washing above those in Europe.
Cases of seasonal flu have been declining for seven straight weeks, just as the coronavirus was spreading, indicating Japanese may have taken to heart the need to adopt some basic steps to stem infectious diseases. Tokyo Metropolitan Infectious Disease Surveillance Center data shows that influenza cases this year are well below normal levels, with nationwide cases at the lowest, according to data going back to 2004.
[The reasons why the R0 for the coronavirus is so low in Japan] may be that personal protective measures like hand-washing and masks are entrenched, that social customs that involve bodily contact like handshakes and hugs do not exist, and that there are a lot of otakus who shut themselves inside all day and live in two-dimensional worlds.
It’s stereotypes of otaku like these that give Japanese pop culture a terrible reputation worldwide. But the lawyer isn’t wrong, I think?
So what’s happening in Tokyo right now? Some of my friends are commuting to work as normal, some of them are in Okinawa traveling, and all of them probably want the coronavirus to go away. I do too. Who doesn’t?
It’s frustrating because late March and early April is the season of change in Tokyo.
Keio University (one of the best universities in Japan) is holding online commencement ceremony. I applaud them. But the staff on the stage are too close to each other? Ok I shut up. https://t.co/EvGi8VETxv
Okay, I don’t think Keio is one of the best universities in Japan, but their auditorium (gymnasium?) is hella fancy. This really is a school for the rich.
The usual graduation ceremony was camcelled, but some Kyoto University students still wore fancy dress. Wonder how well that commemorative shot of Corona beer cut-outs wil age. https://t.co/qQoRatwg79pic.twitter.com/qrzJtCMn0N
In Shinjuku Gyoen park in western Tokyo, where cherry blossoms were near peak bloom, a sign at the entrance informed visitors that, as part of antivirus efforts, picnic blankets and alcohol were banned. Security guards with megaphones wandered through groups of people who were taking photos with the flowers, warning them to wash their hands.
At a store not far from the park, Kazuhisa Haraguchi, 36, stood in a long line for a chance to buy a limited-edition pair of Nike Air Max sneakers.
Mr. Haraguchi said that he was worried about how the virus was spreading in the United States and Europe, but that he wasn’t too concerned about the situation in Japan.
“It’s scary, but it doesn’t seem like there’s much of it here right now,” he said. “If I die, at least I’ll die with my sneakers.”
English-speaking East Asians of the world, when’s the last time someone decided that your family name was your given name?
James Griffiths writes for CNN the Japanese government’s losing battle (?) with English-language media to get the world to write Abe Shinzo, rather than Shinzo Abe:
The family-name-first format has always been used in Japanese. But during the Meiji Era that began in 1868, the order was reversed in English to begin with the given name, a format more familiar in the West.
While that decision may have made life easier for some 19th century Western diplomats, Japan’s neighbors soon proved that foreigners could (for the most part) handle writing the “last name” first. And for almost two decades now Tokyo has been trying to reverse the Meiji reversal. Last year’s request to the international media was only the latest attempt.
Japan is being “being hoisted on its own petard,” said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Tokyo’s Temple University. He added that in the past, the country was “eager to distance itself from its neighbors so as not to be confused with them.” Now, though, it wants the West to treat it the same.
I think I write (and probably will continue to write) Shinzo Abe pretty consistently on the blog. But that would mean I have to write Jinping Xi as well whenever I write snarky shit about Mainland China. (Which I won’t.)
Is it prejudicial to apply a different standard to Japanese names rather than Chinese names? If everyone else is doing it, does that make it right? According to the CNN article:
For now, most media outlets are unwilling to make a change if no one else is, creating an inertia loop whereby inaction begets inaction. CNN Business could not find any major publication which refers to the Japanese prime minister as “Abe Shinzo,” and no outlet which responded to a request for comment suggested such a switch was imminent.
A decision that once thought would take four weeks, now made within forty-eight hours. Ms. Koike, Mr. Abe, and Mr. Bach basically have an oral agreement to agree that the Tokyo Olympics will be postponed for up to a year. But it’ll still be called Tokyo 2020.
I thought this tweet is a great summary of what’s happened:
The joke is that people pass around documents that need corrections in an office using name stamps. (I did that once at an internship to show that I read a document that was being passed around everyone in the office.)
(“政権” points more to Mr. Abe’s administration, whereas “政治” points more towards Mr. Abe’s politics and policies, such as his personal obsession with the Tokyo Olympics. Which he’s not even a party to in the IOC’s host city contract! Maybe privity of contract doesn’t exist in Swiss law.)
Look closer and you’ll see that the picture is actually a triptych of undesirables: two pictures of Mr. Abe enveloping a central portrait of Mr. Trump. Mr. Abe, after all, is so desperate to be Mr. Trump’s friend that he’s willing to golf with Mr. Trump until he trips into a sand bunker.
I thought this Washington Post analysis by Rick Maese and Simon Denyer was the most comprehensive. I would have thought that postponing the Olympics would be the likely way out, but the logistics of doing so might be even more painful than a cancellation:
The Olympics media operation will be headquartered at the Tokyo Big Sight, which serves as the city’s major convention space. Delaying the Games means an important Tokyo facility would be unavailable indefinitely. The city-owned venue normally hosts 300 exhibitions every year.
At the conclusion of the Games, the Olympic Village is expected to be converted into more than 5,600 condominiums, housing 12,000 people. Real estate companies have listed 940 units for sale thus far and have received more than 2,200 applications, with some apartments already sold, said Mika Kiyomoto, spokeswoman for Mitsui Fudosan, one of 10 developers of the project.
Asked what options buyers who have purchased a property would have in case of a postponement or cancellation of the Games, Kiyomoto declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of individual contracts.
Japanese audio narration, with Japanese subtitles.
Apparently it takes around 20 minutes to get to the nearest metro station (on the Toei Oedo Line) from these condos, which cost over a hundred million yen for a unit. Would that be enough of a reason to back out of the transaction?
Ever wanted to express a desire against turning your pristine island into an urban hell in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Just gather your friends and stage a protest against Tanuki Kaihatsu (or Resident Services in English? I’m not sure. I don’t want a Nintendo Switch) by hitting the construction wall continually with your bug-catching net:
Viral tweets on Japanese Twitter always attract irrelevant comments in English. (Can anyone enlighten why people find it necessary to write “just an English comment passing through” on a video (or anything, really) that’s not in English?)
Clearly the original tweet does not have anything to do with a “let me in” meme! That’s why the user made your reply hidden!
Why do we care about our friends? In fact, why do we care about whether we have friends at all? As the coronavirus violently reduces the spectrum of how we spend our waking hours, I find this question looming on the back of my mind.
Most of the time, I don’t talk about friendship with my friends. I talk (or mostly listen) about other things. A new cafe that opened downtown serving scrambled eggs all day and drip coffee from Colombia. An affidavit assignment due next week (and here’s the model answer from last year). Chef Lucas Tse of Junzi Kitchen sharing the scrambled egg recipe from Australia Dairy Company, a world-famous cafe in Hong Kong. The relative sex appeal of a male member of the university’s table tennis team (not much, in my opinion). The insufferable whiteness of begpacking across Asia. The insufferable whiteness of Hong Kong middle-aged men who would rather be Her Majesty The Queen’s colonial subjects, rather than to subject themselves to Xi Jinping’s rule.
Maybe I don’t talk about friendship, because I don’t want to find out the inconvenient truth of whether my friendship is built on a house of cards. An alliance of convenience between innocents who face a common enemy, whether that be law school, or a scary supervisor at work. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Drop out of law school, or switch your job, and giving up your friendships is part of the cost.
Hanya Yangihara doesn’t think of friendships this way. She wrote a 700-page opus about four men in New York City. Their stories are paradoxical: fantastically removed from reality, and yet a dreadful, photorealistic portrait of our fears and prejudices. Just like friendship, which, she says, is an exchange of everything and nothing:
“To me, the thing about friendship that makes it so singular is that it’s a relationship that’s central to our identity in that it doesn’t necessarily benefit us in any tangible way. It’s a relationship we don’t have to pursue – if we decide to stop being friends one day, nothing will happen, no one’s there to legislate or adjudicate it. It’s two people who every day choose to keep it going, and in that way it’s very powerful because it’s one you choose to work on, and you choose to without any agreement; it’s an unspoken bond.”
Yes, all friendships are voluntary. Someday, perhaps, the people who I speak to semi-regularly in my life right now will stop volunteering their time with me. The transaction has ended. But even if transactional friendships are toxic, I cannot reject absolutely the notion that friendship in its idealized form, with all the evil distilled away, has no benefits to the human mind or body. Like the sun and the air, friends are a source of nourishment and enrichment. I could spend the rest of my time alive in a fluorescent-lit room hooked up to a ventilator, but I would much prefer the privilege of soaking my skin on a grass field in the late afternoon sun.
And I would say the same thing about friendship. Without expecting anything in return, my friends have taught me, challenged me, helped me, confided with me, and opened up to me opportunities that I otherwise thought never existed. During the ugliest moments in my many fights with my parents, my father told me that my family is all I ever will have if I lose all my friends. But when I feel so alienated to the people who conceived me, sometimes my friends knew me better than any family I ever had.
“Humans live a constantly changing existence, and so the ways humans connect with one another must also change and evolve. (人間というものが、絶えず変わってゆく存在であるかぎり、人との関わり方も必然、常に変化・変質してゆかざるを得ない。)” So begins a book on friendships once made, then lost, which I came across this January on the first floor of Shosen Book Tower, a popular bookstore for nerds in Akihabara, Tokyo.
The book itself compiles dozens of anonymous letters people wrote to a TBS Radio program called Rhymestar Utamaru’s Weekend Shuffle (ライムスター宇多丸のウィークエンド・シャッフル). Utamaru, the program’s host, asked for people to reflect on friends to whom they’ve become estranged. People who happened to be friends because they sat next to each other in class. People who happened to be friends because they were the first to exchange phone contacts. Do you still feel excitement in your veins when you think about them? Or a longing awkwardness?
After being on the fence about the book for a while, I bit the bullet (financially) and got the book from Amazon. The book was full of stories people probably wouldn’t share even during a fresh round of beers at the second izakaya in a night, but nevertheless deserved an outlet to memorialize. A person who didn’t reply to a friend’s wedding invitation because he was going through a breakup, but went to the wedding anyway and never spoke to the groom again. A person who once agreed with her friend never to show their boy’s love doujinshi to anyone, only to visit her house and find out that she and her boyfriend were reading them together. A person who agreed to work for a friend’s startup, only to find out that their friend wasn’t a very good boss, and had poor scheduling habits.
To be honest, I half-expected the letters to be more melodramatic. Where were the confrontations and dress downs? I was expecting memoirs of ugly fights, not whimsical tales from men who were close to their male friends until they married their own girlfriends. (The book is a little heteronormative.) Though to be fair, Utamaru was going to read these letters aloud on the airwaves (and then to archive them forever in a book). Maybe TBS Radio filtered through the most violent and vexatious tales. Or maybe most people suffer their most brutal adjustments as to who they wanted to give up their time and space to in silence. I know I did, and I know I will.
Nevertheless, the book has inspired me to write my own letter to a former friend. If we all get only one chance at life, then maybe we also only get one chance to say what we want. Even if the message doesn’t get across. This one’s for you, C.
Content note: 1. Some readers may find the emotional language contained in the letter below a difficult read. 2. The sixth paragraph of the letter contains language inserted for narrative purposes that some readers may consider homophobic.
Sometimes I tell myself that our friendship died in circumstances beyond our control. Crushed by postgraduate parental expectations about how to start our lives after college, our friendship had mutated into a cancer, a bag of pain in my heart that I had to cut off.
These are harsh words, C. But I do not forget that you were my first friend in secondary school. I would have otherwise spent my first year in this strange and rich place with nothing to do, and no one to talk to, except for that girl on the school bus who thought that “my handwriting was okay, for a boy.” I remember visiting your house at the start of a summer vacation, with my trusty, plastic white MacBook in hand (the only Apple machine in a friend group of nerds), and we would all join a Team Fortress 2 server, mashing our mouse buttons to virtually murder strangers in cold blood. I think Scout was my queer awakening.
You were kind enough to visit me in Tokyo when I was at Waseda University. I loved having friends visit me in Tokyo, because it was so hard to make friends at Waseda. We went to a bunch of cool places. Do you remember waiting for two hours for a luxurious dinner of deep fried pork cutlet at Tonki, in Ebisu, where we watched (with considerable concern) a very old man, with his back bent permanently at a right angle, make decisive cuts on a slab of freshly fried meat? Do you remember walking down Yanaka Ginza on a sweltering afternoon, where we got the cutest Yorkshire Terrier to sit on my lap at a bakery overflowing with potted plants? Do you remember me suggesting the idea that we should go to a gay bar to see what it’s like, only for you to reject the idea, because you’re “not gay” (even though you would later tell me no less than a dozen times to watch Yuri!!! on Ice, a commercial celebration of a Russian-Japanese same-sex relationship)?
Dinnertime at Tonki. Photographed July 2016.
Something irrevocably changed in our friendship after that summer after we hung out in Tokyo. On reflection, I could have been a better friend and simply asked: “how’s it going?” You were under considerable pressure to get a job in the United States in your senior year of college. You told me that your new full time job was “recruiting”. You told me you had 12 hours of case interview practice a day. You told me you were too tired to even considering downloading Cities: Skylines, perhaps the greatest game to come out in a generation. And you were the one who introduced gaming to me.
I became drawn to your obsessive aura with getting a management consultant job. I started to wonder if management consulting was a career for me. It was not, but I didn’t know better at the time. I became obsessed with wasting money on case interview books. I had no idea why I kept coming to you to look at cover letters. And so you became to contrast my failures with your apparent successes. Our friendship changed into a constant comparison game. My very existence became a vindication of how correct your life choices were, and therefore how incorrect everyone else’s was.
You would later tell me that you “personally had no idea that my behavior was rubbing you in such a wrong fashion”. But if that was the case, why, after I asked for you to help me a download an article for my thesis that I somehow couldn’t find on Georgetown University’s servers, did you send me an email with that article with the subject line, “Your Cornell Academic Subsidy”? Why did you ask me about how my fall semester finals were going, just to ask me, “Feeling prepared or panicked?” Why did you tell me that you were jealous of me taking up Japanese in college? Why did you silently stalk me on social media, only to tell me that you “see on Snapchat that you’ve been suffering with a final paper”, or even, “It seems that you’re procrastinating right now”? Why did you text me out of the blue that you did get a management consulting job in New York City, and that you were “pretty chuffed about [your] pay”? In fact, why were you the only person I knew who would brag about becoming employed completely unprompted? When I told you that I couldn’t find a job in the United States, why did you say that, “I have nothing else to say lest I look like I’m rubbing my job security in”? Was “need I remind you, you scored 45/45” the only reaction you could muster? Why were you still obsessed with our high school examination grades a full four years after we left those hallways of horror? Why did you tell me that you then went to Japan with your family, and then say, “I take back any instances when I may have laughed at you due to your Book-Off addiction”? When I tried to hide the fact that I was returning to Hong Kong for law school, why did you keep peppering me with questions about what I was going to do the summer after college? Why was you first reaction “2 years of lawyering suffering [sic]” when I finally caved in? On graduation day, why did you even take the time to text me, “now law school looms in the distance”? Didn’t you have your own graduation to attend to? Weren’t you supposed to be listening to Joe Biden, your commencement speaker—a fact you told me out of the blue with the intention of flashing your Ivy League credentials? Or were you so obsessed with counting the number of tennis balls that can fit in a Boeing 747 that you no longer knew how to count the number of friends you had left in Cornell by then?
I believe that only the closest of friends confront each other for their failures. C, do you remember what you told me after I confronted you about all of the above? These were the exact words is what you told me over Facebook Messenger:
“When I speak of Cornell, I speak of it from a source of deep school pride. I do not seek to belittle your own experiences at Georgetown or your current studies at HKU. When I highlight your IB scores, I only seek to emphasize the triumphs that your intelligence and work ethic have brought you. When I talk of stress, I seek to inject a degree of levity and use it as a common source of commiseration, I do not seek to undermine your current experiences. When I ask you how you are doing, I am genuinely curious about what you have done recently and not ticking off some checkboxes and scoring your efforts against mine.”
C, do you even realize what you’re saying? “Emphasize the triumphs that your intelligence and work ethic have brought you”? To whom? For what purpose? After a decade of knowing each other, am I just a spreadsheet of numbers and random resume achievements unfit for a management consulting candidate? Do you management-consult your “true friends”, as you emphasized that I was to you until the very end, into the depths of hell? Do you realize how much hurt you’ve generated, to the point that I’m pretending to write to a TBS Radio program, just to show the world how rotten our friendship had become?
Even if that’s the case, C, I wish you well. I saw on LinkedIn that you got promoted at your company last July. LinkedIn seems to be the only social network you’re active on right now. You’re probably a minor millionaire in New York by now.
If you were still my friend, you could be a punch line at a dinner party—after all, I know of no one else who told me he was willing to live in New Jersey to work in Manhattan.
With warmest regards, Kenneth
Notes and further reading
Shosen Book Tower is one of the biggest general bookstores in Akihabara and has an amazing collection of publications, commercial and self-made, on just about every hobby imaginable. I try to stop by whenever I’m in the east side of Tokyo.
君と僕の挽歌 is also the ending song to (the second season of) an anime called Kimi to Boku, which itself is a manga about four teenage high school students and their purely platonic friendships. The song itself is five minutes long, which is too long, and too sad, to sing at karaoke, except perhaps in the small hours of the morning, when you’re the only one awake in the room, and everyone else is asleep waiting for the first train.
In case you’re wondering, every single quote from C in my letter is real. (I have the receipts.) They’re extracted from messages that C sent to me over the course a year. I only edited the text for better grammar flow. I’ve indicated those edits using square brackets. So you can be the judge of whether I’m being melodramatic by writing this essay, or whether C is just awful.
Also, in case you’re wondering, I’m not (or at least I believe I’m not) a melodramatic bitter bean. However, I did think that my and C’s relationship became so extraordinary (and extraordinarily toxic) that I felt compelled to share my story. I publish my words here not with the intention to hurt C in any way, but to invite all of us to reflect on the destructive atmosphere college “recruiting” creates among friends, the importance of adult friendships, and the ways we might help and hurt each other.
The premise of 100日後に死ぬワニ (The Crocodile Who Dies in 100 Days) is simple. You follow the life of an anthropomorphic alligator and his friends in real time, starting from around December until today. Nothing much happens in the story. The alligator works, texts his friends, and watches TV.
We are all, in fact, crocodiles who will die in 100 days. Our schools, workplaces, and lives will also change. Nothing lasts forever. And we all someday will die.
たとえば私は、「22年後に死ぬヒト」です。
For example, I am “a human who will die in 22 years”.
今ちょうど60歳なので、男性60才の平均余命は22年。私は、22年の余命宣告をされています。
I’ve just turned 60. On average, a 60 year old man has 22 years left to live. So it’s been pronounced that I have 22 years left.
Well, 22 years is just an average. I might die tomorrow. That applies to everyone, no matter how young someone is. Their long lifespans are just an average.
人は、一日生きれば確実に余命が一日短くなります。けれど、普段はそんなこと気にしていません。
As we live each day, so do our remaining lives shorten by a day. But we don’t usually notice this.
This weekend, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom in Tokyo, as they are in the comic. The coronavirus crisis might have stopped people from celebrating graduations and matriculations under the falling pink petals, but it is perhaps fitting that millions of people had their eyes on Twitter tonight, collectively celebrating the life of this anonymous alligator.
If you can drink alcohol, check out these convenience store cocktail ideas from Time Out Tokyo to keep your cabin fever to a minimum, and to spice up those soul-crushing Zoom meetings where virtual backgrounds and muted microphones form the ultimate test of non-verbal human communication.
Ginger-infused gin and green tea umeshu sounds great, but I’m not sure about mixing vodka with bubble tea from convenience stores. It might be better to risk a train trip to TenRen’s Tea in Omotesando to get the real stuff and mix in some Grey Goose.
