Global Voices Online » Japanese

Japan: 10,000 signatures to support a café

Hanako Tokita — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:18:24 +0000

A small independent café, Berg, is facing possible eviction from a shopping complex in Shinjuku, adjacent to the world's busiest train station. The building owner wants the 50-square-metre café out because the café owner has refused to sign a new contract that allows the company to evict its tenant after a certain period of time. Customers who frequent the café responded and set up the blog site LOVE! BERG!. Within six months, the site collected 10,000 signatures from people who support the café. However, the company ignored the petition and sent an eviction note in September asking the café to move out by March next year. Petition form here.

Japan: 2008 Neologisms and Trendy Words

Scilla Alecci — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:59:29 +0000

Presenting this year's 60 neologisms and trendy words [jp], among which only one will be elected representative for 2008, Kôgetsu describes briefly[jp] the events that influenced the choice and Japanese public opinion on the topic this year. His “best three” words are: subprime, tainted rise (事故米) and “Ponyo Ponyo, sakana no ko”. His “best three” news stories are: the resignation of PM Fukuda, the crisis following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and the election of Obama. Lastly, Kôgetsu stresses that one of the neologisms, saiban'inko (サイバンインコ) [“lay judge guy”], which he had never heard before, sounds unnatural to him, and he guesses that the Minister of Justice had a hand in its inclusion.

Japan: Japanese Language in the Age of English

Scilla Alecci — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:00:45 +0000

The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English [ja], the latest book by Japanese novelist and essayist Minae Mizumura [水村美苗] [en], roused debate among many Japanese bloggers recently over the fate of their national language. In this book, the writer, who had the opportunity to live and receive an education both in Japan and in the U.S., examines the role and future of the Japanese language. Mizumura contextualizes her discussion of this language, used for centuries by many literates and intellectuals to produce works of great literary value, in a modern age in which English is invading all fields of knowledge, to the point of becoming a universal written language used by everyone across the world to communicate.

The first blogger who wrote about the book in enthusiastic terms was Mochio Umeda, who expresses his hope that the work becomes the basis for any future debate over the relationship between English and Japanese. At his blog My Life Between Silicon Valley and Japan, Umeda-san writes:

この本は今、すべての日本人が読むべき本だと思う。「すべての」と言えば言いすぎであれば、知的生産を志す人、あるいは勉学途上の中学生、高校生、大学生、大学院生(専門はいっさい問わない)、これから先言葉で何かを表現したいと考えている人、何にせよ教育に関わる人、子供を持つ親、そんな人たちは絶対に読むべきだと思う。

Every Japanese person should read this book now. Maybe “every [person]” is an exaggeration, but what I mean to say is every person who wishes to produce something intellectual, every secondary, high school, graduate or postgraduate student (no matter their specialization), and also people who are thinking of expressing their thoughts in the future through the use of language, and finally people involved in education and parents with children. These people should absolutely read [this book].

一言だけいえば、これから私たちは「英語の世紀」を生きる。ビジネス上英語が必要だからとかそういうレベルの話ではない。英語がかつてのラテン語のように、「書き言葉」として人類の叡智を集積・蓄積していく「普遍語」になる時代を私たちはこれから生きるのだ、と水村は喝破する。そして、そういう時代の英語以外の言葉の未来、日本語の未来、日本人の未来、言語という観点からのインターネットの意味、日本語教育や英語教育の在り方について、本書で思考を続けていく。

[Summing up this book] in one word, [the idea is that] from now on, we will be living in the “century of the English language”, limited not only to the use of English in business. Mizumura proclaims that we are going to live in an era in which the English language, like Latin was in the past, will become the “universal language” used for storing and maintaining mankind's wisdom in the form of a “written language”. This book also continues [discussion of] ideas regarding the future of other languages besides English in this age, as well as the future of the Japanese language, and of the Japanese people, and touches on the meaning of the Internet from the point of view of languages, as well as the condition of Japanese language education and English language education.

少女時代から漱石に耽溺し「続明暗」でデビューした水村の問題提起は、「たとえば今日、2008年11月7日、漱石と同じくらいの天賦の才能を持った子供が日本人として生を受けたとして、その子が知的に成長した将来、果たして日本語で書くでしょうか。自然に英語で書くのではないですか」ということである。放っておけば日本語は、「話し言葉」としては残っても、叡智を刻む「書き言葉」としてはその輝きを失っていくのではないか。「英語の世紀」とはそういう暴力的な時代なのだと皆が認識し、いま私たちが何をすべきか考えなければならない。

A fan Sôseki [Natsume Sôseki [en], one of the most influential Japanese novelists of the modern era] since she was a little girl, Mizumura, who made her debut with Zoku Meian (続明暗) [lit. “Lightness and Darkness Continued ”; “Lightness and Darkness” [en] is among Sôseki's unfinished works], raises the following question: “If today, on the 7th of November, 2008, a Japanese child was born with the same innate talent as Sôseki, would this child write in Japanese once they became intellectually mature? Wouldn't they instead naturally write in English?” If this [issue] is left unaddressed, then although the Japanese language may remain as a “spoken language”, will it not lose the radiance typical of the “written languages” used to inscribe [human] knowledge? Everyone recognizes that the “century of the English language” is in this sense a violent age, and we must as such think carefully about what we should do [in this situation].

Disagreeing with the author of the essay, blogger id:fromdusktildawn attributes the fall of the Japanese language to the poverty of contents that have been transmitted over the past few years in Japanese, especially by the mass media. He stresses, moreover, that more so than studying Japanese literature, it would be useful if Japanese studied economics, in order to gain the basic knowledge necessary to acquire political awareness:

今後、世界中の、あらゆる価値ある知識は英語で生産され、英語で流通する。
インターネットの普及が、その流れをますます加速している。
世界中の知的にパワフルな人々は、ますます母国語よりも英語で読み、英語で書き、
英語で議論しながら、価値ある学術的成果・文化・商品・サービスを創り上げていくだろう。
[…]

Now and in the future, all over the world, all knowledge of value will be produced in English, will circulate in English. The diffusion of the Internet has increasingly accelerated this trend.
It would seem that all over the world, intellectually influential people will read, write and debate in English, rather than using their mother-tongue, and in this way they will create scientific results, culture, products and services of great value.

そうして、日本語圏は、三流芸人が軽薄にバカ騒ぎするバラエティー番組や
スポーツマンや芸能人の下半身の話題をさも重大事件のように扱うゴシップ雑誌、
知性のかけらもない動物的で脊髄反射的なネット書き込みばかりがあふれる言論空間に堕ちていく。
書店の本も、ネット上の文章も、日本語のものは、ますます知的に貧弱になり、
英語圏のものは、ますます豊かで豊饒で活力に満ちたものになっていくだろう。

In areas where Japanese is spoken, the level of discussion has deteriorated to a state where third-class performers appear on TV shows with their frivolous and ridiculous attitudes, magazines treat gossip about the sex lives of sportsmen and actors as matters of great importance, and online threads inundate the web with off-the-cuff comments that have not a trace of intellectual reasoning. While the intellectual quality of books in libraries, articles on the net and everything written in Japanese is becoming worse and worse, productions in English in contrast would appear to be becoming richer and richer, full of intellectual energy and vitality.

[…]

日本近代文学大好きな小説家である彼女は、以下のような主旨のことを主張する。
「国語」としての日本語の衰退を防ぐために、
日本の学校教育の国語の時間数を増やし、
全ての学生に日本近代文学を読み継がせることを
日本の国語授業の主眼にすべきだ。

The writer [Minae Mizumura], an admirer of Japanese modern literature, makes a claim of the following kind:
In order to avoid the decline of the Japanese language as a “national language”, the number of hours of Japanese language lessons at school should be increased, all students should be made to continue reading Japanese modern literature texts, and class work on Japanese language should be treated as the central aim.

[…]

文化のために個々のリアルな人間が存在するのではなく、
個々のリアルな人間の生を豊かにするために文化が存在するのだ。
個々の人間のリアルな生が輝くのなら、日本文化など亡んでもかまわない。
[…]

Real people do not exist for literature's sake, rather it is the literature which exists to enrich real people's lives. As long as the individual shines in their own life, the fact that Japanese literature perishes is not a problem.

そもそも、現在の多くの日本国民は、
有権者としての最低限の知識すら身につけていない。
どの政治家に投票すれば、自分たちの暮らしが良くなるのかを
判断するための基礎知識が決定的に欠落しているのだ。
どの政治家に投票すれば暮らしが良くなるのかを知るには、
夏目漱石や芥川龍之介を読むより、
現代経済学の教科書を読む方が、何百倍も効果的だ。

In the first place, many Japanese citizens nowadays don't even have the minimal level of knowledge [needed] as electors. There is no question that they are lacking the basic ability to judge which politician to vote for in order to improve their own life. In acquiring the knowledge needed to know who to vote for in order to improve your life, it is a hundred times more effective to read books about modern economics than it is to read Natsume Sôseki or Akutagawa Ryûnosuke [en].

Another blogger, id:repon, disagrees with Mochio Umeda (the first blogger introduced in this article), explaining that he doesn't feel the same sense of crisis about the Japanese language reported by Umeda-san and also described by [ja] blogger Dan Kogai:

僕には、id:umedamochioさんやid:dankogaiさんが「日本語が危ない」と「危機感」を持つ、その危機感とやらがさっぱりわかりません。
英語は道具、日本語は「国語」。そうなっていくだけのことですよ。
それは危機でも何でもありません。
英語は「国語」にはなりませんよ。

When bloggers umedamochio and dankogai say that they feel that “Japanese is in danger” or [that they feel] “a sense of crisis”, I don't understand what they mean.
English is a tool, Japanese is our “national language”. Simple as that.
This is not a crisis. And English will not become the “national language”.

「国民とはイメージとして心に描かれた想像の政治共同体である」とベネディクト・アンダーソンはその主著「想像の共同体」で述べています。
国民という概念は近代になって創造されたものなんですよね。
その「国民」概念を支えているのが、共通言語として作られた「国語」なんです。
「国語」は、簡単には衰退しませんよ。
グローバリズムが簡単に国民国家や民族や宗教を駆逐するどころか、かえって強化したように。

Benedict Anderson in “Imagined Communities” says that “[The concept of] Nation is an imagined political community sketched in one's heart as an image.” The concept of “nation” has been created in the modern era and what is supporting that concept is the [concept] of “national language”, created as a common language. A “national language” doesn't disappear so easily.
And globalism, rather than simply destroying nations, peoples or religions, would seem to actually strengthen them.

Blogger id:essa (Taku Nakajima) agrees at with id:repon in the belief that the Japanese language, if it were to face a crisis, would come up against a centripetal force that works to conserve language as a symbol of the nation:

確かに、グローバリズムに対抗する形で、民族や宗教の力は強まっている。でも、基本的にはその力は国民国家を解体する方向へ作用すると見るべきだと思う。どこの国でも、国民国家は内と外に引き裂かれて消滅しようとしている。

In fact, the strength of a people or of a religion acquires power when then they are in a situation where they must resist globalism. However, I think that we have to see if that power is working in the direction of dismantling the nation. In every country, nation states are being pulled apart from the inside and the outside, about to be destroyed.

[…]

日本という国は、明治以降になってから明確に外国の存在を意識して人為的に作られた国であり、江戸以前の日本とは別の国だ。夏目漱石は自分が生まれた頃に新しく作られた、その近代日本という国において、どういう言語を使ったらいいかということを生涯のテーマとした人だ。
[…]

Japan is a country that, from the Meiji era on, after it became aware of the existence of foreigners, has been artificially created, and it is a different country from pre-Edo era Japan. Natsume Sôseki lived in a country, modern Japan, that had just been created when he was born, and dedicated his whole life to thinking about which language would be most appropriate [for this nation].

だから、明治維新で作られた近代的な国民国家としての日本が消滅した時に、何が出てくるか予想つかない。それがイメージできない分だけ私にも実感がわかない所もあるが、国民国家としての日本は消えつつあり、漱石に象徴される一つの言語が亡びつつあるのだと思う。
そういう意味で、「あたし彼女」はやはり象徴的だ。あれは、夏目漱石の使った言葉とは違う言語だけど、枕草子には接続できるような気がする。

So if this Japan, which emerged as a modern nation through the Meiji Restoration, was to disappear, I cannot imagine what would come next. Given that I cannot imagine this, it doesn't seem real to me, but I do believe that Japan, as a nation, is actually disappearing, and that the singular language of which Sôseki is a symbol will perish with it.
For this reason, I think that “Atashi kanojo” [lit. “I, the girlfriend”, a popular keitai shosetsu] is symbolic. It uses a different language from the one used by Natsume Sôseki, but I feel that it can somehow be linked to “Makura no Soshi” [en] [“The Pillow Book” a Japanese masterwork written in the last period of the 10th century by a court lady].

Japan: Full-speed ahead for Christmas and New Year's Eve

Scilla Alecci — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:19:34 +0000

Blogger at Techtech to Tuzuru Nichijô Essay Book (テクテクとつづる日常エッセイブック) [jp] describes how, since the first week of November, Tokyo is already lit up for Christmas, everybody seems to walk faster, all the shops are already selling gifts and the big department stores are already displaying special dishes for the New Year. The blogger writes that it's almost as if, in this period of the year, someone has pushed down hard on the accelerator pedal, everything is moving so fast.

Japan: A girl in the Pro Baseball League

Scilla Alecci — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 05:18:32 +0000

Yuko Shimonakamura at Yuko no Jinsei to Tigers [勇皇の人生とタイガース] comments with enthusiasm [jp] on the birth of a new baseball heroine, Eri Yoshida, the 16 y.o. high school student who will likely debut as a pitcher in the Kansai Independent League (関西独立リーグ) starting next spring and will play together with her male colleagues. Like many other bloggers [jp], Shimonakamura-san is forward to admiring the feats of the “new Yuki Mizuhara”, whose specialties include the “knuckleball” and the “underhand pitch”.

Japan: Changing jobs in a recession

Scilla Alecci — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:31:47 +0000

Noriyuki Okada at Silicon Valley wa Kyô mo Hareru (シリコンバレーは今日も晴れ) [jp] describes his experience taking the decision as a software-engineer to change his job despite being in the middle of an economically unstable period. He writes about how he thought carefully about his technical skills, asked for experts' opinion about what the market wants nowadays, and modified his resume in order to improve his chances in getting the position he applied for.

Japan: Street View and the Burakumin

Scilla Alecci — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:22:45 +0000

The Internet, many would argue, has created the possibility for anyone to express their opinions freely without having to belong to a category of people with the “legitimacy to speak” (i.e. journalists, scholars, etc.). Recently, however, some have worried about an increase in the number of racist and denigrative comments against minorities spreading across the web.

In Japan, for example, the advent of Google's new Street View service [GSV], aside from arousing indignation among some and sparking debates over privacy issues among others, has also led some bloggers to discuss the relationship between areas photographed in GSV and the so-called hisabetsu buraku (被差別部落). The hisabetsu buraku are discriminated hamlets inhabited by people who, for many centuries and over many generations, have carried the burden of doing the “tainted jobs” (butchers, executioners etc.). These burakumin (部落民) [hamlet people] resemble the Dalits [the untouchables], the lowest caste in the south-east Asian Hindu system, both formally abolished under modern constitutional systems but continuing their existence through prejudice in the minds of many people.

The first to raise questions regarding the topic of Google Street View and discrimination was Manabu Kitaguchi [北口学] at Journalist-Net, a journalist, expert in human rights and president of the Japan Journalists Association for Human Rights (日本人権ジャーナリスト会):

米国でプライバシーと人権問題の議論が湧き上がったGoogleストリートビュのサービスは、欧州でのサービス開始を前に多くの人権NGOの反対によってストップが賭けられている。が、メディアや市民のなんの論議もなく日本ではサービスがスタートしてしまった。日本固有の差別問題に対する影響力、特に巨大掲示板で面白おかしく差別扇動の書き込みをする人達は、サービス開始直後から「ハイテク電子地名総鑑」というスレッドを立ち上げ、被差別地域の画像をどんどん書き込みしている。

In the U.S., debates about privacy and human rights sprang up after the launch of Google's new service, Street View, and in Europe many human rights NGOs opposed its launch. However, in Japan, where there is no debate between citizens and media, the service was launched and it had a big impact on the Japanese problem of discrimination. In particular, following the launch [of the service], there was an increase in the number of people leaving anonymous messages on online bulletin boards instigating discrimination and threads with titles of “high-tech area names list” [in reference to the infamous “List of Buraku Area Names”, see Wikipedia article for details], together with identification of the discriminated areas [through the use of Google's images]

[…]

Google社は、日本という固有の差別問題を有する国での安易なサービス開始で、大きな問題を巻き起こしているサービスをはじめた。早急に日本国内の人権団体との対話やヒヤリングを行なうべきであると考える。心に痛みを感じる人々に向き合って自社サービスの影響を被害者当事者から聞く姿勢が「正義」であると私は思えてならない。

With the launch of this easy-to-use service in a country with endemic discrimination issues, Google has started a service that is giving rise to major problems. The company should, I think, initiate a dialogue with Japanese human rights groups and hold public hearings. I cannot help feeling that the “righteous” attitude here is to face the people who have been hurt and make efforts to listen to those parties that have fallen victim to the influence of this service.

Another blogger, Nobuo Sakiyama [崎山伸夫], became interested in the issue and expressed his opinion about Kitaguchi's entry at his blog:

気になりつづけている空白地帯問題だが、最初は1ヶ所だけしか認識していなかった大規模被差別部落との相関について、私自身は土地勘がまったくない都市だが空白地帯のいくつかについて調べると、そこもまた被差別部落の地名として著名、といった状況があることがわかった。ただ、空白地帯とそうでない部分の境界と部落との関係がどこまで密接なのか、というのは、さすがに簡単にわかる公開資料程度では分からない。

On this issue of the areas not covered [in Street View], which continues to draw attention, I did a bit of investigating on the blanked-out zones [in GSV] and their connection with large-scale burakumin areas, a topic about which I have no familiarity — at first I only knew of one such place. It turns out that those uncovered areas correspond to places well-known for the presence of discriminated communities. However, the borderline between the blanked-out zones and the areas that are not blanked out is very subtle and, of course, no data about this matter has ever been released.

[…]

ということで、一般にも著名な部落問題の研究者（誰なのかは少なくとも今のところは伏せる）に、本件についてご意見を伺うべく、問い合わせのメールを出してみた。まったく面識がない方なので、どういうことになるかは分からないが。個人的には、本件（Googleストリートビューと部落差別の関係）については「部落差別問題へ取り組むことを主要な関心としているわけではない私が被差別部落の正確な場所について詳しくなることが適切とは思えない」という事情により、今回連絡をとった研究者の方や、あるいは北口氏のような専門性の高いジャーナリストの方に引き取ってもらって撤退したいと考えている。

So I decided to ask the opinion of a well-known researcher on the topic of discriminated communities (I prefer not to reveal his name at the moment) to get their thoughts on this issue. I wrote [this researcher] an email, stating my personal opinion (regarding the relationship between Google Street View and discrimination against some specific communities) that, “Although tackling issues concerning the buraku discrimination problem is not my main interest, I do not however think that it is appropriate for the location of those discriminated communities to become known.” As the matter has now been taken up by the scholar I contacted, as well as the journalist Mr. Kitaguchi, I am now considering withdrawing from this debate.

最後に、私の見込みが当たっているという仮定でのこの問題についての意見だけれども、Googleストリートビューが仮に存続しつづけるとした場合、公開範囲は大幅に制限する必要があるだろうし、また、サポート範囲の道路の縁取りもやめるべきだと思う。

Lastly, if my supposition regarding this issue proves to be correct, in the case that Google Street View continues to exist, I suppose that it will become necessary to restrict their coverage of a wide range of areas, and I also think that they should stop their coverage of surrounding support roads.

[…]

追記: 上記の著名な研究者から返事を頂いた。それによると、当該都市のストリートビューで部落を識別できる状況にはないとのこと。中途半端に知られている地名で余計な心配をしてしまったのかもしれない。

p.s.: I got a reply from the scholar mentioned above, according to whom there is nothing that would lead to discrimination of communities in the Street View coverage of the city in question. I guess I just got overly worried because of my lack of knowledge about the place names.

Kitaguchi posted a reply to Sakiyama:

研究者のおっしゃるようにGoogleストリートビューの公開情報には「このエリアが被差別部落地域」という表示はありません。しかしながら別サイトで山のような差別書き込み、ストリートビュー画像URLが膨大な分量で公開され過去ログも蓄積されています。Googleストリートビューの機能を活用し、ストリートビューのサイトを指し示し閲覧を促すという事実が多数見受けられます。そのようなスレッドが継続して行るという現状の悲惨さは現実問題として進行しているわけです。

As the scholar says, the information published by Google Street View does not indicate that “this is a discriminated area”. However, on other sites there are many discriminatory comments, and URLs to images on Street View have accumulated in huge numbers in older blogs. It is a matter of fact that many of those blogs urge [people] to use Google Street View's functions and refer to it. And the horrible thing is that these threads continue to be written, and this miserable situation will not stop.

For more on this issue, see an earlier post about the so-called “blanked-out zones” [空白地帯] of Japan not shown in Street View.

Japan: Children and mobile phones

Scilla Alecci — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:32:04 +0000

At Kyô mo Aruku [ja], Shigeru Kurokawa casts doubts [ja] on the propriety of a report [ja], published by the government Discussion Group for Education Rebuilding, which urges mobile phone companies to make special telephones for children that limit functionality so that only calls can be made, and to set up a system for tracking the position of the unit.

Japan: Italian students demo seen through Japanese eyes

Scilla Alecci — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:51 +0000

Id:sawabonroma, a Japanese writer living in Rome, describes her everyday life in the Italian capital at Roma no Heijitsu (ローマの平日). In a post on October 30th, she writes about a students demo against the education reform proposed by Minister of Education Gelmini. Millions of high school and university students, professors, researchers and school employees protested in the streets of Rome against the demolition of the public educational system, paralyzing the city center. Blaming the Japanese media, Sawabonroma points out how they gave more importance to the resulting traffic problems than to reasons for the demo. Besides, the blogger adds, everybody knows that traffic jams are part of the everyday routine for Roman people.

Japan: Granny's blog

Scilla Alecci — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 03:29:43 +0000

The first of its kind, a Japanese blog called Sobolog (祖母ログ) [ literally “Grannylog”] crosses three generations, written by a nephew living in Tokyo in collaboration with her mother (who records the facts), presenting the daily life of her funky granny named Hide (82 y.o.) living in Gunma Prefecture. In this blog, the three Nagashima women share with the readers the granny's recipes, her travel accounts and her life in the countryside, uploading pictures nearly every day about Hide-san's bucolic living.

Japan: Mobile Suit Gundam

Scilla Alecci — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:54:59 +0000

On the occasion of the foundation of the International Gundam Society (国際ガンダム学会) during the Hiroshima Anime Biennale in August, Kange debates the aims of the research group which will study the future of mankind through the animated series Mobile Suit Gundam(機動戦士ガンダム). The blogger explains how the researchers at IGS, captained by a Chairman and a Vice experts in scientific fields, will focus on the anime itself as well as the anthropological and sociological aspects of the world represented in the series.

Japan: Three Arrested for Visiting PM House

Oiwan Lam — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:16:13 +0000

Niphonese translated some local discussions about the recent arrest of three protesters under the Tokyo Public Security Act. The “reality tour” (not protest) was organized by Freeter Union.

Japan: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Chris Salzberg — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:30:46 +0000

In a post entitled “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”, Yasai-ＤＸ２ posts a picture of three guys [ja] dressed up as Japanese anime character Haruhi Suzumiya. “Well, they have nice legs, no?” one commenter responds.

Japan: Thoughts on Itochu trading scam

Chris Salzberg — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:11:43 +0000

On October 10th, Itochu Corporation announced that it had paid close to one hundred billion yen in false transactions to Mongolian suppliers for construction machinery and materials. The company started business in 1999 purchasing heavy machinery from a Mongolian supplier and selling it to a local natural resources company, but within one year, when the resources company could not afford to pay, an employee at Itochu began falsifying the transactions in order to make it look as though business was expanding.

A person claiming to be a chartered accountant started a blog entitled Kaikeikansa [会計腐蝕列島] in September, offering views on what is happening in the current financial crisis and at Itochu in particular. In the blogger's first entry, posted on September 14th, they explain:

最近遅ればせながら、会計や監査、内部統制という点で、いろいろと考えることが多くなってきました。これから、その内容を少しずつ書いてみようと思います。たまに脱線することがあると思いますが、ご容赦願います。

Although it is a bit late, recently I've been thinking various things about the areas of accounting, auditing, and internal control. I'm going to try to write a bit about these subjects here. I'll probably make occasional digressions, please forgive me for that.

In a later entry titled “What happens when business performance drops?“, the blogger writes on September 29th (still before the Itochu story was reported):

会社の業績が悪くなると、経営者には、いろいろな負のインセンティブが芽生えます。このことは、ちょっと想像すればわかると思います。人間は、自分が不利な状況に置かれたとき、その状況から何とかして脱しようとするわけですが、そのとき、必ずしも正当な手段だけを用いるとは限らないわけです。それが人間というものです。

When a company's performance begins to sink, the business manager is struck by various incentives to do wrong. If you think about this a bit, you'll understand why this is so. When placed in a disadvantageous situation, humans do what they can to somehow find a way out of it, and in such cases they do not necessarily limit themselves to honest means. That's is what it is to be human.

まさに、子供の嘘のようなものです。まともに財務諸表を作ったら、だれの目にもひどい状態なのが明らかになってしまう。倒産するんじゃないか、と思われたら終わりだ。だったら、この状況を隠してしまえばいい。そのうち回復するから、そのときまで持ちこたえれば大丈夫だ。おそらくそんな発想でしょう。

It's just like a child telling a lie. If you write up honest financial statements, the severity of the situation becomes obvious to everybody. If they start thinking you're going to go bankrupt, that's the end of it. And if that's the case, then it's better to cover up this situation. As long as you can stick it out until things recover, everything is okay. That would seem to be the thinking.

[…]

問題は、そういう状況で粉飾があったとき、監査人は何をしていたか、です。表向きは無風の会社が突然倒産し、蓋を開けてみたら実は債務超過だった、なんてこともあるわけです。ホントに、一体何やってたんでしょうね。本当に、見逃していたんでしょうか。そうは思いたくないのですが。

The question that comes up is, what were the auditors doing when the situation was being whitewashed? Because there are cases where a company that seemed stable from the outside suddenly goes bankrupt, and seen from the inside is actually insolvent. So what in the world were they doing then? Were they just looking the other way? I'd prefer not to think that.

On October 11th, a day after the Itochu story broke, the blogger wrote in part one of a two-part series on the topic:

だいぶ脱線しました。で、クビになった担当課長は何をやったのか、というと、カラ仕入とカラ売りです。商品の受け渡しはなかったにもかかわらず、仕入先から仕入したものとして支払いを起こし、その資金を得意先に迂回させた、ということのようです。最初は真っ当に商売をしていたのですが、得意先が資金難に陥って支払いが滞るようになってきてしまった。そこで、得意先を一時的に支援して、取引を継続してもらおう、そういう意図のようで、報道によれば元課長は、「取引を広めようと便宜を図った」と言っているようなのです。この売上に見せかけた貸付は、実に8 年間にわたって行われ、貸付総額は1,000億円近くに上るとのことです。

So this section chief who was fired, what was he doing anyway? [What he was doing was] buying nothing, and selling nothing. It seems that what happened was that payments were made in the role of goods purchased from the supplier, and those funds were diverted to clients, without any goods having ever actually been delivered. In the beginning they were actually making transactions, but then the clients were struck with financial problems, and payment was delayed. At that point, the clients were supported on a temporary basis and deals were allowed to continue, and with this idea, the former section manager reportedly has said that he “did favors in order to expand business”. The loans made out to look like sales continued over a period of 8 years, amounting to a total of close to 100 billion yen [about 1 billion USD].

In part two, the blogger remarks:

いっぺん隠しはじめると、だいたいは足抜けできなくなってしまうものです。そして麻痺してゆくのです。見つからなければ永遠にやり続けたことでしょう。それは人間心理として仕方がないと思います。やはり、最初の入り口。損失額が大したことがない段階で、隠すとろくなことがない、と思わせる雰囲気や仕組みが会社にあるか。内部統制の本質はそういうところにあるのですが、最近の議論は、なんとなく枝葉末節にこだわりすぎているような気がします。

Once you start hiding everything, you pretty much can't get yourself out of it again. And then you become paralyzed. You can keep going on forever as long as nobody finds out. From the view of human psychology, there's nothing that can be done about this. I wonder whether there was any atmosphere or mechanisms in the company that would have led people to think, at the initial stage when the amount of losses was not yet so great, that hiding [what was happening] would lead to problems. This is really what the essence of internal control is all about, but I have the feeling recently that discussions are somehow overly fixated on unimportant details.

The blogger then goes into detail explaining what was involved in the transactions scam, concluding in the final lines of the post:

こうしてみると、この不正を実行するのは、かなり高いハードルをクリアしなければならないことがわかると思います。私なんかは、もうそれだけで、正直に訳を話して損切りするか融資に切り替えるか、上司に決断させますけど。そうしないと、自分の首が飛びかねませんよね。この課長に何があったのでしょうね。

If you look at it this way, I think you'll see that to commit this act of injustice requires clearing an very large hurdle. If it were me in that situation, I would just give my reasons leave it up to my boss to decide whether to cut the losses or convert them into loans. If you don't do that, it's your head that will roll. I really wonder what was going on with that section chief.

Thanks to Akitoshi Abe for the suggestion to translate these posts.

Japan: Response to Obama “Put down the Wii Remote” Ad

Chris Salzberg — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:30:55 +0000

Comments from Japanese net users respond [ja] to an ad by U.S. presidential nominee Obama in which viewers are told to “put down the remote and go vote“. “Why Wii?” one asks. Another writes: “Anti-Japan policies before even becoming president?” And one person wonders: “Does Obama despise Japan?”