Mailbag Pickies

These came in the mail today.


Banal, but funny.


Oddly touching.


I think this must test for astygmatism.

Pleiades Mailbag Today
I haven't been posting regularly as I've been pretty busy with some stuff. About the only thing I've had energy for has been covering the Yankee Postseason disaster.

Anyway, this interesting link came in today regarding the political pressures applied to the NHK over a documentary covering the issue of 'Comfort Women'.

The documentary film on the tribunal was shown on NHK's second, or educational, channel on 30 January 2001. NHK, like Britain's BBC, is a public corporation, unable to take advertising revenue and heavily dependent on payment of a compulsory viewer license fee (the basic Japanese annual fee is approximately $220, as against the BBC's $195). Its educational channel does not attract a large audience, almost certainly less than 1 per cent of viewers. This January 2001 program was no exception. However, critics were appalled at what they saw as an incoherent and distorted account of the historical issues the tribunal had addressed. They criticized it severely and in due course launched a suit in the Tokyo District Court alleging major NHK improprieties. In March 2004 the court ruled that NHK had acted within its legitimate discretion, but in 2005 the case was continuing, under appeal.

The issue suddenly exploded into the public arena on 12 January 2005, however, when Asahi Shimbun, a national daily with a circulation of around eight million, published a "scoop" alleging manipulation and political interference in NHK's production process.[1] The allegations were repeated the following day in a press conference by Nagai Satoru, a director within NHK, who had become an internal "whistle-blower" one month earlier by launching a complaint of interference and political pressure to NHK's newly set-up "compliance committee."[2] The nub of the matter was that the documentary, originally prepared by an independent production company under a sub-contracting agreement with NHK, had been subject to a series of changes due to political interventions. The "in-house" editing process was conducted while the company was in a state of semi-siege, as rightists mobilized and sound trucks circled the NHK building blaring hostile messages and employees were jostled and abused as they entered or left the premises.[3]

Changes made at that phase of editing included the incorporation of the views of a hostile critic of the "comfort women" and the tribunal (the historian Hata Ikuhiko, an associate of the Tsukurukai group). Then, just days before the film was shown, a meeting was held between senior executives of NHK and two prominent politicians, Abe Shinzo, then deputy chief cabinet secretary and as of early 2005 acting secretary-general of the LDP, and Nakagawa Shoichi, then an LDP diet member and as of 2005 minister for economy, trade, and industry. Further, major changes were then made, adding new material while cutting the 44 minute film to 40 minutes. All reference to the emperor's responsibility was deleted (even though that had been central to the tribunal process), the testimony of the former "comfort women" witnesses was much reduced, the space for hostile comment on the tribunal increased. The process was completed hours before broadcast.

And so on.
It's a pretty disgusting thing to find that the equivalent of an MP can editorialise the equivalent of an ABC documentary.

Teach What?
A couple of thoughts on the never ending textbook 'debate'.
Asahi's line on history is self-flagellatory left-wing ideology. It has been a very motivated, biased media outlet for years, and nobody seems to question their odd stance. It's an old quibble that goes back at least 40-50 years.
There also has been a long tradition of power enjoyed by the Japan Teachers' Union which wielded massive amounts of power in the years since WWII, and combined with the Asahi line, managed to write some pretty 'masochistic history' as the revisionists comment.

Indeed, one of the hardest things growing up in the Japanese educational system as devised by centralised successive LDP governments and the Teachers' Union was what exactly did they want us to learn about history? The way the Japan Teachers' Union wanted it taught, it was a history of repression of peasants and exploiting the land badly and all sorts of horrible things, at the end of the line of which was the war in the Pacific. Now, this flew in the face of most books you'd find on history in the school library. There were a lot of interestnig lords and nobles and warriors that inhabit the history of Japan, just as such figures populate history books of any old country. It's hard to describe what this is like; it's like being able to read about Richard I and the Crusades, but being told in class that the point of the crusades was to exploit the working classes in distant lands. Well, that was the sort of line the Japan Teachers' Union took. It held a very dim view of the civil wars and the feudal wars; and really tried its hardest to suppress the names of some historic figures.

What really gets me is that unless one took a great amount of interest in history, a Japanese kid growing up under the Japanese education didn't get to learn about some important things in history. I still meet Japanese people of my age, who have no idea. No idea. And I think that's even more appalling than teaching what happened. Good or Bad. So I understand people getting upset that 'comfort women' are not in the junior high school history text books; but neither are some pretty important figures and events. I'd be happy to see a history textbook that had 'comfort women' in it, if everything else was in it too. More so, I'd also like to see proper sex education for junior high school kids in Japan so that they know what teachers are talking about when they start going on about 'comfort women' and why sex slavery might be a bad idea in the modern world.