The Week That Was

This is my song of the week. It's called 'Had A Friend'
It's a song Brutus and I wrote many moons ago when we had a band-in-passing called The Time Wasters. As you can see it's based on Sharon Stone who 10 years ago was at the peak of her career. I've rewritten some of the words to better suit the times but you get the idea.

Check it out at my artist page on iCompositions.
Download it for your ipod pleasure. :)

The World Cup Schmozzle
Since the Socceroos were eliminated and rediscovering I actually don't like soccer, I've really not kept up with this world-wide sports-fest. I noticed Brazil were downed by France 1-0, which to me says that the scoring system in soccer is somehow *wrong*. Think about all the sporting games one can play. A 1-0 result in soccer must be the most un-indicative score-line of any sport; it's just too crude an index of how the teams performed. Anyway, it just reminds me of why I just think it's a stupid game to follow.

Finding Closure
'T' from my previous work-place organised a get together for the old crew and sure enough I ran into my old boss JD, who utterly gave me the shits towards the dying days of Classroom Video. The funny thing was, he asked me what I've been doing and I told him about Discovery Channel and the rocket launch shoot and the Aquarium shoot in Japan, and suddenly it was like, "oh?"
Well, I guess that makes it "all said and done" doesn't it?

Now, I don't know if I'm going to get more stuff from Discovery or what-not but it's clear to me in the 24 months since I started this blog that I've come some distance so I felt like I shouldn't really give him a hard time about how it all closed down or any of that. I mean, what would be the point? So we chatted about the World Cup and how inconsistent the refereeing had been and that was it.

Modern Listening


I've been listening to the several Paul Weller discs I obtained in Japan. I've particularly been hooked on the 2-disc special edition of 'Stanley Road'. It's got raw vocals and raw guitars and raw drums and still comes up really polished. It's quite an achivement in song-writing as well as arrangement.
Then there's the more recently purchased 'Illumination' and 'Studio 150' discs that have been a revelation. Talk about growing old gracefully.

Recently, Walk-off HBP forwarded me a podcast of Paul Weller. The man sounds like a really boring guy outside of his music. Yet, the more I listen to his stuff, the more I'm drawn into the logic of his arrangement. Some of it is even rubbing off on the way I go about arranging my own stuff.

Though, to put some perspective on all this, some years ago, I played 'Paul Weller's Greatest Hits' to a good friend who said, "I just don't get this. What is it with all these noises? It's music that only you can like."
It is idiosyncratic mod rock - but that's the way I like my rock music.

Fantasy Team Update
My AFL team is in tatters. I have zero roster flexibility left so the rest of the season is watching a train crash in slow-motion.
While the World Cup's been on and my attention not on it totally, my Fantasy basebal team sat atop of the lague for a good 14 days. That was weird. Now that my attention is back on to it, they've fallen offf their perch. Ain't that the way?

From The Pleiades Mailbox
A couple of interesting entries came in so I thought I hould post them up before I forgot.
This one is about Iran and its alleged military nukes. It's written by Seymour Hersh:

In President Bush’s June speech, he accused Iran of pursuing a secret weapons program along with its civilian nuclear-research program (which it is allowed, with limits, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). The senior officers in the Pentagon do not dispute the President’s contention that Iran intends to eventually build a bomb, but they are frustrated by the intelligence gaps. A former senior intelligence official told me that people in the Pentagon were asking, “What’s the evidence? We’ve got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys”—the Iranians—“have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We’re coming up with jack shit.”

A senior military official told me, “Even if we knew where the Iranian enriched uranium was—and we don’t—we don’t know where world opinion would stand. The issue is whether it’s a clear and present danger. If you’re a military planner, you try to weigh options. What is the capability of the Iranian response, and the likelihood of a punitive response—like cutting off oil shipments? What would that cost us?” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides “really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary,” he said.

In 1986, Congress authorized the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to act as the “principal military adviser” to the President. In this case, I was told, the current chairman, Marine General Peter Pace, has gone further in his advice to the White House by addressing the consequences of an attack on Iran. “Here’s the military telling the President what he can’t do politically”—raising concerns about rising oil prices, for example—the former senior intelligence official said. “The J.C.S. chairman going to the President with an economic argument—what’s going on here?” (General Pace and the White House declined to comment. The Defense Department responded to a detailed request for comment by saying that the Administration was “working diligently” on a diplomatic solution and that it could not comment on classified matters.)

A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, “The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, ‘We stood up.’"

Now that's interesting. Then there's this piece to ponder:

Iran’s geography would also complicate an air war. The senior military official said that, when it came to air strikes, “this is not Iraq,” which is fairly flat, except in the northeast. “Much of Iran is akin to Afghanistan in terms of topography and flight mapping—a pretty tough target,” the military official said. Over rugged terrain, planes have to come in closer, and “Iran has a lot of mature air-defense systems and networks,” he said. “Global operations are always risky, and if we go down that road we have to be prepared to follow up with ground troops.”

The U.S. Navy has a separate set of concerns. Iran has more than seven hundred undeclared dock and port facilities along its Persian Gulf coast. The small ports, known as “invisible piers,” were constructed two decades ago by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to accommodate small private boats used for smuggling. (The Guards relied on smuggling to finance their activities and enrich themselves.) The ports, an Iran expert who advises the U.S. government told me, provide “the infrastructure to enable the Guards to go after American aircraft carriers with suicide water bombers”—small vessels loaded with high explosives. He said that the Iranians have conducted exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel linking the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and then on to the Indian Ocean. The strait is regularly traversed by oil tankers, in which a thousand small Iranian boats simulated attacks on American ships. “That would be the hardest problem we’d face in the water: a thousand small targets weaving in and out among our ships.”

So don't expect the war machine to jump into action.
There are a lot more interesting gem insights in the article so make sure you don't miss it.


The other article covers controversial Foreign Minister of Japan, Taro Aso and his visit to Australia. A number of Australians are pissed off with this man. It's hard to take issue with their issue.

THE next time Japan's Foreign Minister Taro Aso visits Australia, there are a handful of blokes who would like to talk to him about the time they worked for his dad at the Aso family coalmine. But it would not be a cosy meeting.

The former Aso workers are Australian prisoners of war who in 1945 were forced to endure slave conditions at one of the pits owned by Aso's family business, which dates back to the 19th century. Aso Mining Co (now the Aso Group) was one of many Japanese corporations that illicitly coerced Allied PoWs into heavy labour during the Pacific war.

"I'd like to meet Mr Aso," says Joe Coombs, 85, of Regents Park, Sydney. Coombs is a former infantry corporal and one of nine known prisoners still alive who worked at Aso. "I'd like to tell him what happened to us there and how we were treated by his people: the beatings, the starvation diet, the back-breaking work. Then I'd invite him to apologise."

Coombs is one of four PoWs exploited by Aso's family who spoke to The Australian. The others were either too ill to speak or didn't wish to dredge up the past.

Aso, who yesterday conducted a private visit to the Juganji temple where foreign PoWs' remains were kept, has never acknowledged his family firm's role in forced labour during the war. His father, Takakichi, ran Aso Mining during the Pacific war and Taro was its head from 1973 to 1979, before entering politics with the Liberal Democratic Party.

The Nazis enslaved millions of people, mainly East Europeans, but Germany has paid billions in compensation. No Japanese government has apologised to victims or given them a cent.

Legally, post-war treaties freed Japan from any obligation to make payments; however, these were signed before the extent of war crimes was known.

You sort of wonder if it's feasible to charge a man for his father's crimes. It's a complicated issue. Do we really want to go down that avenue of charging people with offenses for acts committed by their ancestors? There might be a fair number of chickens coming home to roost on that one, methinks.

However, there's more to the story:

Last year, in a speech at the opening of a museum in Kyushu, Aso echoed pre-war Japanese racism by describing Japan as unique in terms of culture, language, history and race.

He is also known to be associated with the extreme right-wing Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), which has reacted with hostility to attempts by scholars, historians and journalists to uncover details about Japan's extensive use of Chinese, Korean and Allied forced labour during the war years.

Frequent requests to the Japanese foreign ministry for comment or confirmation of facts from Aso have been met with silence. A foreign ministry spokeswoman claimed to have no knowledge of a recent article about the Aso family's connection to forced PoW labour.

Aso is related by marriage to the Japanese royal family and maintains close links with his family firm, whose president is Aso's younger brother, Yutaka. In 2001 it entered a joint venture with Lafarge Cement of France. Last December the French ambassador in Tokyo awarded Yutaka Aso the Legion d'Honneur at a champagne reception where Taro Aso was a guest of honour.

On the question of whether the latter's government post is tenable in view of his background, the German policy offers context. In a nation that has paid $US6 billion to victims of Nazi enslavement, family links alone do not disqualify citizens from public office. But they are expected to show atonement or make amends. Because of his declared views, Aso would not be admitted to any government in Berlin, a German embassy official in Tokyo says.

Aso, the grandson of a former conservative prime minister, may rise higher in Tokyo. He is one of three candidates to succeed Koizumi in September. Japanese critic Tatsuro Hanada, a Waseda University professor, says: "Aso's attitudes and behaviour are a political issue and his qualifications an important subject for the Japanese public."

I don't know if I pointed it out a while back but I always wondered about the sort of diplomatic ramifications of appointing the son of General Korechika Anami as ambassador to China of all places; but now that I find out this man is Foreign Minister, I sort of understand how that decision in personnel may have manifested. Yet what do we really know of this man?

The article is a little vague as to what excatly Aso's position is on Aso mining's role n WWII but is happy to lump him with the crime. Here's the Wikipedia entry in Japanese which makes for interesting reading.

麻生財閥の元社長（総帥）。名門一家に育ったが「首相の家庭なんて幸せなもんじゃねえ」と言う。祖父を支え忙しい父、亡くなった祖母に代わりファーストレディー役の母。曰く「両親にほったらかしにされて育った」と。小学校の運動会では友達が両親と弁当を食べるのを横目に、母に頼まれて駆けつけた料亭の女将と重箱をつついていたという。
射撃で日本を代表する選手として活躍。モントリオール五輪に日本代表選手として出場（結果は41位）。第2回メキシコ国際射撃大会（クレー・スキート（個人・団体））では優勝。
政治評論家三宅久之によると、JC会頭の改選において麻生太郎の認証無くしては 決まらないと言う。
漫画が大好きで、週刊漫画雑誌のほとんどを読み流していると豪語している。好きな作品は「ゴルゴ13」・「のだめカンタービレ」他多数。外務省の執務室まで、漫画の本を本棚一杯持ち込み、一部外務官僚から鼻白まれているようだ。
名門家系の出でありながらべらんめえ調でも知られている。本人曰く「生まれはいいが、育ちは悪い」。実際、その発言が一部で物議を醸すことも多い。英語も得意で大学卒業後、スタンフォード大学大学院に留学、卒業直前に吉田茂の働きかけで ロンドン大学大学院に無理やり転校させられ、その時スタンフォード時代に覚えたアメリカ英語をロンドンで矯正させられる。
孫の顔を見にアメリカを訪れた吉田茂だが、現れた太郎の姿に強烈なショックを受ける。完全に西海岸かぶれしていたからである。その上喋る英語は強烈なカリフォルニア訛り、いよいよ我慢ならなくなった茂は、孫をスタンフォード大学院からロンドン大学に転学させるよう和子と太賀吉を説得。仕送りを止めさせ、転学させた。
西アフリカのシエラレオネにダイヤモンド鉱山開発で2年間滞在するも内戦、革命が勃発したことから撤退したこともある。
クリスチャン（カトリック）であるが、毎年靖国神社に参拝。これは幼少の頃、祖父の吉田茂に靖国神社に連れて行かれたのが、そのまま慣習になったものである。しかし「何故戦争に負けた日に参拝しなければならないのか」と、8月15日ではなく例大祭に参拝する形を取っている。またA級戦犯が合祀されていることに対しては、疑義を唱えている。しかし分祀賛成派というわけでもない。
現在、次期自由民主党総裁候補の有力者の一人（俗にいう麻垣康三）として、名前が挙がっている。
対中などへの強硬発言や行動からタカ派と目されている。国民的人気は今一つだが、一部のブログや匿名掲示板2ちゃんねる内では高い人気を誇る。
河野グループはもともと、ハト派集団：リベラル思考の人が多く、所属派閥を間違えているのではと、皮肉る政治評論家もいる。
福岡県知事の麻生渡とは同姓であるが何の関連もない。

Some salient points.
He grew up in a very important family, but mostly under neglect. He likes talking in street dialect of Tokyo.
He likes manga comic books; so much so he's stacked a bookshelf full of the stuff in his Foreign Minstry Office. (Oh My Gawd, an Otaku!)
He is the grandson of former PM Shigeru Yoshida.
He likes the US West Coast vibe.
He competed at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal in shooting.
He's personally a Catholic (!), but visits the Yasukuni Shrine because of family custom. He does not go on 15th of August to mark the end of the war but on the Big Festival Day. He has also publicly questioned the continued internment of the A-Class War Criminals.

He simply doesn't seem to be the extremist protrayed in the article, however here's the Wikipedia English article.

Controversial statements
At a meeting of the Kono Group in 2001, Aso drew criticism when he said that "those burakumin can't become prime minister," a statement directed at Hiromu Nonaka, a burakumin member of the Diet. Aso's office attempted to clarify the statements by saying that they were misunderstood.
In May of 2003, while attending a festival at the University of Tokyo, Aso remarked that Koreans wanted to change their names to Japanese names during colonial rule, and that Japan helped in the diffusion of the Hangul writing system.
Later in 2003, when Abe was inaugurated as Minister of Internal Affairs, Posts and Communications, he predicted that information technology developments would lead to a future in which paper was replaced by "floppies."
On October 15, 2005, he praised Japan for having "one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race," and stated that it was the only such country in the world. [5] [6]
On December 21, 2005, he said China was "a neighbour with one billion people equipped with nuclear bombs and has expanded its military outlays by double digits for 17 years in a row, and it is unclear as to what this is being used for. It is beginning to be a considerable threat." (See also: China's military expenditure)[7]
On January 28, 2006, he called for the emperor to visit the controversial Yasukuni shrine. He later backtracked on the comment, but stated that he hoped such a visit would be possible in the future. [8]
Kyodo News reported that he had said on February 4, 2006 "our predecessors did a good thing" regarding compulsory education implemented during Japan's colonization of Taiwan. [9]
Mainichi Daily News reports that on March 9, 2006 he referred to Taiwan as a "law-abiding country", which drew strong protest from Beijing, which considers the island a part of China. [10] His implication that Taiwan is an independent nation contradicts the agreement made between Japan and China in 1972 (the Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China) that the Beijing rather than Taipei government be considered the sole legal government of China and that Taiwan be considered "an inalienable part of the territory of the People's Republic of China."

It seems the world wants to make a case out of him more than anything else.