Quick Shots - 21/Oct/2016

World War III Is Brewing?

This past fortnight there were reports Russia was instructing its government people to bring back their kids from abroad. They were preparing for nuclear exchanges and World War III. At the same time there have been news reports saying the Pentagon is waring that World War III is looming large. Those sources are a bit fringe and hard to credit (especially in a world where fake news sites say extraordinary things in the hopes of harvesting clicks), but the main stream media all of a sudden is reporting similar things.

Other parties are also issuing warnings. The crux of the biscuit is Aleppo where Assad's forces are present and the Americans want to bomb them. Th Russians are still supporting Assad, and so it flies right in to Putin's face to be even thinking about it.

If World War III really is brewing over Syria, I'd want the West to abandon its plans in Syria. It's not worth it. Aleppo has been reduced to rubble, which is bad enough, but really, the continued conflict is creating more refugees by the day. As much as Bashar Assad is a horrible dictator to let go, turning Syria into a flashpoint for global conflict with the Russians is just unpalatable. That being said, you have to wonder about the timing. This close to the Presidential elections makes Obama a lame duck POTUS who is going into caretaker mode, so this would present an opportunity when American leadership is in a political limbo. If you're Putin and you meant to go to war with America, then this moment through to the end of the year represents an opportunity.

Anyway, it is interesting how these things are lining themselves up. I don't think there will be a world War III. I just think it's interesting people in power want to toy with the rhetoric of a World War.

Achilles' Choice

I am still shocked by the passing of Seiji Hirao. 53 seems much too young. He had everything in his life that he could ever want, but 53years is all he got. He certainly got more than Achilles, I guess.  Lots of Important people have died younger. All the same I'm still shocked, and it makes me ponder about the meaning of things, this and that, and the value of life.

After I wrote my little entry on Hirao, I remembered the first time I met him in 1995. I'd left Dentsu Australia and was freelancing when Bucks Night Terry rang up and wanted me to dig up an old report I'd written for Dentsu in late 1994. The report was about the successful bid for the 2000 Olympics by the Sydney Olympics Committee, and the salient points to the strategy in how they went about trying to win. Dentsu at the time were busily preparing for the Nagano Olympics but wanted to try and get Osaka for 2004.

My report would have been about 20pages long. A lot of it was based on statements in the public record as well as Rod McGeoch's account in 'The Bid', plus ringing around a few sports bodies. When I filed it in 1994, I got no response whatsoever out of Dentsu Tokyo so I had forgotten all about it, but at the time I filed it, I would have told Bucks Night Terry what was in it and he remembered it.

Seiji Hirao came through Sydney on Kobe Steelers Rugby business but somehow made Bucks Night Terry his gopher, and Terry had told him about the report because Seiji Hirao told Terry he was part of the Osaka Committee. Terry was a classic panderer - hence his strange nickname - but he was very good at it. One thing led to another and I met Mr. Hirao in the office of Mino Metals in Chatswood. Mr. Hirao didn't want to read the report, he wanted me to give him an oral digest, so I spent 20 minutes going through the ins and outs of the Sydney bid's approach as far as I could piece together. He didn't say anything, simply nodded and walked out.

Afterwards Terry told me the report went to the Osaka Committee and that Mr. Hirao wanted to go all in on the recommendations I'd written. He also had some feedback about my presentation which I won't go into here, but basically nobody likes a smartarse and I am one.  After that, he went off to the UK to coach the Japan Rugby team where the team famously got that historic drubbing of 145-17. Later that year he was backing Sydney and I had the chance to go drinking with Mr. Hirao and Bucks Night Terry. It was a bloody long night. I staggered home at 3 or 4 in the morning, drunk as a skunk.

For a few years there in the late 90s, Bucks Night Terry started being an agent for Australia Rugby payers looking for professional contracts in Japan. That's how I ended up interpreting at the contract negotiations. That was all Seiji Hirao helping out Terry. Mr. Hirao would come through Sydney about once a year and I would meet him now and then. I'm not sure I got along with him so much because when we were sober, we'd never really talk. I can remember quite a few uncomfortably silent rooms, just sitting with him. He was a gregarious guy when drunk but when sober, there were simply some people with whom he'd deign not talk, and I was one of them. Maybe he was shy, but it was hard to imagine.

I learned it can suck to meet famous people. Especially those with a lifelong record of success. no mater how humble they try to be, they just can't hide their ego. Mr. Hirao was one of those characters. He wasn't arrogant or meant to be superior; he just couldn't stop himself acting that way; and he wasn't the sort to be self-reflective about it either. He was in some ways a very awkward person to be around if you weren't from rugby or of rugby or about rugby. And I decidedly wasn't from his world where he was a king.

Anyway.... I lost touch with that whole thing about the time Bucks Night Terry closed up shop with his little agency business and started a restaurant. They were good friends and stayed in touch, but I fell out of Terry's orbit. It's just how life goes. Now that he's gone I can't stop thinking about those awkward moments of silence sitting in a room with Seiji Hirao, "Mr Rugby" of Japan.
It's really rough.

I rang Terry today and he was really bummed out, but he had known it was coming for about a year. He said he wished Mr. Hirao could have made it to the Rugby World Cup in Japan in 3years time, but it wasn't to be. In honour of the man Terry said he was  giving up smoking. I don't know how long that vow's going to last but the fact that Terry wanted to vow it, alone spoke volumes.
If nothing else, I am bummed out.

UPDATE:
I understated how funny he could be. I've been reading a transcript of one of his last speeches and in it is a line about how much he loved rugby. He said you have to love what you do. "Nobody I know ever became no.1 in Japan doing something they had to do because they had no other options in life".

Seiji Hirao (1963-2016)

"Mr. Rugby"

I've met Seiji Hirao several times. He wanted to catch the Southern Hemisphere so badly.

On all occasions he was visiting Australia for the purposes of furthering Rugby in Japan, although the very last time I met him, he was the guest of Japan Airlines to talk about Australian wine and rugby at this very strange event I produced. It's weird when you meet famous people and they want to talk to you as if you know every aspect of their careers. He had a lot of rugby career that he assumed I would know, and his conversations would just start from some point of thought in the long line of his successful life. I would often just shut up and listen - he was unique because he was the embodiment of all rugby in Japan. Where he went, what he learned, what he applied, was all important. Every bit of it; and he had been living that life since he was a teenager.

His playing career was prodigious in Japan, representing the national team at the age of nineteen. He was somebody who had success early but also went out to the world to find just how big the world was. It humbled him and made him very frank. I recall him discussing the defeat of Japan at the hands of the All Blacks in the 1995 Rugby World Cup where he was the head coach of Japan. Before leaving Japan - knowing his team would face the All Blacks in the group rounds, - he asked his mentor if there was any one aspect of the game where the Japanese team could get an edge on the All Blacks. He was told, absolutely none. And so it became a mission to play hard and die on the pitch.
And that's how that went down.

The amazing thing about meeting Seiji Hirao was that he never ran or hid from that 145-17 defeat which remains the largest margin of defeat in Rugby World Cup history. When I - rudely, because I am a rude man - asked him about it, he smiled and said, sometimes the other team is simply too good. You can live with defeats like that. There's an important life lesson right there. Everybody is born to a different star with different talents and circumstance. Sometimes you meet opponents who have much, much more than what you can bring to the field. There is no dishonour in those losses, no regrets or recriminations.

He was very much a man from Kansai, that is to say he had a deeply rational approach to things and relied deeply upon his intuition and inspiration. I think he liked to be unpredictable to get an edge, so in that sense he was a speculative kind of guy. There was something infra-cultural about that I recognised as my own, that drew me in. He certainly wasn't short of charisma, but the bit that appealed to me the most was his fearless desire in going for the long shot. Whatever one thought of the man, you had to admire that spirit.

It is reported he was battling illness for a long while. He never made public what it was, but 53 is much too young. RIP Seiji Hirao.

Cherry Blossoms Over Springboks

34-32 - The Win That Shook The Rugby World

I haven't blogged anything to do with sport for a long time. I just don't watch a whole lot of it any more let alone play. It's taken me 19 years from 1996 when I was the definitive sport-nut guy to 2015 where I just don't care much any more. I've seen a lot in the time in-between and heck, even the time before. In the late 1990s I was even tangentially involved with the business of sport when I was roped in to being the interpreter at contract negotiations for Rugby players going to Japan.

This was back in the heyday of Seiji Hirao who was captain of Japan rugby, followed by a stint as its coach. He came down to Australia quite a bit to watch Rugby, talk rugby and drink with rugby players. In one of his talks, he was asked to explain the 17-145 loss to the All-Blacks at the '95 World Cup. Hirao got up and said he went to his mentor leaving before for Scotland where the game was played. He asked his mentor if there was any one aspect of the game where the Japanese team had some kind of edge. His mentor said, "of course there is no such thing. Your team is inferior in every single aspect of the game. You'll lose. Just go lose honourably."

Thus they went like lambs to the slaughter. Japan own some pretty sad scorelines for losses at the World Cup. There's that 17-145, but also drubbing by the Wallabies 11-91, and another drubbing by the All Blacks that is just as lopsided. If you're not the Tri-Nations in the Southern Hemisphere or one of the Five Nations in the Northern Hemisphere, World Cups have been where your country's team goes to get drubbed. It's a small miracle the drubbings didn't flat-out kill the sport in Japan. Each time they got drubbed at the World Cup, they were compared less favourably to the soccer teams that did better at their World Cup.

Still, there's a case to be made that Rugby in Japan had been - to the point they started getting drubbed at World Cups - more successful than Soccer in Japan, in finding its audience and crowds. Lots of good players have gone to Japan to make a living over the years so their industrial leagues are not to be sneezed at. They can easily offer the kinds contracts that the NSW Rugby Union were offering their fringe players, and they send scouts regularly to watch club games in Australia, looking for talent.

During that period, there were several times I found myself in the company of Eddie Jones. Eddie had coached Japan as well by that stage. He viewed it as the poisoned chalice. It's the pinnacle coaching job of Japan but the expectations were too high for what could be realistically achieved with the talent on the ground. Being the interpreter, I'd just sit and listen most of the time, but it was apparent that Japan's Rugby was so far behind the top nations that it was inconceivable to send a team that could compete with a nation like South Africa. Japan Rugby was further behind Australian Rugby than Australian Baseball was behind Japanese baseball.

Eddie Jones is a sanguine kind of character. When he was asked about the legitimacy of the Japanese team being Japanese (it has a third of its squad born overseas), he offered up the reply to the effect that in an ideal world, everything from top down would be Japanese native people including his job as head coach. But that kind of idealism isn't his job; he was briefed to put together a team that can compete at the world level, at the level the World Cup is contested. And so his squad is one third made up of players from New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, and so on. And thus, this team that beat the Boks is a lot more diverse, colourful and different in style to a team that might have been made of native Japanese players. Implicit in Jones' reply is the rhetorical question, does Japan still want to go out and lose 17-145?

Maybe there still are rugby journalists in Japan that want that kind of purity where a team of native Japanese boys go out to the World Cup and get smashed. Like some forlorn Banzai-charge at a machine gun nest or something. It might be a terrible defeat but it would somehow be racially pure, a glorious and grand gesture of defiance or some such nonsense. With all due to respect, I don't think the Emperor himself would be terribly interested in such an enterprise. Even Hirao's team of 1995 featured Hopoi Tainone from Tonga.

My own view is that the best thing about this win is that it allows Japan to see itself very differently from that monocultural monolithic self-image found on racial purity. It's already breaking down, thanks to foreign born Sumo champions dominating what was once the National Sport. It would be good to move on from that kind of self-image. It would be good to embrace people from Tonga and Fiji and even Australia and New Zealand as part of a self-image of Japan. After 20 years of being there, Eddie Jones is as much theirs as ours. How then can those foreign born guys donning the Japanese uniform, not be Japanese? That's the way it should be.

As they say in Japan, winning confers legitimacy.

The Week That Was

Talking To A Member Of The Japanese Diet


It must be the season of politics for me. While intepretting for the Japanese Film Festival this year, I had the pleasure of making acquaintances with Mr. Tadayoshi Nagashima, Member of House of Representatives in Japan who came out to give a short talk on his village that disappeared under an earthquake in 2004.

Mr. Nagashima went from being the mayor who pulled out his villagers from a crisis with only 2 loss of lives, to the latest member of diet in the recent elections in Japan. Naturally, we got talking about a lot of issues. Partly because he was a candidate who came from a strong local support as opposed to a party apparatchik, he was quite open in discussing his position on many things. In fact I felt he was searching for answers on maany international topics.

Some of the topics we covered included North Korean abduction; the Yasukuni shrine problem; the media and policy; whaling and the IWC; the on-going diplomatic aggravation with China and South Korea and Japan's shouldering off 23% of the UN budget while it gets no representation at the Security Council. I got asked a lot about my perception of these issues being outside of Japan and well, I gotta say he came to the right man. :)

What was most refreshing about Mr. Nagashima was that he was very concerned about policy as a long term thing, and that at any given topic the decisions would have to stand up 100 years from now.

He said that most politicians in Tokyo were scared of the Media and would therefore try their best not to take a position; this in turn surrendered too much power to the Media in Mr. Nagashima's opinion. If one were in politics out of principle, then one should stick to principles instead of waver according to the prevailing winds. So the problems of North Korean abductions demanded the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Japan not mince words but point out in blunt terms the displeasure of the Japanese Government. And Mr. Nagashima's not kidding here. He's from Niiigata prefecture where the abductions took place. North Korean abductions are his electorates' very problem. Even the problems of the Yasukuni Shrine visits and so on come from the Foreign affairs department mincing words which leads to further misunderstandings. Mr. Nagashima had already been down to th Foreign affairs department to ask what they told North Korea, straight after being elected. In other words, here's a politician who is going to kick butt.

He was humble, he was curious, and he was most courteous, but above all, you felt he had a deep personal connection to his constituency. And no, he might not be the world's leading intellectual, but you sure knew he wasn't there for the pay or glory or power, but to do good work.

Eddie Jones Gets Sacked


It's such a bummer when you see a beleaguered coach get the chop. After all how much of the team's under-performance is his fault? In the case of Eddie Jones, coach of the Wallabies it seems it's a case of 50-50.

ARU managing director Gary Flowers said: "Professional rugby is a result-based game - one win in nine matches is far from satisfactory. The decision to search for a new coach was only reached after carefully considering the information that has been gleaned from our review and consultation with key people.

"This is a very difficult decision, but the ARU strongly believes we must give the Wallabies a fresh start with a new coach who will give us the best possible chance of future success. While the ARU board has decided to search for a new coach, we also recognise that Eddie Jones has made an enormous contribution to the game. However, it was clear that we needed to act now on the position of head coach.
"We will now be able to move forward and get on with the job of searching for a high calibre head coach to lead a coaching team that will get the best out of Australia's elite rugby players. This is not an easy decision, but it is in the best interests of Australian rugby."

I've met Eddie a couple of times through Japanese Rugby contacts. He's an interesting guy when you listen to him talk. Certainly his track record shows he's a disciplinarian and succeeds making teams disciplined, but it's also true that a certain point a coach's effectiveness in directing players starts to fall.

If I have one criticism of the way Eddie ran his team in the last 24months since the end of the World Cup, it would be that he was really reluctant to turn over the aging team roster. Most notable in that time was how he loyally stood by team captain George Gregan whose decline was very notable. There was no feeling as to how Australian Rugby was going forwards after the spectacular Grand Final finish at the 2003 World Cup where the Wallabies pushed the Lions into overtime and lost on a Johnny Wilkinson goal. Since then, it's looked like Eddie has been busy shoring up that team instead of building a new team as he once did with the ACT Brumbies.

Here's a post-mortem in the SMH.

Eddie Jones has gone down the same route as several of his predecessors in Australian rugby.

Alan Jones returned from a tour of Argentina in 1987 and was shown the door just three years after leading the Wallabies on a victorious grand slam tour.

Bob Dwyer, four years after winning the 1991 World Cup, was moved on. Greg Smith, who followed Dwyer, had two years at the helm and barely had time to get off the plane from South Africa before he was axed.

A prominent rugby official told me midway through the recent tour that the sharks were circling Jones and when the sharks are circling you never survive. How right he was.

It just adds weight to the adage that there are two types of coaches - those who have been sacked and those waiting to be sacked.

Indeed.

I Got Some New Stuff
My girlfriend bought me a Sony 19" flatscreen monitor for my birthday. It's pretty swank. I've also downloaded Firefox1.5 and of course it allows me to do more here at blogger, which is great.

Bill Clinton Weighs In

And We're Not Talking About His Weight

Former Presidents tend to just shut up and try to fade away like Old Soldiers. In most part, this is a good thing, but sometimes it becomes necessary to speak your mind. And so Former President Bill Clinton has spoken his mind on the execution of the War in Iraq. I think this is the point at which we realise the thing has been going on too long without the resolution that has been promised.

The next day, Mr Clinton weighed in from the Middle East, saying the war as it unfolded was "a big mistake". It was a good thing Saddam Hussein had gone, the former president said, "but I don't agree with what was done". The administration underestimated "how easy it would be to overthrow Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country".

He said President George Bush had made "several errors, including the total dismantlement of the authority structure of Iraq". He added: "We never sent enough troops and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders." Across those porous borders, "the terrorists came in. That was the central mistake, and we're still living with that".

As passions have run higher here this week, the venerable traditions that foreign policy arguments "stopped at the water's edge", seems to have been conclusively discarded. The most recent Democratic president was in Dubai, in the heart of the Arab world, when he delivered his verdict on the war that was launched by his successor in the White House.

On Tuesday, US senators voted 79-19 to endorse a Republican amendment demanding a regular accounting for the war from the Bush administration. Not only was it a bilateral statement that things could not go on as they were, it came at the moment Mr Bush was in Asia, thanking Japan, South Korea and Mongolia for their contributions to coalition forces in Iraq.

Ideally, we should get out, but getting out is not going to be easy. The day we decide to leave is the day the insurgents will celebrate saying, "we won". And indeed that may be the case; that we must swallow the bitter pill of defeat in order to get out of this misadventure altogether. However before we come to wiping the Iraq Campaign slate clean we have to look at what possible outcomes we can salvage from Iraq.

In a nutshell the COTW (Coalition Of The Willing) really should go back to an intel-driven war rather than this tank, helicopter gunship and white phosphorous thing they're doing. That stuff is okay for a short war as proven in both gulf-wars, but this thing is getting protracted. The classic way they used to fight wars like this was to send in CIA agents to set up proxies to do the fighting. Haven't they seen 'Spy Games'?

One of the issues seems to be that the current Bush Administration don't like the CIA and are therefore not inclined to follow the advice of those people. Indeed, the model for fighting these wars have been practiced in Afghanistan, and having US troops on the ground has not added much except mobile fire-power. It's costly and thee money is better spent on the CIA nursing the situation along rather than the military rupturing the situation with gunfire at every turn. It draws less attention too.
The least the COTW can do is to manage these things a lot better.

No Rugby World Cup For You!


It must be a day for former leaders to speak up. Former Japanese PM Yoshiro Mori was speaking up on behalf of the globalisation of Rugby, now that Japan was not awarded the Rugby World Cup for 2011. Instead, that honour goes to New Zealand who took it away with a surprise win. Moe accurately, he is whining and griping, but his whine and gripe is not totally without merit. After all. NZ has already hosted a Rugby World Cup. What gives?

The Japanese had stronger words. "Our tender was much better than those of the other two," said Yoshiro Mori, president of the Japanese RFU, and the former prime minister of Japan. "Everybody thought it would be of great value to the game to stage the Rugby World Cup in Asia. We had public support and there is a feeling that the game needs to be globalised.

"It looks as if this was a sympathy vote for New Zealand because they couldn't stage the World Cup in 2003. Maybe it was the old boys network of the IRB at work."

Aah. Mr. Mori, was famous for debating and Rugby from his days at Waseda University. He's also famous for this true anecdote:

Mr. Clinton is coming to Japan for the G8 summit. His underlings brief him on how to greet Mr. Clinton:
"First you say, 'How Are You?' He'll probably say 'fine thank you'. then you say 'Me Too'."
So Bill Clinton arrives. Mr. mori opens his mouth and says: "Who are you?"
Thinking it's a joke, Bill Clinton replies with his riff: "I'm Hilary's Husband."
Mr. Mori says: "Me Too."
Everybody in the room died of embarrassment.
But hey, he's still 'Former Prime Minister of Japan'!

Capital Punishment Is Not A Good Thing
Neither is haggling over sentences of another country. The best that could be said for the on-going Nguyen saga is that the Australian government seems to be doing its best to avert the impending execution of Mr. Nguyen. That is he way the government should be; not exporting people from which it has removed citizenship.
Meanwhile the tone of journalism kind of stinks here

It struck me as we pressed Prime Minister Lee on the issue this morning, how well he defended the indefensible. He spoke not about the fact that this was a first offence. He didn’t focus on Nguyen Tuong Van at all. Instead he spoke of the quantity of heroin at issue — almost 400 grams — and the suffering that could cause. He spoke in soft, measured tones and emphasised the gravity of putting a human being to death.

When pressed on the question of when the execution would take place, he showed sensitivity, suggesting the family needed to know first and so he wasn’t saying any more. And notably, he applauded Prime Minister Howard for resisting 'megaphone diplomacy'; that is trying to embarrass the Singapore government by speaking out on the issue. By the end of his six minutes, Prime Minister Lee had impressed me and I suspect many in the Australian press pack. In fact, tonight it appears what we were watching was a diplomatic stuff-up — big enough to ruffle the typically unruffled John Howard.

The suffering caused by 400grams on heroin are policy things under which laws are writ. Heroin is one of the best anaesthetic tools that have been removed from the hands of doctors because of USA drugs policy. There a re a lot of ins and outs to this issue alone; but in the mean time, the Singaporeans think it is important enough to execute somebody who is carrying this much heroin. No matter which way you slice it, it's their law that you're trying to disrespect.

That said, Mr. Nguyen made this trip to paay off debts. Debts incurred to lawyers who worked on trials defending Mr. Nguyen's brother who trafficked drugs. What kind of hell kind of family is this? Presumably, the third brother will have to mule some heroin to pay off two big legal bills now. Okay, bad joke.

The execution is scheduled for 2. December. I don't agree with capital punishment. That said, I don't think we'll dissuade Singapore from carrying out what its judges have decided, just on the say-so of ethnocentric journalists like this Tim Lester fellow.

Yanks Retain Hideki Matsui

It's a total non-news moment when the Yankees retain a stalwart player with a multi-year contract. Hideki Matsui agreed to stay on for 4 more years with the Yankees.

“I’m most very happy to be able to come back again and wear the pinstripes again and play in that uniform,” Matsui said at a news conference yesterday. “My first desire was to play here.”
Matsui’s agent, Arn Tellem, and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman met the Nov. 15 deadline contained in Matsui’s first contract with the team. That deal stated that if there was no agreement by then, New York would have to place the outfielder on unconditional release waivers, which would have prevented the Yankees from re-signing him until May 15.

“I know Hideki is relieved. This is where he always wanted to be,” Tellem said after reaching the agreement Tuesday night. “His hope is to finish his career as a Yankee and help the Yankees win the World Series.”
Matsui is to earn $13 million in each of the next four seasons and gets a no-trade clause. He was coming off a $21 million, three-year contract in which he earned an additional $1.5 million in performance bonuses.
“This was obviously the No. 1 priority to get him wrapped up,” Yankees manager Joe Torre said. “He’s such an important player.”

The teeth-gnashing you hear from Boston is that the 52million dollar price tag puts Johnny Damon at a higher price for the Bosox who want to retain their Center Fielder. Rumours persist that Scot Boras is trying to get 7 years and 84 million for his client Damon.

And that is all the bullshit that is fit to post.