Topic: Japan

What's the largest financial institution in the world? It may surprise you to learn that it's Japan Post, whose insurance and savings businesses hold nearly $3 trillion in deposits.

It goes without saying that this has an enormously distorting effect on the Japanese economy, tying up vast sums of capital in the hands of the government and serving as a tremendous resource for patronage. Among other things, Japan Post is the biggest buyer of Japanese government bonds. This cozy arrangement has helped to keep the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in power since 1955 (excepting a gap between 1993 and 1996).

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had made the privatization of Japan Post a centerpiece of his administration. Today his postal reform bill was defeated in parliament, leading Koizumi to call a snap election that he might actually lose. What this means for the future of Japan Post, and of Japan, is uncertain.

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Topic: Japan

How an event is remembered by history is often completely different from how it looked when it was happening.

As an example, consider Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's forcible opening of Japan to American trade in 1853. This took place just five years after the United States annexed California — by sailing into San Francisco Bay and claiming the place.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that the American approach to Japan was not going to resemble its approach to California, which was part of the continent Americans saw it as their manifest destiny to subdue, and whose vast territory was occupied at the time by about 4,000 Mexicans. But I wonder whether the Japanese of 1853 would have been so sanguine. They were already worried about the Russians nosing about Hokkaido (at that time sparsely populated with Ainu), and the Russians had even gone as far as crossing the Pacific to establish forts in California (thus the town of Sebastopol in Sonoma County). The distance between Washington, D.C. and Tokyo isn't much greater than that between Saint Petersburg and San Francisco, and it's less than that between London and Calcutta.

Neither the Japanese nor the Americans could have known in 1853 that America would collapse into civil war within a decade, while Japan would embark on an ambitious, unprecedented campaign of modernization. At the time, Perry's landing may well have looked like the beginning of a process that would end with total annexation and even statehood.

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Topic: Japan

In my reading of East Asian historical source materials, I ran across this marvelous Japanese poem, written in the linked-verse style, which means that the first two lines were written by one person, and the final three lines were then "linked" afterward:

Bitter, bitter it was
And yet somehow funny.

Even when
My father lay dying
I went on farting.

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Topic: Japan

Are you ready?

"His Augustness Truly-Conqueror-I-Conquer-Conquering-Swift- Heavenly-Great-Great-Ears."

That's from the Kojiki, an eighth-century Japanese compilation of origin myths. If it helps, HATCICCSHGGE was born in the following manner:

The august name of the Deity that was born from the mist [of his breath] when, having begged the Heaven-Shining-Deity to hand him the augustly complete [string] of curved jewels eight feet [long] of five hundred jewels that was twisted in the left august bunch [of her hair], and with the jewels making a jingling sound having brandished and washed them in the True-Pool-Well of Heaven, and having crunchingly crunched them, Susa-no-o blew them away, was HATCICCSHGGE.

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