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Japan and its 800-pound gorilla neighbor

Slate recently published a good roundup of international media coverage on the recent incident involving North Korean asylum-seekers being forcibly and illegally removed from the Japanese consulate in Shenyang, China by Chinese police. A fascinating video (available here from the BBC — Real Player needed) was taken of the incident (apparently by a South Korean film crew tipped off in advance), and has been getting saturation play on Japanese TV for over a week now, as the story plays out and varying versions of what happened and who did or didn’t do what get revealed.

The Yomiuri Shinbun (as quoted in the Slate piece) I think summed up the incident best:

[Japanese reactions reflect] the tendency to act in a masochistic way when it comes to a matter involving China.[…]Found throughout the process is a way of doing things ‘without incident’ by avoiding taking any confrontational stand, which has much to do with the deep-rooted tendency in the bureaucracy to shirk responsibility.

No better example of this than the images in the above-mentioned video of Japanese consulate officials retrieving the fallen caps of the Chinese police officers while the North Koreans are being dragged kicking and screaming from the consulate gates.

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Last night’s quake

It’s highly amusing to me that in two short months of living in Tokyo, I’ve seemingly felt more earthquakes than I ever remember experiencing in 14 years of living in San Francisco (including the big-but-not-The-Big-One 1989 quake). Last night, or actually early this morning around 5:30am, was the strongest yet, although apparently it only measured 4.7 magnitude according to the New York Times (via AP). It was quite a short but violent jolt, whereas most of the others have been of the “rolling” variety. According to the AP article, “Japan is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone nations because it sits atop four tectonic plates.”

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Engrish siting

There’s a whole group of folks fascinated by what’s called “Japlish” or “Engrish,” that is, strange or mangled or just badly-translated English that one finds quite prevalent in Japanese advertising, signage, brochures, etc.

So I’m sure the following has probably already been catalogued by someone out there, but I was amused by this message on the box of my new au cell phone:

Warning: Be careful of bad language in this mobile phone, because a partner’s feeling is going to be bad. Let’s keep mobile manners.