Byline: Tokyo
Having been a visitor to Japan for over thirty years and having spent years here, a month or two at a time, it is hard to know what I see that is unusual.
Some of my observations came out at dinner last night. It was a pork cutlet dinner called Tonkatsu, my favorite, which I can rarely eat because of the delicious, but excessive pork fat. Pork fat would ordinarily be constipating so the Japanese, over centuries, have learned to serve pork with cabbage. A unique pork dinner tradition is that you can have all the cabbage salad you want. I often have two or three servings of cabbage salad.
I had great pork last night, but it didn't have a name. In the most high priced beef restaurant in Tokyo, a women announces the name of the cow being eaten that evening. One night, when a friend was there, they announced that the cow, Hariko, was a virgin.
Politics: I was here and involved in the year of the bar owners in the Diet. My friend Murayama, Katsu was a minor leader in the Socialist Party and the year was 1992. The Japanese, then as now, were struggling with the issue of an Army, in that case it was about sending a peace keeping force to Cambodia. The Japanese are fervently pacificists. An election was called for 1993 and Murayama's party knew they had a chance to do well. Murayama, with me in tow, went to every bar he knew and tried to talk the owners, usually women in their 50s, into running for the Diet (Congress) from Tokyo.
Murayama signed up five women bar owners and they won easily. The election, which broke a 38 year control of the Diet by the Liberal Democrat Party, would have easily carried the Socialists to total control if the Socialists had had more candidates on the ballots. The next year I met some of these sweet innocents in a Diet ante-room where I gave a brief talk. Lovely women (raunchy at heart) who didn't look right in their conservative suits and their little green sakura lapel buttons that designate a Diet member.
This year a different friend works for Sokogakai, a buddhist/baptist-like religion that has a political party: Komeito. Komeito is the clean party. The current issue is that most Diet members failed to pay into their pension plans (they get retirement benefits anyway). Only one Komeito member failed to contribute to his pension plan --- he had to crawl, beg forgiveness and bow, all at the same time, at his party headquarters. My friend saw the sight and loved it.
Olympics: the Japanese seem to love the Olympics. It is carried on three TV channels here, all the time. The TV covers different events on different channels and seems very fair about covering the winners. A week ago the Japanese defeated the Chinese in soccer in China and the Chinese booed during the entire game. The Japanese I talked to took this as a sign of Chinese media-generated nationalism --- part of commercial competition.
