North Korean racism

Christopher Hitchens has a review at Slate of a book about the North Korean regime's racist policies. It isn't surprising that a "black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to show his family the sights of Pyongyang," but I guess the racism is so virulent that even their East Asian neighbors are reviled as racially impure:

North Korean women who return pregnant from China—the regime's main ally and protector—are forced to submit to abortions. Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters.

And then there's this horrifying statistic:

Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.

Teddy Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor

James Bradley wrote a very intriguing Sunday op-ed for the NYT that's been floating around the libertarian blogosphere. The gist of the article is that had Teddy Roosevelt not supported the Japanese against in the Russians in 1905, the Japanese empire might never have materialized and attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941:

In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt approved the Japanese annexation of Korea and agreed to an “understanding or alliance” among Japan, the United States and Britain “as if the United States were under treaty obligations.” The “as if” was key: Congress was much less interested in North Asia than Roosevelt was, so he came to his agreement with Japan in secret, an unconstitutional act. [...]

Roosevelt had assumed that the Japanese would stop at Korea and leave the rest of North Asia to the Americans and the British. But such a wish clashed with his notion that the Japanese should base their foreign policy on the American model of expansion across North America and, with the taking of Hawaii and the Philippines, into the Pacific. It did not take long for the Japanese to tire of the territorial restrictions placed upon them by their Anglo-American partners.

Japan’s declaration of war, in December 1941, explained its position quite clearly: “It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under the Anglo-American policy of imperialistic exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation.”

Is the iPhone really a failure in Japan?

Every once in a while some naïve American journalist hears that the iPhone is a flop in Japan because Japan is cell phone utopia/Japanese people are robots/etc. The latest attempt is from Wired, entitled "Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone." Apparently not only is this not true, but the author made up some of the quotes. That link, an original article from Apple Insider (a member of the Apple rumors community), also gives a much more nuanced and interesting look at the Japanese cell phone market and Apple's position in it.

The chicken tariff spat that killed Detroit

The NYT has an editorial online about the unintended consequences of government interference in the market. The editorial traces the roots of American auto makers' disproportionate share of the light truck market (a declining one in the face of $100+ barrels of oil) to a retaliatory trade war started in the 1960s. Germany, in an attempt to protect its own domestic poultry market, convinced the European Common Market (the second incarnation of what has become the EU) to triple the tariff on frozen chicken imported from the United States. The US retaliated, imposing a 25% tariff on light truck imports, a move directly targeted at Germany's Volkswagen automaker. However, the tariff was also imposed on Japanese imports, giving Detroit an advantage when it came to competing with the Japanese over the American auto market. The chicken tariffs ended long ago, but American carmakers got too cozy with the benefits from the light truck tariff, and now it's coming back to bite them in the ass with that market in free-fall and consumers going for smaller cars. A nice example of the unintended consequences of government action.

Athenians have second thoughts about Olympics

According to a story in the Christian Science Monitor, some in the city of Athens are reconsidering whether hosting the 2004 Olympic Games was really worth the $15 billion cost. The stadiums lie either empty or underutilized. Athens got some infrastructure out of the deal – the metro was revamped, the ancient city center was beautified, and the airport was enlarged – but all of those investments could have been made without hosting the Olympics. Beijing is spending an estimated $40 billion on their coming out party, but authoritarian regimes are insulated from the oversight and criticism that other Olympic hosts face from their citizens. The article also implies that Tokyoites are a lot less receptive to the idea of hosting the Olympics in 2016 than they were in 1964. The trend seems to be that citizens in booming, upcoming cities (Tokyo 1964, Beijing 2008) are more likely to welcome the Olympics than citizens of dynamic market-oriented cities who don't need to prove themselves to the world.

All my writings on Olympics-related topics here, with more examples of Olympics-gone-wrong in Sochi and Baku.

Japanese citizen journalists

Japan has always been a mystery to me, so the smallest things that come out of it seem like such enlightenment, but here it goes:

In the United States, online news is divided into a few categories: portal news (AP headlines and a lot of sensational stories on Yahoo or MSN landing pages), online-only news (Drudge Report, Google News, Digg to some extent), and then there's the established media (CNN, NY Times, etc.). Blogging has started disseminating more diffuse sources, and a very small number of blogs do their own actual reporting (as opposed to meta-reporting and commentary).

In Japan, however, which has very high rates of newspaper readership, the print media was still very dominant, and five national newspaper set the tone of the news. In a Christian Science Monitor article, the author talks about the rise of "citizen journalists" who report exclusively for websites, and who often work for free and are not professional reporters. The stereotype of the citizen journalist is in direct opposition with the mainstream journalist, who must belong to a press club, and whose sources are very controlled. Mainstream journalists, some say, rely too much on the government, which isn't surprising given the corporatist leanings of Japan.

The article doesn't go into detail about the types of reporting that citizen journalists do, and I can't read Japanese so I can't really figure out for myself. The examples of reporting cited seem slightly sensationalistic (rapes, homelessness, labor rights) – these are important as news, but it's also important to have more comprehensive reporting, or reporting that taps into high-level sources and discusses the government. Of course, that's also the kind of reporting it's difficult to do if a) most of your reporters aren't paid and b) you don't have any sources in government or the upper echelons of business.