Strong, incisive, and definitely opinionated,
Yuichi Yamamoto is where I go to get
perspectives on Japan. I may not always
agree, but I am always impressed. The
Japanese media, unfortunately, don't carry
his brand of analysis.
- Gordon G. Chang -
Gordon G. Chang has been known as the author of an
insightful, foresighted and courageous book titled
"The Coming Collapse of China" (Random House, 2001).
In early 2006 his second book "Nuclear Showdown"
was released from the same publisher.
Who is the owner of this site?
The owner of this participatory website, Yuichi Yamamoto, is a semi-retired
businessman whose biological age is 70
as of 2006.
He is Japanese both ethnicity-
and nationality-wise.
Mission statement
Our way of thinking is that Japan's mainstream media are so taboo-ridden
that they cannot tell the truth wherever telling the truth is what really counts.
That's where kicks in. However, since we have no network through
which to gather facts and data on our own, we can't provide you with the most
up-to-date news stories. That's why we are aiming at 'First-hand views on
second-hand news'. And when turning to Japan's major news organizations for fresh news
stories, we always bear in mind that as Bob Kohn points out in his "Journalistic Fraud",
the modus operandi in some newspapers (most newspapers in case of
Japan) is to pass off biased editorial opinions as straight news stories.
JMR featured Y. Yamamoto's piece
On October 20, 2005
Japan Media Review
ran my commentary
titled
"Questioning the Questioners"
which deals with the pivotal role the Japan's mainstream media
played during the campaign period for Election 2005.
JMR is a joint project launched in March 2003 by -
The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication
The USC East Asian Studies Center
GLOCOM (The Center for Global Communications at the International University of Japan)
and is a sister publication of Online Journalism Review.
TFP gets plugged in Amy Chavez' Guidebook to Japan
In early-2005, prominent humorist and Japan Times columnist Amy
Chavez published
"Guidebook to Japan - What
the other guidebooks won't tell you" from GOM Press.
The author selected the TokyoFreePress as one of the Best 200 websites on Japan and
inserted the link to the TFP at the end of the section titled "Daily
Life" of "Part 2: Living in Japan" (page 223.)
On the surface her way of viewing this culture is different, if not 180-degrees, from the TFP's. Apparently approaches are quite different, too, as hers is much more lighthearted and laidback whereas the TFP chooses to address Japan issues more squarely. Notwithstanding the stark contrast, however, the TFP believes it has a lot in common with her Guidebook.
According to her website,
the American humorist living in Japan for quite some time now has once
said: "Sometimes, the only way to survive a foreign culture is through
humor." I, as the owner of the TFP, too, think that maybe I will be
better off, health-wise or otherwise, by making a caricature of this
culture and these people (Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Tokyo
Governor Shintaro Ishihara, et al.) because they do not really deserve
to be discussed seriously, in the first place, even from a Japanese native's point of view.
But for now it has really gladdened me that my blog has been plugged by
this first-rate humorist. Many thanks, Amy.
Sunday, April 27 2008 @ 05:41 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 116
Talkative birds
For some personal reason, I have not logged into my blog publishing platform
since November last year. But that does not mean I have quit blogging for
good. In the last four years since I launched this site, the number of hits
to the system has topped 710,000. Even though this indicates, by
the rules of thumb, that no more than 350,000-400,000 people actually read my pieces,
I want to express on this occasion my gratitude to these frequent
visitors to my site.
During my long absence from the blogosphere, I seldom watched TV or read newspapers, either,
because something in my skull refused to be updated on the sequels of the same old serial farce. The path that connects my sensory nerves to the brain had become too congested with junk. Unfortunately I'm not good at passing around empty words on an ear-to-mouth basis, without fully internalizing them. The only things that drew
my attention were the Dalai Lama making a disappointing about-face, the
Japanese leg of the Olympic torch relay completed without major disruptions, and
the municipal government and all the citizens in Obama City, Fukui Prefecture,
enthusiastically rooting for Barack Obama..
Now the Tibetan "spiritual leader" seems to be saying he is not
a secessionist and that he supports the Beijing Olympics, after all. In Japan, Tokyo
Governor Shintaro Ishihara, known for his cheap anti-Chinese rhetoric,
seems to have decided to shut his mouth even at the sight of the Five-Starred Red Flags flying all over the venue of the torch relay in the April breeze heralding the holiday-studded Golden Week. He just wanted to see the Japanese "security runners", 90 of them, successfully prevent
the sacred flame from being extinguished by Tibetan separatists living
here. Six persons were reportedly arrested but they did not include those who badly assaulted protesters trapped under the huge blanket of the FSRF. The Governor is now in a position to kowtow to the IOC as well as
the CCP because of his bid to host the 2016 Olympics. As for the Obama craze in Obama City, they become enraptured every time the Democratic presidential
hopeful wins a primary. They have even formed a hula dancing team because
Obama was brought up in Hawaii. A not-too-sexy hula dancer in her 60s was
telling an NHK reporter that she would "do her best" to support
Barack Obama. · read more (358 words)
TokyoFreePress Gets Linked to Benjamin Fulford's Website
Benjamin Fulford, a Tokyo resident, is a prolific nonfiction writer ardently working on his admirable cause to straighten out the messy situation in this country. When working with Forbes magazine, he was overseeing its Asia Pacific Bureau. We do not necessarily share the same approach to various questions - sometimes his views are diagonally different from mine - but we do share the same set of questions, which I think is already quite something. The late management guru Peter F. Drucker once wrote to the effect that the wrong answer to the right question is by far better than the right answer to the wrong question. That's why I think we can collaborate with each other despite the apparent chasm between us. He has written a number of books in Japanese including Say Good-bye to Zombies
(グッバイ・ゾンビーズ) and 9.11 Hoax Terror (9.11 テロ捏造).
Monday, December 03 2007 @ 01:16 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 965
Vladimir Putin menacing the poor Russians
Russian President Vladimir Putin now looks fully poised to hand over his
autocratic power to one of his henchmen in the presidential elections scheduled
for March 2, 2008.
The early returns from the December 2 parliamentary elections have already
indicated that the former KGB spy, who is responsible for the deaths of
Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya and many other courageous dissidents,
is now on a roll in terms of paving the way to installing his
puppet as the next president of the Russian Federation.
The Russians at large have, time and again, proved courageous and proud
people that dared to challenge authority to change their life for the better, if reform
has sometimes been attempted in the wrong direction as it was 90 years
ago. To that end they have even attempted to kill Czars. But primarily
because of the iron-fist rule by Joseph Stalin and his successors, now
they have been reduced to a bunch of docile and self-deprecating folks.
That's too bad, but we don't care too much about the way things are unfolding
in the today's Russia, because it's their headache, not ours. After all
it's them who are destined to suffer the consequence of all this, in a decade or two from now.
If there
is someone who is learning a heartening lesson from Putin, it's Chinese leader
Hu Jintao and his people. They have already learned WHAT NOT TO DO from
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. But now the
communist leadership in China is learning WHAT TO DO. Without doubt Hu
is increasingly becoming sure that the introduction of a representative
democracy won't necessarily be the end of the world. Monopoly of power by
the Chinese Communist Party will withstand a transformation of the system
if it only means that Hu has to change his headwear from the red hat to a differently
colored one. Indeed, Deng Xiaoping was right when he said, "Whether
a cat is black or white makes no difference. As long as it catches mice,
it is a good cat." · read more (210 words)
Friday, November 30 2007 @ 02:28 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 796
The Kirishima, JMSDF's Aegis-equipped destroyer
Since October, the government, legislature and media have been
so preoccupied with bullying small-time con men such as former Administrative Vice Defense Minister, his wife, former defense chief and executives from a local defense broker, as if these bribery cases weren't "the tip of the tip of the iceberg," that Diet deliberations on the
"new" anti-terror bill which would enable the resumption of the
refueling mission in the Indian Ocean have yet to commence in the upper house.
Most probably Ichiro Ozawa's Democratic Party of Japan will ultimately give way because
it's by now proved totally unable to come up with a workable counterproposal.
But this will happen only when the Kitty Hawk, the conventional aircraft
carrier, is about to retire somewhere in 2008, as has been planned, and be replaced by a nuclear-powered
carrier such as the USS George Washington which needs a refill only once
every 25 years. Actually that doesn't matter at all because from Prime
Minister Yasuo Fukuda's point of view, any defense issue has nothing more than a symbolic
significance.
Fukuda's predecessor Shinzo Abe mentally collapsed days after he assured
George W. Bush of an uninterrupted extension of the anti-terror statute
which was to expire on November 1. Then Fukuda took over and visited Bush
on November 15 to tell he would try his best to minimize the suspension
period during which the free gas station is out of service. Now that the
two consecutive leaders of this country have failed to deliver on their
pledge, it's already alarming enough a sign that the bilateral alliance
is increasingly in jeopardy. · read more (139 words)
In October, the story about Takemasa Moriya, former Administrative Vice
Defense Minister, surfaced from out of nowhere. It went like this: The
63-year-old bandit had been entertained in 200 golf junkets by then-senior
managing director of Yamada Corporation, a trading firm that intermediates
between the Defense Ministry and American defense contractors such as Lockheed
Martin.
At that time an independent defense analyst said the revelation must be
"the tip of the tip of the iceberg" of the structural corruption.
Of course he refrained from elaborating on his remark but he must be damned
right. This sort of allegation always comes out when an unsuccessful bidder who
thinks his money didn't pay off starts to whistleblow. So it's inevitable
that the revelation comes in bits and pieces.
If there were some investigative journalists in this country, however, they would
soon uncover the total picture taking a cue from the firsthand accounts
by the resentful briber. Unfortunately, though, Japanese news media, themselves,
are an integral part of the structural corruption. So, they have
used their same old modus operandi and doled out little by little the charges
against the small-time ex-vice ringleader and his pet contractor. They
certainly know that this way they can immunize their audiences and readerships
for an abyss we are destined to see sooner or later.
Yet, it's not that they are poised to ultimately confess to what's really
going on in this kleptocracy. Their M.O. No. 2 says, "Once the truth
has started gushing out, try hard to localize and marginalize its implication."
They look like an egregious criminal willingly admitting to the smallest
part of his guilt to camouflage the main part. · read more (948 words)
Friday, November 09 2007 @ 03:10 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 738
Ichiro Ozawa offered tearful apologies on Wednesday
When former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stepped down as he had mentally collapsed
in the face of the defeat in the July 29 upper house election, "opposition"
leader Ichiro Ozawa momentarily looked triumphant and upbeat. But as TokyoFreePress
predicted, Ozawa now followed suit, if not hospitalized. Instead the pouty
Ozawa just holed up in a hotel suite so he remained reachable to other
party cadres, who felt they couldn't afford to lose him. If and when the
Japanese voters once again prove stupid enough to effectively pick him
as the nation's leader, it's inevitable for the Democratic Party of Japan
to reveal itself to be nothing but a spinoff of former intra-party factions
of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The consensus, therefore, was that
Ozawa will best represent the true color of the DPJ when it takes power.
Actually what has rattled this nation in the last several days is nothing
new to the nation which still remains mysterious to Westerners. On November 2, the DPJ
head met with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to talk about a grand coalition,
so specifically as to agree on the appointment of Ozawa to deputy premiership of the new administration, as if the two parties weren't already kin since
the birth of Ozawa's party. He brought back his feat to the headquarters
of the party to have it approved by party's Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama
and other senior members. To his dismay DPJ cadres turned a cold shoulder
on Ozawa.
On November 4, Ozawa tendered his resignation. Then Hatoyama and other party members realized the party couldn't afford to lose him and started begging him on their knees to retract his letter of resignation. After dignifying himself for some 72 hours, Ozawa agreed to take back his intention to leave the party's top post. As if to prove the DPJ doesn't even have intra-party democracy in place, the lawmakers of the party unanimously decided to forgive Ozawa for his second about-face in less than one week. On November 7, he offered sincere apologies to his men, and then to the press corps. · read more (478 words)
It's not that the Japanese have been disabled to communicate since the
beginning of their existence. But as a matter of fact, my fellow countrymen
today are totally disabled to communicate among themselves, and with foreigners
for that matter.
In my definition of the word, communication is an activity intrinsic to any species of creatures in which they juggle thoughts and feelings back and forth between them. Desire to communicate, therefore, is just like craving for air, food and flesh. But if there is anything particular to communication among human beings, it's that a certain amount of
value is added each time the information changes hands, from its original sender
to the first receiver, and then to the next. This is exactly what the Japanese people are unable to
do. They just pass around one and the same idea which was given from
out of nowhere.
One good example is what they call dibeto, Japanese transliteration of a debate. The most important thing to note
about dibeto is the fact that the issue is always given beforehand. At a glance it's the media that seem to pick the topic they think is debate-worthy.
But in fact, it comes down from further up above. The media are just mediating the whole process. At any rate nobody is allowed to question the validness and relevance of the
selected issue.
The problem here lies with the fact that there is no living human being sitting high up above, as has always been the case with this nation whenever it faced a crisis. Worse, only this nobody knows the right solution for the problem although the mediating media sometimes know it like an examiner does. Without the correct answer tacitly established in advance, the issue isn't considered debatable in the first place. Hence, dibeto always looks like a ritual in which to authenticate the predetermined
answer with the moderator acting like a priest and the debaters toying with the given idea all along . · read more (1,174 words)
Sunday, October 21 2007 @ 04:35 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 699
Say good-bye to the U.N. and these sociable gentlemen
This coming Wednesday marks the 62nd anniversary of the birth of the United
Nations. It was officially founded by 50 nations in San Francisco on October 24, 1945. Ever since its charter, organization, ways
of financing its activities, administrative rules, etc. have remained essentially unchanged
although the number of its member countries has grown to 192 and the 1971
hijacking of the Republic of China's privileged seat by the People's Republic
of China marked a stigmatic milestone. While the U.N. has been at a standstill,
the world has undergone a sea change through the two "Cold Wars." and 9-11.
Small wonder that nobody but China and Russia thinks it's still functioning,
and reparable if things go wrong at times.
Against this backdrop we have heard a myriad of empty words about reforming
the organization from the likes of Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon. Unfortunately,
though, they are the kind of people who have to reform themselves before
reforming someone else.
John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is practically the only
exception who knows what he is talking about when addressing this issue.
Back in 2005, he said: "The Secretariat building in New York has 38
stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
But his tenure as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. didn't last long, essentially
because the outspoken U.S. envoy knew exactly what to do to make a big difference.
When I was in business, we called this the resistance to change. Every
time we were set to implement a reform program, people who had vested interests
in the status quo would desperately try to defend them and make believe
it was still reformable despite defects inherent to the "legacy system"
showing all over the place. Given this human nature, we thought that was really unavoidable.
The only thing we can expect is that a resolute person comes forward to
revolutionize things all on his own. He has learned from the history textbook that any revolution
in history started with destruction of the ancient regime. But he is also
to learn a lesson the hard way that trying to fix an unreformable body is a sheer waste
of time. · read more (749 words)
Big rally staged on June 18, 1960 (Left) Nobusuke Kishi, alias the Specter of the Showa Era (Right)
All of these [self-deceptive] people believe it would be better for them to leave the relationship, but when it comes to doing so they are paralyzed. In order to remain in relationship, knowing it is against their own best interests, they frequently try to trick themselves by distorting the situation. - How to Break Your Addiction to A Person by Howard M. Halpern, Ph.D.
To be genuinely loving and committed one must FREELY choose another person. [On the other hand] one of the hallmarks of an addiction is that it is a COMPULSIVE drive which, by definition, means that it limits this freedom. - ditto
No other sovereign nation in history has been more dependent on another
country than Japan. It's almost as though Japan is addicted to the United
States through the incongruously parental arrangment called Nichibei Anzen Hosho Joyaku, or the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan. You can see a close parallel
between this nation and a junkie hooked on the substance.
Nichibei Anzen Hosho Joyaku, or Anpo for short, was first countersigned by Shigeru
Yoshida, grandfather of former foreign minister Taro Aso, in San Francisco
on September 8, 1951. Article 10 of the pact read: "After the Treaty
has been in force for ten years, either Party may give notice to the other
Party of its intention to terminate the Treaty, in which case the Treaty
shall terminate one year after such notice has been given."
Given this clause, the Japanese people were facing the first critical juncture
in 1960, when I was in my early-20s. Hundreds of thousands of people took
to the streets to oppose a proposed renewal. (To be more precise, it was
a revision rather than an automatic extension.) Despite the nation-wide
uproar, however, then Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, former Class-A war crimes suspect and grandfather of former
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, could elbow his way into signing the revised
treaty with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, and having it ratified in a turbulent Diet session, thanks to the powerful backing from rightwing fanatics and yakuza. Some
even suspect that the CIA may have played a pivotal role, too, in facilitating the entire process. · read more (935 words)
Monday, September 24 2007 @ 05:34 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 739
Abe offered apologies to the nation at Keio Hospital on September 24 (Left) Osama bin Laden in love with Japan (Center) Fukuda soon to succeed Abe (Right)
Without doubt, Japan is the worst-prepared nation for a terrorist attack.
The duck has been sitting there at least since the late-1970s when North
Korean operatives started entering the country to kidnap
its citizens at will. Even today the Japanese people think they are surrounded
by friendly peoples. To them, it only takes patience, perhaps coupled with an utter inaction, to
build a sense of camaraderie with Kim Jong-Il or Hu Jintao. Why not believe
in the good faith Osama bin Laden must harbor toward them deep inside?
Despite the total absence of preparedness, al-Qaida hasn't hit us in a
major way as it did the U.S., the U.K., Spain, or the like. The
likelihood of a major terrorist attack on Japan looks extremely remote
even in the future. I think there are two reasons Muslim fundamentalists
have whitelisted this nation.
Firstly, they respect us, or at least, they have an irresistible sense
of affinity toward the Japanese people. Actually Japan's religious salad
(Shintoism is only an ingredient of it) has nothing in common with the faith of Muslim.
But we share a "death cult" of the same flavor with Muslims.
There's no denying that terrorists owe their insatiable lust for martyrdom
to kamikaze suicide attacks more than to the Qu'ran.
Even today, the Japanese have an unmistakable desire for self-destruction
as is apparent from the international comparison of suicide rate. I don't know what's really going
on in much less populated countries such as South Korea and Hungary. But in absolute terms, Japan has by far topped the list at least since 1998. · read more (371 words)
You can vividly visualize certain things, while there are some other things
you can hardly envisage.
My blog has repeatedly taken up the issue with the likelihood of Japan's
collapse on the possibly wrong assumption that the country has yet to perish. But indications thus far are that I have failed to convince my audience.
I predicted from the beginning that with my fellow countrymen, my words would all fall on deaf ears. They are the world's most credulous
people. But that only means once convinced of a phony idea, they turn into the
world's hardest folks to counter-brainwash. On the other hand, it was a total disappointment for me to know that among the big crowd who has hit
my website more than 550,000 times in the last three years, there are very few Westerners, either, who would explicitly agree to my
dismal perspective about Japan's future.
On October 20, 2005
Benjamin Fulford, a Tokyo resident, is a prolific nonfiction writer ardently working on his admirable cause to straighten out the messy situation in this country. When working with Forbes magazine, he was overseeing its Asia Pacific Bureau. We do not necessarily share the same approach to various questions - sometimes his views are diagonally different from mine - but we do share the same set of questions, which I think is already quite something. The late management guru Peter F. Drucker once wrote to the effect that the wrong answer to the right question is by far better than the right answer to the wrong question. That's why I think we can collaborate with each other despite the apparent chasm between us. He has written a number of books in Japanese including 
You can vividly visualize certain things, while there are some other things
you can hardly envisage.