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.
Friday, July 11 2008 @ 04:55 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 213
Ron Paul, who still remains in the 2008 presidential race, bases his non-interventionist
platform on the wrong assumption that everything happening outside of the
United States is a "blowback" resulting from the past interventionist
policies. Despite his naivete, however, there's no denying that a growing
number of American people have been inclined to relearn from the founding
fathers, be it George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Their principles
all come down to this: "Let's mind our own business, nothing else."
Ron Paul seems to fret about his fellow countrymen mistaking his non-interventionism
for isolationism, but that is not an important issue.
The 34th G8 Summit was hosted by Japan from July 7 through July 9. Toyako
in Hokkaido was chosen as its venue because environmental degradation in
the northernmost island is not so serious as in the other part of the archipelago.
The 8 leaders, along with their counterparts from the European Union, China,
India, and some African nations, chitchatted over their pet issues
such as what measures to take to cut the greenhouse gas emissions and how
to cope with the global food crisis already affecting tens of millions
of Africans and about to hit the industrialized nations as well. To demonstrate
how the leaders in the developed countries are concerned about the worldwide
degradation of environment, the Summit's host even staged a tree-planting
ceremony on a lakeside ground.
Despite the Japanese media's acclaim for the success of the 3-day-long gathering, these
guys were just exchanging empty words and symbolic gestures. That being
the case, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda was the best person to preside
over the pointless meetings. The Japanese people, for that matter, are
the best people to host the ceremonial Summit. · read more (334 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).
On Sunday afternoon in Akihabara district downtown Tokyo, the 25-year-old
man drove a 2-ton rental truck straight into the crowd of shoppers and
then emerged from the vehicle to randomly stab pedestrians with his Smith
& Wesson dagger knife. Hours before, he had had to settle for the small
truck because a larger one was not available at the time. So he couldn't
kill as many people as he had initially planned. Even so, his mission was
successfully completed: the lanky guy could kill 7 pedestrians, injure 10 others, and more important,
make the headlines at home as well as abroad.
An off-duty NTV cameraman was on the scene and did an excellent job with
the tragicomedy as it was unfolding, using his digital camera. His 6-minute-long movie was
shot so professionally that you could see or even hear the entire edifice
crumbling. To reporters and commentators in local media organizations, however, the sound of silence remains inaudible and what's really going on is still invisible. The same holds
true with foreign correspondents stationed here. Believing the collapse of the nation is something utterly counter-intuitive, they keep disseminating
stereotypical, bland and sanitized "analyses" of what is not going on here. · read more (440 words)
Monday, May 26 2008 @ 11:21 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 483
When I was doing my daily mining routine on YouTube late last week, I came
across some videos relating to Ron Paul. Actually there are 124,000 videos
posted by his campaign office and supporters. and some of them have been
viewed more than a million times. Until then, I hadn't known that the congressman,
R-Tex, still remains in the presidential race, because of the media blackout in and outside
the U.S.
From this Japanese blogger's point of view, the only candidate
who could make a difference is one who will pull the plug on the dead organization called the United Nations and give Japan the 1-year prior
notice to terminate the incongruous pact called the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation
and Security between the United States and Japan, as soon as s/he takes
office. In the light of these criteria, either Obama, Clinton or McCain
is out of the question. But since I came to know the obstetrician-turned-politician has persevered in the 2008 race on the "Libertarian" ticket, I have started thinking that for the American voters, hopes for real change may not have been thoroughly extinguished.
Admittedly, I am skeptical about the wisdom of categorically ruling out military or non-military intervention. No matter whether President Paul would opt to withdraw from WTO, his Secretaries of Commerce and Treasury Departments would have difficulty handling protectionist measures, including currency manipulation, China and some other country would certainly step up. His Secretary of Defense would face equally formidable problems, at home with defense contractors, and abroad with those nations whose Founding Fathers were, unlike their American counterparts, interventionists or even expansionists. Despite all these sticking points, I am inclined to buy into Ron Paul's philosophy because at any rate it precludes him from making America police the whole world with its overstretched troops deployed in 130 countries, let alone with the help of unreliable and overdependent allies such as Japan.
This afternoon, Amazon delivered my rush order for The Revolution: A Manifesto authored by the insightful septuagenarian. According to this book, Paul's
team could raise $4 million online on the single day of November 5, 2007,
and the record in the U.S. elections history was surpassed on December
16 when they could raise more than $6 million. This really indicates Ron
Paul and his colleagues are now gathering momentum for a real change. I
have a hunch that at latest by the time he, as well as myself, turns 85
in 2020, the American voters will send the real change agent to the White
House. It's hard, sort of, to visualize what it will be like under the
Libertarian administration, because we are too used to the false dichotomy
between the Republicans and the Democrats. But if you assume that Ron Paul
will most probably opt to put in place an Internet-enabled model of E-Democracy,
you can somehow envisage what his minimalist government would look like. · read more (182 words)
Sunday, May 25 2008 @ 07:21 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 467
Chinese Geisha
The May 25 edition of the Japan Times carries an article about Zhang Ziyi's
fund-raising drive in the interest of Sichuan residents afflicted by the
May 12 jolt. The piece is placed just below a news story that quotes Wen
Jiabao as hinting that the death toll "may top 80,000" (what a difference a week made) and asking
the visiting U.N. Secretary General for "900,000 more tents."
According to the JT report, Zhang Ziyi was "surprised to find one
group she solicited on the sidelines of the Cannes film festival knew little
about the disaster in Sichuan Province." Stunned at the "ignorance"
on the part of the participants in the film festival, the Beijing-born
star actress said: "I was as angry as a madwoman. I said, 'Are you
idiots? You are well-dressed and you look like you identify with society,
but you don't know what's going on on planet Earth.'" · read more (203 words)
Saturday, May 17 2008 @ 01:01 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 487
Hu Jintao visited the port city of Yokohama on May 9. The Kanagawa Prefectural
Police Department was on full alert throughout the city, especially in
the China Town where some pro-Tibetan and pro-Taiwanese elements were poised to
protest. Actually, Hu and his entourage let down these folks by quickly leaving the city after visiting
Yokohama Yamate Chinese School which is located in a quiet neighborhood
atop a hill. YYCS is where only wealthy parents find the tuition affordable.
Down in the valley, people were hanging about in the mazy streets of the
China Town in anticipation of Hu's visit. When I walked by a Chinese eatery
I frequent, I was stopped by its owner, 83-year-old chef-emeritus and some
employees. Although the owner and a waitress were wearing an apron colored like
the Five Starred Red Flag, they are not particularly patriotic. I said:
"If he dares to come down to the China Town, why don't you invite
him in your shop and treat him to the frozen gyoza dumplings?" They
burst into laughter. A male employee exclaimed: "Why not? That sounds really great."
Recently some frozen dumplings imported from China were found tainted with
phosphorus pesticide by far exceeding the limit.
Two days earlier in Tokyo, the Chinese leader had a chat with his Japanese counterpart over this and that,
including how to proceed with the ongoing probe into the phosphorus-rich gyoza.
But the communique signed by the leaders of the two ailing (or failing)
giants indicated that no concrete action plans to boost the "future-oriented"
bilateral relations had come out of the summit. The only specific thing was Hu's promise to rent out
a pair of panda bears to the Ueno Zoological Gardens in Tokyo.
In response, the Tokyo Governor mumbled, "Am I supposed to feel grateful
for Hu's gift?". · read more (857 words)
Sunday, April 27 2008 @ 05:41 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 553
Talkative birds
For some personal reason, I have not logged in to 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. I do not particularly feel grateful, though, to tens of thousands of those sickening worms called spammers. I am getting more and more inclined to believe that they are on the payroll of anti-virus or spam-filtering software vendors.
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)
Monday, December 03 2007 @ 01:16 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,666
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: 1,361
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: 1,263
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)
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 
On Sunday afternoon in Akihabara district downtown Tokyo, the 25-year-old
man drove a 2-ton rental truck straight into the crowd of shoppers and
then emerged from the vehicle to randomly stab pedestrians with his Smith
& Wesson dagger knife. Hours before, he had had to settle for the small
truck because a larger one was not available at the time. So he couldn't
kill as many people as he had initially planned. Even so, his mission was
successfully completed: the lanky guy could kill 7 pedestrians, injure 10 others, and more important,
make the headlines at home as well as abroad.
When I was doing my daily mining routine on YouTube late last week, I came
across some videos relating to Ron Paul. Actually there are 124,000 videos
posted by his campaign office and supporters. and some of them have been
viewed more than a million times. Until then, I hadn't known that the congressman,
R-Tex, still remains in the presidential race, because of the media blackout in and outside
the U.S.
Hu Jintao visited the port city of Yokohama on May 9. The Kanagawa Prefectural
Police Department was on full alert throughout the city, especially in
the China Town where some pro-Tibetan and pro-Taiwanese elements were poised to
protest. Actually, Hu and his entourage let down these folks by quickly leaving the city after visiting
Yokohama Yamate Chinese School which is located in a quiet neighborhood
atop a hill. YYCS is where only wealthy parents find the tuition affordable.
