Precut – Modern Japanese Timber Construction from BAKOKO on Vimeo.

H/T to Popular Woodworking for the link.

It’s not easy being a young man in Japan today. Every few months sees the release of a new set of figures, stats and stories trumpeting the same meme: today’s Japanese men are unmanly — and worse, they don’t seem bothered by it.

Tagged in the domestic media over the past few years as hikikomori (socially withdrawn boys), soshoku danshi (grass-eating/herbivore men, uninterested in meat, fleshly sex and physical or workplace competition), or just generally feckless, Japan’s Y-chromosomed youth today elicit shrugs of “why?”, followed by heaving sighs of disappointment from their postwar elders and members of the opposite sex. With the country’s economy stagnant at best, its geopolitical foothold rapidly slipping into the crevice between China and the United States, and its northeast coastline still struggling with the aftermath of disaster and an ongoing nuclear crisis, the reaction to a failure of Japan’s men to take the reins, even symbolically, has evolved from whispers of curiosity to charges of incompetence.

[. . .]

Why the generational malaise and indifference to sex? Theories abound. The most provocative to me, a Japanese-American and longtime Tokyo resident, is that Japanese women have become stronger socially and economically at the very same time that Japanese men have become more mole-ish and fully absorbed in virtual worlds, satiated by the very technological wizardry their forebears foisted upon them, and even preferring it to reality. “I don’t like real women,” one bloke superciliously sniffed on Japan’s 2channel, the world’s largest and most active internet bulletin board site. “They’re too picky nowadays. I’d much rather have a virtual girlfriend.”

[. . .]

The phrase “herbivore men” was coined by a female Japanese journalist in 2006. By 2009, the Japanese male’s lack of ambition, sexually or otherwise, had become a media meme. With the latest reports in Japan, of men who can’t get it up for real women who won’t get married or have kids, the mutual gender-chill phenomenon has become mainstream. It may be the future, but is it really Japanese?

“Maybe we’re just advanced human beings,” says a Japanese friend of mine over dinner this week in Tokyo, who won’t let me use her real name. She is an attractive, 40-something editor at one of Japan’s premier fashion magazines, and she is still single. “Maybe,” she adds, “we’ve learned how to service ourselves.”

It seems “debt,” “Greece,” “crepe,” or any other words that might relate to the current Euro crisis prompts a flurry of activity on stocks around the world. But if you thought Greece’s and Italy’s debts were high, there exists a country with an even higher debt-to-GDP ratio. Surprisingly, it also has some of the lowest government bond rates in the world. Let’s take a look at this macro mystery.

Japan’s 2011 gross public debt as a percentage of GDP is estimated by the IMF at 234%. Compare this to down-but-not-yet-out Greece’s at 139% and Italy’s at 119%, and the United States’ at 99%. With those numbers, you may ask how Japan hums along while investors berate Europe for their lack of strict budget controls and U.S. politicians wrestle to cut the deficit.

This is because of one main difference: 95% of Japan’s debt is Japanese-owned. Compare this to Greece, which owns 29% of its debt. The Japanese have been happy to fund their government at incredibly low bond rates, currently around 1.1% for a 10-year bond. Why don’t the Japanese invest elsewhere for higher returns? For one, Japan likes to keep its yen in the country. This is due to a natural bias to favor one’s domestic investments (home bias), the strength of the yen, and domestic institutions’ required participation in bond auctions. Also, it’s difficult to find domestic positive returns. The Nikkei, since Japan’s trouble in the early 1990s, has lost about half its value

A minor quibble: though Craig Shirley asserts that the only way Americans could fight overseas before Pearl Harbour was with the Chinese air force, at least 16,000 Americans were serving in the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Navy, or the Royal Canadian Air Force:

Long before Pearl Harbor, a steady stream of Americans had started moving northward across the border to join the Canadian armed forces. By the beginning of 1941 some 1,200 Americans comprised about 10 percent of RCAF officer strength and 3 percent of the other ranks. A U.S. influx totaling about 10 percent of RCAF recruitment continued until, at the time of Pearl Harbor, over 6,000 U.S. citizens were serving in the RCAF, of whom 600 were instructors in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. By the same time nearly 10,000 Americans were serving in the Canadian Army. After Pearl Harbor a reverse movement resulted in the absorption of over 26,000 Canadians into the U.S. armed forces during World War II.

From Military Relations Between the U.S. & Canada by Stanley W. Dzuiban.

• “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history”
• “The power behind the [. . .] juggernaut is much greater than most Americans suspect, and the juggernaut cannot stop of its own volition, for [it] has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas.”

This kind of statement can be found in all the prestigious newspapers, opinion journals, and magazines . . . in the late 1970s through the late 1980s. The economic juggernaut of the day was Japan. It was poised to crush the feeble remnants of American capitalism with the all-powerful keiretsu, Japan’s corporate conglomerate organizations. The strong would smash the weak, leaving America (and the rest of the Anglosphere) in the dust. Just in case you didn’t follow economic history, it didn’t happen.

Today, the economic bogeyman is China:

“We are getting our clock cleaned by Chinese state capitalism,” wrote Robert Kuttner, now editor of The American Prospect, earlier this year at The Huffington Post. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson piled on at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, declaring, “The age of American predominance is over. The [Chinese] Yuan will be the world’s reserve currency within two decades.” The conservative Citizens Against Government Waste even aired a television commercial featuring a Beijing economics class in 2030 in which a professor explains how America became indebted to China. The professor concludes, “So now they work for us.” The class chuckles knowingly.

This gloomy message of American decline relative to China appears to be seeping into popular consciousness. An April 2011 poll by Xavier University found that “a stunning 63 percent believe that the Chinese economy is more powerful than the US economy.”

“The U.S. could lose its status as the world’s biggest economic power within five years,” reported The Daily Mail in April. The Mail article was based on calculations released by the International Monetary Fund projecting that total Chinese GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, will surpass U.S. GDP by 2016.

Can that be? Let’s do the math: China’s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China’s GDP would rise to $40 trillion. If the U.S. economy grew at, say, 3 percent a year, total GDP would be $27 trillion. Back in 2007, before the financial crisis, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report projecting that Chinese GDP would be $26 trillion in 2030, compared to $23 trillion for the U.S. It bears noting that current Chinese purchasing power per capita is about $6,000, compared to $46,000 for Americans.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible — the longer the US government struggles to avoid cutting back, the more likely it is that the US will enter a long economic decline — but China has economic problems a-plenty.

Japan has grounded more than 200 F-15 fighter jets after a fuel tank fell off one of the war planes during a training mission.

Flames were seen under the wing and fallen parts were scattered at sites near the western city of Komatsu.

No-one was injured in the incident and the plane landed safely.

It is the second time in three months that officials have suspended F-15 flights.

The 155-kg (340lb) tank, which was empty, and parts of a dummy missile came free and fell from the plane as it was nearing a field for landing. The debris fell on 10 locations, including a sewage plant, officials said.

Stranger still was the arrival on May 11th, a full two months after the earthquake and tsunami, of Sri Lanka’s Disaster Relief Team. Some 15 officials from Colombo’s Ministry of Disaster Management came to help clear debris, via a local NGO called Peace Boat. An extremely decent gesture, likewise. But the flights to and from Japan must have cost the ministry a fortune, relatively. This follows an equally quixotic donation by the Sri Lankan government of 3m tea bags.

Then there is the matter of blankets. Since the disaster some 17 countries as well as the European Union have offered blankets as part of their emergency relief supplies. In March this made sense. Some 25,000 blankets from India, 25,000 from Canada and 30,000 from Thailand were donated within days of the disaster. But did Chile really need to deliver 2,000 blankets on May 31st, by which time the temperatures were balmy to say the least?

Earlier Chile donated 100 kilograms of rice, purchased in Japan, to the city of Minamisanriku. Yet considering the Japanese government stockpiles about one million tonnes of rice in case of a crisis—which it buys under World Trade Organisation commitments, keeps off of the market to support local farmers, and burns after it rots—Chile’s altruism was more likely symbolic than satiating.

In the aftermath of natural disasters, the media usually makes a big, hairy deal if the head of government for the region, state, province, or country isn’t immediately seen touring the area. While it makes for useful video footage for the TV news shows, it’s often counter-productive for the people whose lives have been overturned by the disaster. Heads of state, in particular, don’t just jump in a taxi and head off — there’s a huge entourage that have to precede and accompany the leader. This takes up cargo space, landing slots, and flight paths that might be more usefully devoted to providing help to the afflicted area.

It may be useful psychologically for the victims and the relief workers to see the prime minister or the governor, or whatever, but between the TV and other media folks, the dignitaries themselves, their security detachments, and the other support staff, it almost certainly delays the disaster-struck area actually recovering.

Japan underestimated the risk of a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant, the UN nuclear energy agency has said.

However, the response to the nuclear crisis that followed the 11 March quake and tsunami was “exemplary”, it said.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was badly damaged by the tsunami, is still leaking radiation.

Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan is facing a no-confidence vote submitted by three opposition parties over his handling of the crisis.

They say he lacks the ability to lead rebuilding efforts and to end the crisis at the Fukushima plant, public broadcaster NHK reported.

Some politicians from Mr Kan’s governing Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), including former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, are backing the motion.

If it is passed in a vote expected on Thursday, Mr Kan would be forced to resign or call a snap election.

However, given the thousands of dead and missing from the earthquake and tsunami, the attention paid to Fukushima has been rather disproportional. As someone joked yesterday, radiation from Fukushima has killed fewer people (none) than e.coli tainted food in Germany (16 at last report).

Update: In case I’m being too obscure, the “this” I refer to in the initial paragraph is the with-the-benefit-of-hindsight conclusion that the Fukushima plant was inadequately prepared for the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

In a business practice that recalled the ritual seppuku suicides of samurai warriors, the president of Japan’s largest power company resigned Friday to assume responsibility for the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

At a nationally televised news conference, Masataka Shimizu bowed deeply in an exhibition of remorse and declared, “I am resigning for having shattered public trust about nuclear power and for having caused so many problems and fears for the people.

“I want to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close.”

Whether it’s a hearkening-back to Samurai ethos or not, he should have resigned long ago, as soon as it became clear that the company he headed was doing everything it could to conceal the extent of the actual damage both from the media and from the government.

There is a widespread feeling the government and TEPCO officials did not disclose all they knew during the early days of the crisis and have been less than forthcoming since.

In the first weeks after the earthquake, TEPCO officials received 40,000 complaints a day about the lack of information. Police had to be assigned to guard the company’s offices from anti-nuclear protesters.

This week, TEPCO released documents showing it was dealing with three simultaneous nuclear meltdowns, while reassuring people the fuel rods were safely intact in all the reactors.

“Why did it take two months to get to this point?” demanded a Wednesday editorial in the Nikkei business newspaper.

“Even a rough calculation of conditions inside the reactors would have helped in choosing the best response.”

Public confidence was shaken further when it emerged engineers at Fukushima were so unprepared for the disaster, they had to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes and used car batteries to try to reactivate damaged reactor gauges.

Nobody with an ounce of sense is criticizing the workers at the plant for their reaction to an earthquake that was far in excess of the design for the reactors, or a tsunami that was much higher than anything the designers had foreseen. Shit happens, and it was the daily double of fantastically unlikely natural disasters that struck the plant.

The company, however, deserves more than just a light dusting of shame for the way they appear to have been actively preventing the real state of the plant becoming known to the international nuclear community and the national government. A nuclear disaster is everyone’s business, and there were resources available to TEPCO that they signally failed to draw upon. Saving face is not an acceptable reaction to this kind of catastrophe.