Flat3D

Google.cn

I am sure you have seen about Google’s row with China in the news recently.  Basically “someone” in China was attacking Google’s services (primarily gmail) in an apparent attempt to get information about civil rights protesters.  Google’s response was a bit disconnected in my view… 

Back in 2006 Google made a For-China version of it’s site called Google.cn (.cn being the TLD for China),  Now it had a chinese language version of it’s service for sometime, but it was being blocked by the Great Firewall to avoid people finding things on the internet that might not agree with the governments official take on national and world events, or even worse, might make them look bad.  So, in order for Google to have a workable presence in China, they have to censor their results in a fashion that pleases the Chinese authorities, and so they decided to do that through google.cn.  This move brought a lot of flack their way from free-speech activists and other people who don’t like how China works.

So basically, as I understand it google.cn is the site that gived the filtered results and the rest of google doesn’t.  Google doesn’t seem to offer its other services through google.cn and presumably they aren’t part of the agreement with the Chinese government like search is.  But by using proxies and routing connections through other countries, clever folk can access Gmail and it offers pretty secure (SSL) and pretty anonymous (no name etc required) email based outside China, a good thing for folk who might be trying not to get noticed or found protesting against their government.

But the disjointedness to me is between Google’s findings (that “someone” was attacking their services from China) and their response  (to remove filtering from their in-China search).  Why does removing the filtering balance out the attacks?  And surely Google must be aware that China will just ask them to leave or just block google.cn…  Perhaps Google is planning to remove themselves from the Chinese market and simply wants to make a big noise about doing so, while squarely pointing out the attacks made by ”someone”…  And I think good for Google.  They are a corporation, not a government agency, and they can withdraw from China if the fancy takes them.  If other corporations followed suit, China might think twice about it’s policies on censorship which in turn would mean it would have to think twice about abusing people’s civil rights as there wouldn’t be anywhere to hide.

But the truth is that out here in East Asia Google isn’t the same big deal it is in the ‘western world’.  Here in Japan no-one talks about Googling things, not many people use gmail, harldy anyone is on picasaweb, Blogger isn’t the blogging site of choice, Android has still to make any real appearance, YouTube is used a bit, but isn’t as clear a winner…  The big internet mogul in Japan, and in most of East Asia, is Yahoo!  In Japan Yahoo! provides search, online auctions and shopping, maps, news and weather, online TV, financial information, entertainment news, games and more.  On top of that it is one of the largest internet service providers in the country, it is in cahoots with my mobile phone company, Softbank, and my future parent’s in law even use Yahoo! as their telephone provider for their home.  the most common email address out here is @yahoo.co.jp.  Google is even advertising on TV to try and up it’s market share here, I never saw a Google advert in the UK, they didn’t need them.  If this is anything to go by China won’t worry about google leaving, there will be some other company that everyone uses.  If Google left Japan, most people probably wouln’t notice anything other than improved efficiency at the office because there is no YouTube.

So yeah, that’s my take on the whole thing…   Perhaps a well intentioned, if frustrated, move by Google, but will it have any of the effects people are talking about?

But!  Be aware I am no expert on China or Chinese politics, quite the opposite, but my mission agency’s background is in China, originally being the China Inland Mission before being kicked out and deciding to serve the rest of East Asia (including Japan! ) and so there is still a lot of interest in and prayer for China within the organisation…  So the story is of a little bit of interest to me, but this rant is the extent of my reporting ability on the subject!

Tags: censorship, china, civil rights, google, internet, japan, yahoo

Bloooooddd…… I’ll get it!!

Emily and I went to give blood today! Emily had never given blood before and I hadn’t in Japan either. It was pretty daunting to go through all of the questions on the computer screen checking if I was ok to give. There were lists of diseases that, had I had them in the past 6 months, would have meant I couldn’t give. Then lists that if I had at all would mean I couldn’t. These were pretty hard to understand, but made easier by the fact I haven’t had any diseases in a long time… Maybe since chicken pox as a kid!
Then came some lifestyle questions, questions about going to the dentists (which I did on Saturday, but the lady said it was fine as he just poked about and said everything was fine), questions about tatoos and piercings, and then the clincher…
It wanted to know if I had ever lived overseas. Of course I have, so I clicked 「はい」 (yes) and chose Europe from the list that followed.
The next question took me a little by surprise, althought I had been forewarned that I probably wouldn’t be able to give blood.
Had I stayed for more than one night in the UK between 1980 and 1996?
Well yes, of course I have. 「はい」 again.
Then the system asked me a bunch more questions and the lady printed out a sheet, before pointing to a massive poster on the wall saying that people who had stayed for more than one night in the UK between 1980 and 1996 you can’t give blood… I hadn’t noticed the poster, it really was massive, but in my defence there were loads of massive posters and it takes ages for me to try and read them! The reason given is the old favourite BSE, I hadn’t even thought about that whole episode since the foot and mouth outbreak made us remember it. But just in case I am a mad cow (ok, it’s really CJD in people…) they don’t want my blood.

So Emily gave blood on her own, and went all woozy in the middle of it. I think she has a bit of a blood phobia, she broke out into a sweat at the sight of it and took a little while to recover. We had planned she wouldn’t look at them doing it and maybe that would be ok, but the distraction she found was the next bed over which, of course, had someone lying in it giving blood! So that didn’t help so much! But all credit to Emily, she continued and gave her quotia!

Afterwards the lady at the desk kindly informed me that soon they will be revising the limit on people who have been to the UK so that those who have been for upto 30 days will be able to give blood, I explained that I had spent 14 of the 16 forbidden years living there.  Interestingly it is specifically the UK, if I had been born and raised 75 miles south on the same island, i.e. in the Republic of Ireland, I’d be certified BSE-free for giving blood in Japan!
I guess I will just have to keep my blood all to myself!

P.S.  Extra bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the post title comes from!

Tags: blood, BSE, CJD, emily, ireland, japan, mad cow, medicine, uk

Irritation… cultural irritation?

I have noticed myself being irritated at a few things recently.  Some of them are possible justified, others are long standing dislikes of mine, but some are new!  And some really aren’t consistent, swinging with my moods, energy levels and so on, which is pretty normal, to be honest.  But as I thought I realised some are culture stress, as things don’t work out the way I want or expect, sometimes because of new culture, sometimes because of misunderstandings, and sometimes simply because I have relatively recently moved from one culture to another.

Let’s start with something unique (for me) to Japan, and relatively inconsistent!  I have been getting annoyed when school kids, specifically middle school or high school kids, shout “Harrowww!!” at me in the street.  Some days I don’t mind at all and will even reply with a friendly “Hello!” of my own.  But on other days I see a group of kids and deliberatly cross the street and speed up my pedalling to avoid it, and when it comes stare ernestly forward as thought I had no idea that a kid I have never met is trying to engage me in a conversation that won’t progress further than bauldering a common salutation across the street…
Don’t get me wrong, I am usually fine with having a chat with someone who is interested in finding out where I am from that extends beyond an interjection, and I am ware that my failure to interact might inadvertently discourage these kids from trying to engage a foreigner in such a conversation in the future…  But being treated this way was fun for a little while, but it’s worn a bit thin and I’d kind of like to be treated a bit more like I was a permanent feature in the locality than a temporary exhibit…  But still I am a foreigner and not the normal face!

A long standing irritant for me is taxes and finances.  Recently I’ve been doing a bit of all that.  But now I am a bit more settled things might become more regular and once I have learned how to do stuff it might remain a bit more consistent!

A smaller one is a result of moving to Japan from UK.  Movies in Japan take a while longer to come out, bigger movies take shorter time, smaller movies take a bit longer.  Recently I have rented a few movies that looked pretty good and recently released just to get home and find it is a movie I saw last year, or even in one case a few years ago!  It’s particularly irritating when the movie wasn’t that great anyways!

One irritation that swings big time for me is racism in Japan and reactions to it.  On one aspect I am surrounded by people who really are quite at home with foreigners most of the time and so maybe I don’t experience so much of it.Sometimes the racism is ignorance, and harmless, easy to ignore and when people make a fuss it irritates me .  Sometimes it is pretty serious, like when kids are being bullied at school or by peers for being different.
But occasionally I will hear of something or even see something first hand that is downright racist and would be stamped down on big time in the UK.  When this happens I find myself swinging between feelings of annoyance that it has happened, is happening or even can happen and feelings of irritation that someone is making a big deal out of something that really isn’t that directly damaging to anyone.  One such example of this is a recent blog post about a McDonalds campaign here in Japan.

Anyways maybe the summer ending, winter looming on the horizon is making me more irritable?

Tags: harrow, irritate, japan, mcdonalds, mr james, racism, school kids

Change of power

Today saw the Japanese equivalent of a general election take place.  So in the run up, with the loud-speaker cars driving around disturbing my extra hard study time (definitely not nap time, no no, definitely not), the news going nuts over politics and everyone (ok, some people) talking about it, I spent my time with Mr Yagita, my “language helper” talking about politics and learning how it all works in Japan!  Here is some of what I found out (memory problems and later verification by Wikipedia mean accuracy is not guaranteed!)

The Japanese government system is very similar to, having been based on the British parliamentary system and a Prussian system of constitutional monarchy. The National Diet (国会 – Parliament, not fish and rice…) are two houses, the lower “House of representatives” equivalent to the Commons in Britain, and the upper “House of Councillors” which is sort of the equivalent to the Lords, initially Councillors were not elected, but high ranking nobles. After WWII things were shaken up a bit, everything became a bit more democratic, the Councillors became elected individuals rather than hereditary noblemen.

So today Japan voted for it’s House of Representatives.  A bit like the UK there are two main parties and then a bunch of smaller ones.  The two big players are the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan – 民主党) and the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party – 自由民主党).  There is a whole bunch of history about these two parties that Mr Yagita sort of skipped through at pace, one interesting point thought, is that 50-odd years ago, Mr Aso’s grandfather, Shigeru Yoshida, (Until today, Taro Aso has been Leader of the LDP and Prime Minister of Japan, but that might change) was put out of power by, current leader of DPJ and apparently becoming Prime Minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama’s grandfather, Ichiro Hatoyama.  The reason wasn’t an election, but a merging of two parties and Yoshida (Aso’s grandad) being ousted as leader by Hatoyama, but the story doesn’t end there, in the midst of US/Soviet hostilities, CIA papers reveal a plot to assassinate Pro-US Yoshida and put Hatoyama in place as a more militaristic leadership, but Hatoyama’s government didn’t rearm Japan after all…

Another interesting point is that the house of representatives has had a LDP majority for all but a short time (11 months according to BBC article, two and a half years according to Wikipedia).

But today this has all changed, the vote counting widget on the front page of the Japan Times says that, come September, Japan will have a new Prime Minister and, potentially, a vastly different government.  Though it seems that really noone knows what kind of changes might result, if any at all.  As in any electoral campaign, I guess, promises have probably been made, but with no experience of living under a DPJ government, who knows whether they will be viable or manageable.  What’s more, no one really seems to be interested in the party’s policies, rather just keen for a change of leadership as the LDP has offered problem after problem and Prime Minister after Prime Minister.  Although a fast PM turnover rate is not new in Japan!  Japanese PMs tend to retire easily when trouble arises.

One of the more interesting aspects of the race for us Christians in Japan is that while Aso followed his grandfather’s footsteps into Roman Catholicism (Norn Irish voters unsure of what to make of that…) Hatoyama doesn’t share the Christian faith of his grandfather.  I have even heard that Hatoyama verges on the anti-Christian side, possibly resenting his mother’s faith.  Personally I am not sure that it will really make much of a difference.  Aso didn’t really make anything out of his faith that I am aware of while in office, and I can’t imagine Hatoyama going to any lengths to disrupt Christianity in Japan.  But if changes come, there will undoubtedly be some that help Christianity, and other’s that hinder or oppose, but it seems most likely that both of these scenarios will be unintentional, with other matters being the focus of any decisions at hand.

We are living in interesting times here in Japan!

Tags: Aso, DPJ, election, government, Hatoyama, japan, LDP, politics, prime minister

Surf envy…

On Saturday a bunch of us went to a beach near the Ferry Terminal Emiri and I went to Ibaraki from.  We were celebrating Stephanie’s birthday (A JLCer with Pioneers Mission from Canada).

The beach wasn’t the cleanest of beaches, quite a few of Japan’s beaches or coastal areas that haven’t been turned into cliffs have the misfortune of being dumping grounds for the Pacific’s garbage…  That combined with prolific fly-tipping in Japan and more relaxed views on garbage dumping in other east asian countries brings a lot of garbage to Japan’s coastlines…  This beach wasn’t so bad though, most of the drift was wood and natural stuff, but the odd piles of plastic bottles, a tv here and a sofa there, probbaly dumped and washed up in a storm.  This particular beach also had the privilege of being next to a ferry terminal and a port that is home to an oil processing plant!  But, all things considered, the water was pretty clean, and pretty nice temperature for swimming!

JP, a surfing and snowboarding missionary, was along with us, the waves were pretty small, but there were a lot of surfers out in the water.  I had a serious bit of surfing envy!  The beach was fun, and I did a bit of swimming and even brought the volleyball to the sea to have some fun, but the sea isn’t nearly as much fun when you aren’t catching waves…
So I’ve been searching for surf kayaks on yahoo auctions…  I need a kayak, a paddle, a car, wetsuit and all the gear….  I don’t think it’s going to happen!!

Here are some pics from our day at the beach!  It was still fun, and I got a bit of sun too!!

Saturday at the beach

Tags: beach, birthday, envy, japan, jlc, sand, sea, sofa, surf, want