2009-07-28

Reflected glory

The other day I stumbled across my name
on a BBS devoted to social and political issues.


By William Wetherall

Some threads of the forum were dominated by activists who follow the needles of one or another ideological compass in their pursuit of happiness. Posters to the thread in which my name appeared were engaged in speculation about contributors to the scandalized (now gone) WaiWai feature of the (now mostly gone) Daily Mainichi News.

One poster linked my name with some lawsuits concerning my children and Japan's Nationality Law between 1978 and 1988. The writer was under the impression the cases were related to revisions that became effective from 1985. I contended, even then, that the law was being revised despite the litigation.

Another poster connected me with a translation of Oe Kenzaburo's A Quiet Life, and also profiled the person with whom I collaborated on the translation. The poster, who appears to have traced our backgrounds on Google, failed to say I had previously published a translation of one of Oe's short stories and an essay about Oe -- and that the principal translator of the novel is a good friend of Oe's.

I was also tied with Doi Takako. A House of Representatives parliamentarian when the nationality cases were in court, she staunchly argued that a child born to a Japanese woman married to an alien should have the same right to acquire Japanese nationality as one fathered by a Japanese man whatever the mother's nationality. Apparently the poster had not discovered that a newspaper columnist at the time had mentioned my name in the same front-page article in which he dropped Doi's name.

The connection of stale dots in the thread was not, however, about me but others I was alleged to know. Thanks to the manner in which the thread publicized the Google-retrieved revelation that we had crossed paths, they too may be said to have crossed paths with the likes of Doi and Oe, neither of whom I have ever met -- but neither have I met Will Smith except on the big screen.

Now imagine all the people that Oe and Doi -- he a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, she arguably the best-known woman in late 20th-century Japanese politics -- have met somewhere. Imagine all the people -- famous, notorious, anonymous -- whose sweaty palms these two celebrities have pressed in the course of their public and private travels and travails. Did I mention that my dad got Babe Ruth's autograph?

I might complain that Internet wolves have too much time on their hands. But they could say the same about me as I write this blog. My dad also has a doubly signed color portrait of Barak and Michelle on his bathroom counter.

The Internet has become a village square, a community well, a public bath (and, let's face it, latrine). Everyone gathers there to spread the latest rumors about local and world affairs. Before I forget, I ought to confess that I spotted Adlai Stevenson II (1900-1965) from my dad's shoulders one afternoon in Golden Gate Park.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) -- the man to read in the 1960s when I published a couple of essays called "What Shall We Do With Andromeda?" (1965) and "Cybernetics and Semantics" (1966) -- had that much right, among a few other predictions that have turned out to be mostly true.

"Six degrees of separation" is also turning out to be more urban than myth. May everyone caught in the webs of gossipy Internet threads take a deep breath and bask in their fifteen nanoseconds of fame.

28 July 2009

Disclosure 1 I wrote a few articles for WaiWai. They have been posted for many years, and remain entirely public, on my Yosha Research website.

Disclosure 2 My dad is pushing 100. He still drives, shops, cooks, tends large flower and vegetable gardens, walks in the woods, writes inspirational stories, practices law -- and mentions Ruth and Stevenson during the interludes in his praise for the Obamas.

2009-07-24

Internet hunting

The wild woolly web is a cornucopia of forums
that appeal to the gamut of human interests.


By William Wetherall

Internet bulletin boards existed long before the high-powered servers, terminals, and software that now link everyone with a personal computer or mobile phone -- at speeds imaginable only to sci fi fanatics in the dial-up modem days.

In the good ol' days, the boards may have been tamer -- if only because so much emotional energy was expended just typing the commands it took to get on line, stay there, and say your two-bits worth in as few costly metered seconds as possible.

All manner of forums, mild and vulgar, thrive today -- despite the spread of social networking and messaging sites like Facebook and Twitter. Not a few people continue to be interested in -- or obsessed with -- the themes they define in a thread in a string in a rope in a choking hawser. Some bulletin boards are labyrinths in which a casual visitor will quickly get lost in the tangle of twine.

Older, colder threads get bumped to make more memory and bandwidth available to newer, hotter threads. Search site archives are stuffed with dated and even deleted threads.

Some boards permit total anonymity in order to encourage virtually risk-less participation. This may invite abuse, but it also allows some people to get downer and dirtier than they would if they thought a reader might know who they were.

Communities formed around such virtual anonymity nonetheless constitute actual social entities which gather the mass and velocity that define the vectors of one or another version of truth, urban legend, conspiracy theory, or defamation movement. Strategically directed, the collective momentum can have considerable impact.

Stalking game

Bulletin boarders with hunting instincts, on the same or different boards, are known to pack like wolves and coyotes when going after a bison or deer. The self-appointed hunters do not carry, much less fire, their own rifles with laser scopes. They get others -- politicians and corporations -- to do the wet work.

Internet hunters work like a team in the Combat Information Center of a warship. They spot other vessels and aircraft with their search radars and sonars and identify them as friend or foe. If an enemy they will decide its threat and whether it should be killed.

If the enemy is to be killed, its coordinates and movements will be fed to a weapons system. When the target has been engaged, someone will order others to push the buttons that fire the rounds, torpedoes, or missiles that destroy it.

Internet hunters stalk their prey in Google, track down every bit and byte of information they can find, the more damaging the better, and publicize it, with their allegations, on the highest profile boards. Covering their digital footprints every step of the way, they will send the data to organizations and individuals they think will have both the motivation and power to kill the prey in their stead.

Having put the wolves on the scent of their prey, the hunters will wait, listen, and watch. They will hear media reports of the wolves howling. On the news one night, they will catch a clip showing the wolves chase, tire, and strike the prey.

The scandal will precipitate an apology, a firing, a resignation, a divorce, a suicide.

As their main object was to see their prey destroyed, most Internet hunters will abandon its carcass and spend the rest of their life telling tales of the great hunt on the boards and to their grandkids. A few will download and save files of their postings as trophies of their bravery.

Boards are generally just soapboxes. Some are stages for flaming or outing. Others are venues for postings that blatantly overstep the line between fair criticism and libelous ad hominem slander.

Victims are lining up to file lawsuits. More attorneys are specializing in claims against Internet service providers. Some courts have awarded plaintiffs damages and ordered offensive content deleted.

Public square

Internet forums are tantamount to bulletin boards in laundromats. What you post can get you negative attention from law enforcement officers.

Advocating that someone should be assassinated -- or expressing "hate" against any group, even in the form of, say, denying or doubting the German "Holocaust" of Jews in Europe or the Japanese "Rape" of Nanjing in China -- are causes, in some jurisdictions, for investigation, arrest, prosecution, and punishment if found guilty.

Many website administrators now monitor, or filter, content that might invite unwanted public outcry or legal action. Mostly, though, the World Wide Web has become an unmonitored, unfiltered forum for free speech, like or not what others say.

The Internet facilitated the mass contribution of funds and other forms of support that brought Barack Obama to the White House. It will undoubtedly also foil China's attempt to protect itself behind a Bamboo Firewall.

24 July 2009

2009-07-18

Lost in translation

A ménage à trois between bureaucrats, scholars, and lawyers
defines a lower standard of language policing.


By William Wetherall

The movement to standardize translations of Japanese laws began with a government task force in 2004. Version 1.0 of Standard Bilingual Dictionary (SBD) was released in 2005. Government agencies began cooperating in the development of a foundation for promoting standardization of foreign language translations in 2006. The Ministry of Justice took over the project in 2009.

Since 1 April 2009, the Ministry of Justice has been responsible for continuing to develop the dictionary and for overseeing the translation of Japanese laws in accordance with its standards of usage. The government's aim is to improve the quality of legal information it globally disseminates in other languages.

The Nationality Law, as revised in 2008 effective from 2009, was translated with version 3.0 of SBD in May and posted in July 2009. It is a disaster, as are some of the other translations now available through the "Japanese Law Translation Database System" (JLTDS).

日本法令外国語訳データベースシステム
Japanese Law Translation Database System

JLT website disclaimers

The "Japanese Law Translation" (JLT) website appropriately reminds visitors that its translations are "unofficial" and only original Japanese texts of the laws have authority. It also makes these disclaimers. I use the plural because the Japanese and English versions are significantly different (retrieved 8 July 2009, emphasis added).

このページの利用に伴って発生した問題について、一切の責任を負いかねますので、法律上の問題に関しては、官報に掲載された日本語の法令を参照してください。

The Government of Japan shall not be responsible for the accuracy, reliability or currency of the legislative material provided in this website, or for any consequence resulting from use of the information in this website. For all purposes of interpreting and applying law to any legal issue or dispute, users should consult the original Japanese texts published in the Official Gazette.

So much for the government's pretense of wanting to improve quality and understanding through the "standardization" of legal translation.

The Government of Japan, represented here by the Ministry of Justice, will spend tax money developing its elaborate dictionaries and databases -- and crank out translations as fast as its technocrats can run the software -- yet baldly refuse to be accountable for "the accuracy, reliability, or currency" of its work.

The Japanese version of the disclaimer says nothing about the government not taking responsibility for "the accuracy, reliability or currency of the legislative material provided in this website."

But since the disclaimers are legal statements -- and since both declare that only Japanese versions of laws are authoritative -- it would appear that the government could, in fact, be held accountable for its irresponsible linguistics standards.

20 July 2009

2009-07-17

Race across Pacific

My latest nightmare begins
on one of those cattle car flights
from Tokyo to San Francisco.


By William Wetherall

I'm with my two kids, and we're on our way to their grandfolks' home in the Sierras. The plane goes down in the bay, and the three of us end up on autopsy tables to be IDed.

A medical examiner looks at my daughter and writes "Asian" in the race box. My son's post mortem officer decides he's "White". I'm declared "African American" by a coroner who thinks I look like Ed Bradley.

As I'm gurneyed back to the fridge, I smile. What would they have said about Tiger Woods? Then I laugh at the thought of a panel of government demographers, educators, criminologists, and health officials defending the accuracy of race statistics.

A few years back, a Seattle couple actually called one of their racially mixed children "Asian" and the other "Caucasian", in order to satisfy race quotas at the schools of their choice. "Situational identity" I call it. But what else are racially ambiguous people to do when faced with the rigidities of identity politics?

Two years back, a man at San Francisco International Airport did, in fact, do a double take on me and ask, "Aren't you on sixty minutes?" His grammar puzzled me, but he seemed sober, so I smiled and said, "The Sacramento flight's been delayed an hour." His face flushed as he said, "I'm sorry, I thought you were someone I saw on TV."

When I told my folks about this encounter my dad laughed and said, "You do look like Ed Bradley." "Ed who?" I said. Cultural literacy is the first thing to go when you live abroad as long as I have. My dad told me about "60 Minutes" and we watched it that night. I felt honored.

"So we've been passing?" I said. "Not that I know of," my dad said. "You played Pocahontas once," my mom interjected. It was long ago when I was a boy. Everyone thought I looked the part.

Much later in life, I happened to remark to a professor of Asian American Studies that my mother was born and raised on Nez Perce lands in Idaho. "Are you a Native American?", she asked, her face lighting up. "They were homesteaders," I said. Her smile vanished.

The absurdities of racializing human beings, past or present, are not always funny. In the end, one has to question the moral sanity of a government that has become increasing obsessed with racial compartmentalization and labels.

The "white"/"non-white" dichotomy of yesteryear was bad enough. The elaboration of "colored" into half a dozen or more other arbitrary categories has added trendy insult to historical injury.

My problem with race stems from the debates I have had defending the need for racial and ethnic data in medical research. I am, after all, a social scientist of sorts, with an impulse to quantify the human condition. I recognize the genetic and cultural diversity of the human species, and I acknowledge the role that genes and even culture can play in disease.

Yet I keenly feel the moral dilemma of racializing individuals as a matter of public policy. I was glad to see the religion boxes go before I left the United States. And I have come to appreciate not seeing a single race box in nearly thirty years of life in Japan.

Though I grew up taking race boxes for granted, now I find myself disgusted by the sort of questions my children have to face when in the United States. Beyond voluntary participation in research that requires disclosure of family ancestry, I can find no justification for differentiating people on the basis of their genes or culture.

The race box choices are "so weird" as my daughter once put it.

"What's this, Dad?" she asked on a visit to California, tapping her pen on the "Race and Ethnicity" section of an application form.

"Just cross it out," I said, not wanting to talk about it.

"But what's it mean?" my son, beside her, persisted.

"They want to know what you are. Your race, your culture, things like that."

"I'm half."

"That's what some people call you, yes. But what are you? Really?"

"In Japan I'm Japanese. Here I'm an American."

"Because you're a citizen of both. What else are you?"

My daughter thought a moment and said, "I'm just me."

"Do you see a 'Just me' on the form?"

"No."

"Then cross it out."

"Can you do that?"

"Watch" I said. I drew a big X through the whole section and smiled when my son went "Wow!"

My kids get a kick out of some of my antics, but they worry. They've been well trained in Japan to follow bureaucratic instructions -- whereas their old man has a history of civil disobedience on both Pacific shores.

The next time they see a race box, though, I'm betting they'll make me proud.

As submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle for its "Guest Forum" column, and acknowledged, on 7 June 2002. It was not published.

15 July 2009

2009-07-15

Dreams of happiness

Neither the United States nor Japan
guarantees their people happiness.
Nor could they.


By William Wetherall

The Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776 holds that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Too bad for the fishes in the deep blue sea.

The American scientist, diplomat, and publisher Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the originators and signers of the declaration, is supposed to have remarked that the U.S. Constitution guarantees only the pursuit of happiness. Individuals have to catch up with it themselves. William Channing (1780-1842), a Unitarian minister and social critic, similarly maintained that "The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves."

"Created equal" is taken in context to mean that all people were born with what Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) more often called "natural rights". Apparently he preferred "inalienable" to "unalienable", but his style sheet was trumped by a typesetter who was inperturbed by unalienable. It could not have a typo of the kind made today on a qwertyui keyboard.

Japanese equivalents of the word "happiness" do not appear in the 604 "Constitution in Seventeen Articles"(十七条憲法)by Shōtoku Taishi (573-621). Nor do any show up in the 1890 Meiji Constitution. The English version of the 1947 Constitution of Japan, though, embodies verbatim the famous phrasing of the Declaration of Independence.

Article 13
All of the people shall be respected as individuals. Their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shall, to the extent that it does not interfere with the public welfare, be the supreme consideration in legislation and in other governmental affairs.

第13条
すべて国民は、個人として尊重される。生命、自由及び幸福追求に対する国民の権利については、公共の福祉に反しない限り、立法その他の国政の上で、最大の尊重を必要とする。

Japan's postwar Constitution was based on a draft in English submitted to the Japanese government by the Allied Powers represented by Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), then a general, now a god. The Allies didn't get everything they wanted, but the Imperial Diet found the guarantee of a "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" harmless enough. The dignity of the individual had, after all, been subordinated to "public welfare".

Besides, people in Japan past and present, like people in all places at all times, have always been free to pursue happiness to the extent that no one in a position of authority has found reason to stop them. Essentially, then, nothing has changed. If you're not happy, it's your own fault. If you're not where you want to be, it's up to you to get there. Or try to get there. Or be content with a dream of getting there.

I said as much to a friend who insists on crying once or twice a day mostly out of self-pity. I tell her, if she's not doing what she wants to do, then do it. Maybe she can't "Just do it" as the Nike ad urges. Perhaps she will need to do a little preparation -- study, train, practice, save money, whatever. Nothing, though, is going to change unless she strives to make things change. Since she can't afford to hire palanquin bearers or a helicopter, the only way she's going to get to the top of Mt. Fuji is to hike there on her own two feet.

Still, you may go through life, working and struggling to make your dreams come true, and never get close to reaching your goals. Would this mean that happiness has evaded you? Not if you accept the dictum that happiness is in the pursuit, not the arrival.

Of course you may feel a wonderful sense of accomplishment when at last you reach the top of Mt. Fuji and look down on the rest of the world. Yet you might stumble all the way to the summit and find yourself shrouded in a fog so thick you can't even see into the crater. While you could not be blamed for feeling disappointed, you have every right to take joy in the fact that you not only dreamed of climbing Fuji, but actually did.

Life is a marathon. Only one person is going to win. A few others will place. Many, but not all starters, will finish. Many times more people will be content to mingle along the route and just root. The vast majority of humankind won't even know about the event, or care if they do.

As long as you have the legs to carry you down whichever road in the wood you choose to take, there will be nothing to stop you except an occasional tree across your way, or a perhaps a mountain lion. Barriers and dangers are there to discover ways around. At times you may encounter an obstacle so high, wide, and deep, or so terrifying, that you simply have to admit you've reached a limit. Accepting a limitation is not giving up. It is merely a recognition of the difference between a possible and an impossible dream.

Some people without legs find ways to run. Many people with legs entertain an intent but never make an attempt. The unfortunate are those who have no dreams. The most fortunate are those who cherish both impossible and possible dreams. The possible dreams are for achieving. The impossible dreams are for embracing in your heart, from which they will nourish the sparkle in your eyes that others will see as your soul.

One way or other, we all cross the finish line of life. But how will we get there? Running? Crawling? Lying on a gurney? Or slumping in a catatonic state before a boob tube we didn't turn on and can't turn off?

Now and then you read about a man or a woman dying on the slopes of Mt. Fuji from a heart attack. Some people climb even knowing the risks. They are among the lucky few who realize that happiness and comfort are not the same thing -- and that "inalienable rights" do not exist except as we imagine and earn them.

3 January 1999

2009-07-13

Social cybernetics

All this talk about how corporations are hooking kids
on gadgets and gimmicks
is familiar.


By William Wetherall

I had similar thoughts when my son began spending most of his time with a home video game he had to have because all his friends had one. My dad felt this way about my generation, which seemed to be watching too much TV and reading too many comics for its own good, to say nothing of rock'n'roll.

It all began with the ancestors of the shamans, medicine men, and priests. Vocationally specialized fish-hook, blow-dart, and arrow-head makers also share the blame. Then came itinerant snake-oil vendors and local shoe salesmen (where I got my introduction in the art of selling people something they don't need and may not really want) and redundant engineers peddling the latest Star Wars weapons systems.

Today the masters of "friendly persuasion" are simply a few degrees removed from the neighborhood and town. Their pitches have become "sophisticated" by behavioral psychology applied to the design, manufacture, and distribution of addictive consumer goods. The theory, knowhow, and tools needed to market the "stuff" that globally courses the veins of human vanity are so elaborate that only a handful of people understand how they really work. The rest of us, as passive participants in the slow but gradual industrial slogging and social blogging of the earth, are the meek who shall inherit its ruins.

A lot of writers in the late 1800s and early 1900s forecast the Brave New World doom of humankind with the coming of telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television. Rooms full of vacuum tubes and gear trains shrunk to pinhead nanosecond microprocessors in the span of half a century. In the meantime, Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders), Norbert Weiner (God and Golem), Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine), and a host of other such writers saw where it was going after it had become impossible to deny that it had begun. Today the ideological drive is toward the globalization of everything from machine-readable passport standards to local ballots.

Still, the advances in electronics, and in the materials science that has made today's virtually unbreakable wireless technology possible -- not to mention the programming that instantly gratifies HAL's appetite for more complex code and content control -- have been startling.

Just the other day a friend called my conventional cordless phone from his conventional cordless phone on the other side of the planet. Or at least I took the mere stream of electrons exciting the wafer of plastic replicating his speech in the air outside my ear for his living voice.

He reiterated his chronic fears about the quality of life in this age of cells, telecommuting, and virtual pets, fast food and junk politics. And immediately after he ended this thread of critique, just before he rang off -- or did he hang up or press off? -- he, a music lover, complained he had lost his terabyte iPod on which he carried every cacophonic symphony ever composed.

23 March 2009