Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts

Breaking News: Actual Experts Discuss Nuclear Power On Local News

Here's a news report that ran on the local ABC news, featuring the Free Will Brother In Law, who is a post-doc at UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering. Turns out there's been a lot of misinformation out there RE: possible radiation leaks from the stricken Japanese nuclear reactors. Who knew!

UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering continues to collect air samples for any sign of radiation. On Friday, they also collected rain to see if any radioactive particles fell from the sky.
Air samples collected on Thursday night on the roof of UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering failed to show any significant levels of radioactivity, and then came the rain.
"The rain is a very efficient way to wash out activity in the atmosphere and get the potential activity down to us. So this is actually a much more sensitive and efficient way for sampling," Professor Professor Kai Vetter from the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering said.
The levels may be slightly higher. According Vetter, there again he sees nothing to worry about. UC Berkeley nuclear engineers also demonstrated why it's impossible for the fuel rods in Japan to catch on fire. They exposed a piece of cladding, just like the ones found in the Japanese reactor cores to 2,000 degrees Celsius. If the cladding burnt, the nuclear fuel inside would send huge amounts of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.
"It's worse, much worse to have it on fire. The fire and the smoke become a way to spread the material that's inside," Professor Charles Yeamans from the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering said.
The test proved the rods, while they would suffer some damage, would not catch on fire. The Japanese reactors have another layer of protection, pools of water that act as moderators unlike Chernobyl which had graphite.

American journalists have had a week to put something like that on the air, but instead we've been treated to a steady drumbeat of scare headlines about "sharply rising" radiation levels, plus nuclear experts whose jobs seem more PT Barnum than Robert Oppenheimer. But, since we've never heard any apologies for the "cannibalism at the Superdome" stories, it's probably too much to expect sober commentary on nukes, at least not while people are paying attention.

I've seen a lot of critical commentary out there about how Japanese officials have not been forthcoming enough about the extent of the danger from a possible meltdown. Yeah, it's so much better to have a lot of hysteria and bad information out there whether from Ed Markey trying to score cheap Green points, the surgeon general suggesting people stockpile iodine, CNN trying to scare the Depends off of its aging audience, or good old fashioned nonsense about irradiated spinich. Could it be that the Japanese put a premium on putting out correct information while Americans apparently prefer to just have a huge out-pouring of "facts," the majority of which are wrong or exaggerated? Perish the thought.

This is the point when I will wax philosophical about how this shows how fundamentally different Japanese and American society is. While Japanese media and politics is buttoned up ("inscrutable" is the formulation), America's lets it all hang out. And that works for all concerned. But, I'll bet Japan will still have a robust nuclear industry after all this, while America's is going to be set back for another 20 years, mostly based on opportunistic fear mongering. While Luddite American Greens can always find screen-time on national broadcasts, the sober engineers and scientists who know what they are talking about sit around their labs talking to themselves.

Loose Lips, Loose Nukes

We have reached the stage of the "Japanese nuclear meltdown" emergency where the off-hand comments of obscure government officials are enough to set off panic. In this case, the Surgeon General of the United States (do you even know their name?) has suggested that people stock up on iodine as a "precaution" even as other parts of the government say don't bother. Well, it's one or the other.

The fear that a nuclear cloud could float from the shores of Japan to the shores of California has some people making a run on iodine tablets. Pharmacists across California report being flooded with requests.
State and county officials spent much of Tuesday trying to keep people calm by saying that getting the pills wasn't necessary, but then the United States surgeon general supported the idea as a worthy "precaution."
U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin is in the Bay Area touring a peninsula hospital. NBC Bay Area reporter Damian Trujillo asked her about the run on tablets and Dr. Benjamin said although she wasn't aware of people stocking up, she did not think that would be an overreaction. She said it was right to be prepared.
On the other side of the issue is Kelly Huston of the California Emergency Management Agency. Huston said state officials, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the California Energy Commission, were monitoring the situation and said people don't need to buy the pills.

Does anyone remember back in the early days of the post-9/11 color coded alert system when there was a Code Orange for a nerve gas alert, or some such? A reporter asked Tom Ridge what people could do to prepare for an emergency and he made some off-hand comment about buying duct tape? There was a run on hardware stores! One guy even covered his house with plastic sheeting and duct tape! That doesn't mean Ridge's information was bad, but it didn't take much for him to set off a round of panic buying.

For whatever reason, American media and politics are inordinately focused on Japan's damaged nuclear reactors, which have yet to kill anyone yet. Not saying the situation is dangerous and in flux, but is there any doubt the Japanese are going all out to prevent a catastrophic meltdown?Meanwhile the tens of thousands of dead and displaced are already fading to the background, at least in major American media.

I have no idea whether the Japanese reactors are going to kill us all, or not. The Free Will brother in law is a nuclear engineer, and he has so far been pretty sanguine. I'll take that over anti-nuke hysteria any day.

Wind & Wave: the Japan Tsunami

The scenes of destruction in Japan are almost too much to blog about. It's a disaster that hit close to home here at Free Will HQ. The Free Will wife is Japanese. I was born in Tokyo and lived there for several years. The Free Will mother still has a lot of friends there. It's true that earthquakes are common, and that the Japanese are fanatics about earthquake drills and safety prep. Everyone understands from birth that the country could be hit with a massive quake, followed by tsunami, but when it actually happens, it's still a shock.

Still, once the waters recede, and the fires go out, and the nukes are back in their coolant, we all know what will happen next: the Japanese will rebuild, and rebuild quickly. My mother used to say that if you told three Americans to walk across a field, they would each make their own way over. But, if you told three Japanese to walk across a field, they would do it shoulder to shoulder. I think that says a lot about how Japanese society faces adversity of the sort it is facing now.

Some things I think we all know will not happen:

The Japanese won't shut down their nuclear power industry because one plant is experiencing a semi-meltdown brought on by an apocalyptic natural disaster.

There won't be any crazy rumors about survivors resorting to cannibalism.

There won't be any wide-scale looting. (I would actually bet on no looting)

No one will wonder if this disaster is good for Obama

A Japanese rapper (yes, there are some) won't go on television and announce that Prime Minister Kan "hates" Sendai

First responders will not be dragged away from their jobs to attend press conferences

Media figures will not use this disaster as an opportunity to emote for the cameras.

No one will blame global warming.

You get the idea.

As bad as this was, it could have been much much worse. But Japan is one of the wealthiest, technologically sophisticated countries in the world. From the early alerts to the seismic upgrades to the years of drills and preparation, people and buildings survived a disaster that would have utterly destroyed other nations. No doubt many would wonder if this is fair. Why should a Turk or a Chinese or a Haitian or Indonesian die in an earthquake that a Japanese had a much better chance of surviving? Well, if you haven't learned that life isn't fair by now, I don't know when you ever will.

Americans , Europeans, and Japanese should wake up everyday and thank God that they were born within the borders of an advanced civilization. Instead, we have millions of people, up to and including the president himself, who seem to think that the Developed World has somehow use more than its fair share of resources. But, it's the use of these resources that gives us the resilience to survive disasters that would lay low a nation in the Developing World or the Third World. It's a basic fact of life. You either protect yourself as a society, or you leave yourself at the mercy of the elements. Fair's got nothing to do with it.

The Great Non-Learning: "Lessons" From Japan's Deflation

The NY Times published the latest in a loooooooong series of news stories, published over the years in every imaginable media outlet, about the effect of the Great Deflation in Japan and the "lessons" Japan's experience has for the West. The lesson, per the Times? American are just going to have to get used to a stunted standard of living:

Like many members of Japan’s middle class, Masato Y. enjoyed a level of affluence two decades ago that was the envy of the world. Masato, a small-business owner, bought a $500,000 condominium, vacationed in Hawaii and drove a late-model Mercedes.

But his living standards slowly crumbled along with Japan’s overall economy. First, he was forced to reduce trips abroad and then eliminate them. Then he traded the Mercedes for a cheaper domestic model. Last year, he sold his condo — for a third of what he paid for it, and for less than what he still owed on the mortgage he took out 17 years ago.

“Japan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,” said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage.

Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West.

The article was written by someone named Martin Fackler who, I assume, traveled to Japan to write this piece. But, he clearly came with the story already written and simply sought out Japanese who could provide him with ready quotes and sob stories. But, that doesn't mean you should confuse his story with reality. Even at the height of Japan's boom times, the vast majority of Japanese lived relatively modest lives. That was the real Japanese miracle: that a country was able to extend a comfortable middle class lifestyle to virtually its entire population. But it was not a grand life. We're talking about small cars, crowded cities, and tiny houses and apartments. Someone like Masato owning a Mercedes and traveling to Hawaii was very much the exception. (I spent the summer of 1986 in Yokohama and Tokyo. I could count the number of Mercedes, or equivalent, that I saw on one hand). And, even after 20 years of deflation and non-growth, Japan's middle class remains largely intact.

What it true is that Japan has had no real economic growth, and has begun to slip behind China according to some measures. But, if you had to choose, I guarantee you would choose life as a Japanese salaryman over that of a Chinese factory drone. Not only that, Japan's economy continues to produce advanced technology that the Chinese can never hope to duplicate, only steal.

But what's really frustrating is Fackler's profession of confusion as to how Japan's deflation has continued unabated for so long. He hints at the reasons indirectly, but the truth is he doesn't want you to know:

But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy.

Now, as the United States and other Western nations struggle to recover from a debt and property bubble of their own, a growing number of economists are pointing to Japan as a dark vision of the future. Even as the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, prepares a fresh round of unconventional measures to stimulate the economy, there are growing fears that the United States and many European economies could face a prolonged period of slow growth or even, in the worst case, deflation, something not seen on a sustained basis outside Japan since the Great Depression.

Japan hasn't just had 20 years of deflation. The deflation began with the bursting of a housing bubble exacerbated by (1) a government which propped up its financial sector, rather than allow insolvent banks to fail and (2) engaged in an epic bout of stimulus spending that left Japan with towering debts. Sound familiar? And none of it has worked. At all. In fact, the only things that worked were the Koizumi Reforms, which sought to privatize government entities like Japan Post, among other things. Privatization of government services worked?? Don't want to say that out loud!

The fact is that we know exactly what "happened" in Japan. We know that bank bailouts, excessive stimulus, infrastructure spending, and 0% interest rates did absolutely nothing to pull Japan out of its funk. The Times knows it. Yet they have been at the head of the parade calling for .... bank bailouts, excessive stimulus, infrastructure spending, and 0% interest rates to pull the US out of its deflationary spiral. Those are the preferred policy responses of liberals, and liberals clearly would rather be liberal than correct.

UPDATE 1: the Free Will mother just emailed to remind me that I was in Japan in the summer of 1987, not 1986 as I wrote above. D'oh! Then again, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, everybody who remembers what they were doing in the summer of 1987, raise their hands.

UPDATE 2: the Free Will mother also remembers that, back when we lived in Tokyo in the go-go Seventies it was known around our apartment building (in the Azabu section of Tokyo) that there were then 12 Rolls Royces in Japan. One was in our parking garage. We never saw any others around Tokyo, but people thought there was one in Hokkaido.

UPDATE 3: also the Free Will mother thinks the reference to Chinese factory drones is inapt since "drones have no task except availability to fertilize the queen." I don't know, would a reference to "Chinese honeybees" make any more sense?

UPDATE 4: the summer of '87. If you remember it, you probably weren't there.

Philadelphia

Via Ampontan, here is a mid-Eighties clip from Japanese avant-pop sensation Saeko Suzuki

She spends most of her time hammering on the marimbas, but stick around for when she gets behind a drumkit and starts wailing away.

As Ampontan says, "there’s a Zappa influence, but the music is also feminine with Asian touches, and all of it’s hers. If there are Western women doing anything like this, I haven’t heard of them."(well, Sheila E and Laurie Anderson could have collaborated to come up with something similar...)

Deflation Studies

Via Instapundit, here's a look at the lurking specters of inflation and deflation. Central bankers are supposedly trading copies of an old book about the Weimar Inflation in an effort to understand the forces that can be set loose if/when highly indebted governments give in to the temptation and let the printing presses rip:

As it happens, another book from the 1970s entitled "When Money Dies: the Nightmare of The Weimar Hyper-Inflation" has just been reprinted. Written by former Tory MEP Adam Fergusson -- endorsed by Warren Buffett as a must-read -- it is a vivid account drawn from the diaries of those who lived through the turmoil in Germany, Austria, and Hungary as the empires were broken up.
Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm.
"In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended," she wrote.
Grand pianos became a currency or sorts as pauperized members of the civil service elites traded the symbols of their old status for a sack of potatoes and a side of bacon. There is a harrowing moment when each middle-class families first starts to undertand that its gilt-edged securities and War Loan will never recover. Irreversible ruin lies ahead. Elderly couples gassed themselves in their apartments.
Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. "Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else," said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.
Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. "My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice," said one well-connected woman.

Not sure what anyone needs to "learn" about the social and economic effects of inflation. The history of Weimar Germany is as much a part of the cultural conversation as Kristallnacht or the League of Nations. In other words, well read people know what's going on. Americans over the age of 40 should have some memory of the Great Inflation, even if it has been wiped from the history books. Profligate governments love inflation, but the voters end up hating it and finally rising up and rebelling against the elites who fanned the inflation. Often you end up with a Hitler or - more likely - Juan Peron taking power; but sometimes you get lucky and the inflation leads to Ronald Reagan. Whichever way it works, the people who start the inflation are never in charge when it ends. That's the real risk of inflation for the elites. Even if they don't say this out loud, they know this deep down.

On the other hand, there's deflation, which central bankers profess to fear, yet often fails to arise. Japan's Lost Decade has been the most compelling deflationary episode in the modern era, one that has played out in real time in the second largest economy in the world with the eyes of journalists, policy makers, economists, and the business world upon them. And yet, no one knows what's going on:

The old bogeyman of deflation has re-emerged as a worry for the U.S. economy. Here's something else to fret about: After studying more than a decade of deflation in Japan, economists have slowly realized they have no idea how it works.
Deflation is usually associated with a Great Depression-like drop in demand. Consumer prices, incomes and asset prices fall. Interest rates go to zero, as low as they can go. As prices and incomes fall, the cost to borrowers of servicing debt does not, sucking life out of the economy and pushing prices down further. A bad situation, in short, gets worse.
In 1932, U.S. consumer prices fell 10% and between 1929 and 1933 they fell 27% in all.
But Japan's experience has looked nothing like this. Rather than being deep, destructive and concentrated in a few years, deflation has been a surprisingly mild, drawn-out affair. Consumer prices have been falling in Japan for 15 years, but never by more than 2% in any single year. Japan's deflation has been a morass, but not the destructive downward spiral many economists predicted. Why? And what does it portend for the rest of the world today?
Economists don't have good answers. "We don't know how deflation works," says Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee who has been studying Japan since 1997. "We don't have a way of rationalizing steady, several-year flat deflation," he says.

How can this be? How can we not even have an idea how deflation works? How can we not know what's happening in Japan, which is hardly a mysterious Hermit Kingdom. Where's Paul Krugman? Where's (fill in famous progressive economist here)? Sounds like a good research topic!

The problem, I suspect, is not that we don't know; but that the elites don't want to know. After all, Japan hasn't just had 20 years of deflation. The deflation began with the bursting of a housing bubble exacerbated by (1) a government which propped up its financial sector, rather than allow insolvent banks to fail and (2) engaged in an epic bout of stimulus spending that left Japan with towering debts. Sound familiar? And none of it has worked. At all. In fact, the only things that worked were the Koizumi Reforms, which sought to privatize government entities like Japan Post, among other things. Privatization of government services worked?? Don't want to say that out loud!

And given Japan's experience, isn't deflation preferable to inflation? Japan is still, after all of its troubles, the second largest economy in the world. Japan has remained a wealthy, productive society. Its heavy industries have remained prosperous and innovative (indeed some have obtained a real global reach). They're building robots, for God's sake! Most important, Japan has not suffered the economic and social upheaval that accompanies inflation. This is not to say that Japan's deflation has been a picnic. The Japanese equivalents to Generation X have had their prospects stunted to help "pay" for the profligacy of earlier decades. Jobs are not as permanent or as plentiful as they once were. But, this is not as troubling as a bout of inflation destroying the yen. At least, it shouldn't be.

I'm not going to pretend to understand what monetary policy is better than the other. But it sure is curious that inflation seems to be the default preference for the elites, and the only restraint is their knowledge that the beginning of major inflation would also be the end for them.

Readings...

Items of interest from my blogroll:

Reflections On The Revolution In Japan: you wouldn't know it from reading American journalists, but the Japanese have been engaging in a slow motion electoral revolt against the elites who have run the country into the ground. At least that's according to this digressive, impressionistic post at Ampontan

Satellite Photos Support Testimony That Iraqi WMD Went To Syria: six years on, can you stand to relive the argument that Saddam Hussein sent his WMD's to Syria? You probably should, as the fate of Saddam's WMD's is one of the on-going mysteries of the two Iraq Wars. I'm afraid, though, that W will be vindicated...in 50 years, kind of like what happened to Whittaker Chambers.

The Times They Are A-Changin’, But Obama Isn't: Obama visits the Senate GOP caucus and asks for some bi-partisanship for old times' sake. How about after you heal the planet and cause the oceans to rise again, big shot?

Our Forgotten History: need replacement copy of the full version of the Star Spangled Banner? I mean the version with all four verses, of course.

Men At Forty: and here's a poem titled Men at Forty from Tigerhawk. If you are of a certain age, you might find the room is getting a little dusty.

Hungary Tries To Calm Markets: in the "up is down" "left is right" world we live in, it's considered a gaffe when a Hungarian official admits that his country is heading towards a Greece-style debt crisis. If you had been reading Free Will back in March 2009, this wouldn't be a surprise at all.

Beaten Gaza Activist Arrives Home In California: Lord. Is it any surprise that one of the members of the Gaza Flotilla was a sixtysomething linguistics professor from El Cerrito (literally the poor man's Berkeley)? This guy had to have noticed that most of his fellow activists were little more than anti-Semitic goons, not that this made any difference. Some people never grow up.

If the news out of the Middle East has been depressing, you should read Start Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. It tells the virtually unheralded story of Israel's dynamic economy and the cultural and social factors that allows it to thrive in a region filled with economic backwaters. One story captures it all: a kibbutz digging for water could only find warm salt water...so they started a fish farm. Inspiring.

The Tao of Cars

Will the ways of the East always remain a mystery to the West? Check out Toyota's plan to revive its fortunes and then imagine the fat, ossified execs at GM coming up with something similar. And, even if they did, imagine their fat, work-rule obsessed manufacturing employees going along without pouting: Toyota Boss Vows To Change Priorities

The new president of Toyota Motor Corp. on Thursday acknowledged the company erred in the last decade with an all-out push to become the world's largest car maker and vowed to change priorities.
"I do not think we were wrong to expand our business to meet the needs of customers around the world but we may have stretched more than we should have," said Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company's founder.
Mr. Toyoda told reporters that his primary goal is to change the company's priorities, putting products first, not sales and profits.
"Rather than asking, 'How many cars will we sell?' or, 'How much money will we make by selling these cars?' we need to ask ourselves, 'What kind of cars will make people happy?' as well as, 'What pricing will attract them in each region?' Then, we must make those cars," he said (emphasis added-Psota).

???????

Mysterious! Inscrutable! Zen-like! Consensus driven!

Obviously, that could never work in America, where the goal of American car companies is to make pension payments, and provide permanent employment to dues-paying union employees who happen to live in Michigan. Good luck with that.

Church & Stupid

Leave it to the Japanese to create a tax-dodge so elaborate it dwarfs anything that America's creative accountants ever came up with. I read through this article twice, and still don't understand exactly what was going on. It doesn't help that the journalists telling this story essentially tell it backwards: Religious Group Hid Love Hotel Income

A religious corporation that operates "love hotels" concealed 1.4 billion yen in income over seven years through February 2008 as tax-exempt donations from amorous couples, sources said.
The Kanto-Shinetsu Regional Taxation Bureau has ordered Uchu Shinri Gakkai (Space truth academic society) to pay 300 million yen in back taxes and penalties.
Uchu Shinri Gakkai, based in Tadotsu, Kagawa Prefecture, has filed an objection to the order.
"We actually send money to needy children in the country. We'll fight the tax authorities," said the 46-year-old president of a company in Chikuma, Nagano Prefecture, that processes and sells mushrooms and vegetables.
The love hotels are apparently run by a 71-year-old former president of the company.
Uchu Shinri Gakkai appears to be a religious organization in name only. The vegetable company apparently used the name of Uchu Shinri Gakkai to win tax breaks offered to religious groups, including tax exemptions on donations.

So what we have here is a vegetable processor set up its own religion (the Space Truth Academic Society) to obtain tax exemptions, and then used their religious status to operate a couple dozen "love hotels." And then hid the income from the hotels. I ask you, are there any "Benedict Arnold CEO's" in the United States who would come up with such a daffily elaborate scam?

The best part: the reporters are focusing on the propriety of the "religious group" hiding donations, rather than the propriety of an agricultural concern concocting a fake religion to operate a sexy side business.

The Japanese! Those sandal wearing goldfish tenders?

Here's an interesting short essay by Bill Costello, an American education advocate who visited a Japanese school and came away impressed: Rising Sons

Japan has outperformed the U.S. in math and science on several international assessments of educational achievement. For example, the average math achievement score for 15-year-old Japanese students was 523 on the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).American students only scored 474. In science, Japanese students outperformed American students 531 to 489.
The Japanese school system is teaching math and science to students more effectively than the American school system, and it still has enough resources left over to implement a social curriculum, offer healthy food, and allow students to stay physically active during the school day. These are all great practices that American schools should consider borrowing.

Unlike most Americans, I have some experience with the Japanese school system, as I was lucky enough to attend a Japanese school for three years (my brother and I were the only non-Japanese kids there, except for one kid with a Japanese father and Dutch mother). They are superior in many ways. However, this is often due to Japanese culture and society, which is much more homogenous than America's and much more confident about what kids should or should not be learning in school.

For one thing, Japanese schools don't have to deal with kids with substance abuse or mental health problems on the scale that every single American high school has to deal with. They also don't have to deal with large numbers of non-native speaking students; everyone at a Japanese school is Japanese and is there to learn to read and write Japanese. There's no equivalent in Japan to the "bi-lingual" education advocates in the US. Japanese parents tend to take their kids' education much more seriously than American parents. Tutoring and after-school education programs are available on a mass scale in Japan. Most kids attend juku - Saturday private schools that supplement the main school curriculum. And, frankly, Japanese home life is much more stable and conducive to learning than in the US, where parents are likely to be single parents, divorced parents, or have substance abuse/mental health issues of their own.

Costello points to some things that would be worth trying in US schools, but it's hard to imagine their being adopted on a grand scale:

First, Kadena Elementary has a social curriculum in addition to an academic curriculum. For example, the students clean the school every day by themselves; there is no janitor. They sign up for chores on the blackboard.

...

Also, the students serve the school lunch to the teachers and themselves; there are no cafeteria workers. After lunch, the students clean up after themselves.

Hah! Can you imagine the high school drop out rate if American students had to start cleaning the school? And, even if they did, can you imagine some parents letting their Precious Little Dears do that? I can't. Not only that, I would imagine most US school systems have a janitors union that might have some unkind words for this arrangement.

The second practice I observed that worked well is that the students eat a healthy diet. There are no soda vending machines at Kadena Elementary. The school lunch is planned by a dietician and prepared at a central location in the school's district. It is then delivered daily to every elementary school, middle school, and high school in the district. Japanese schools do not have cafeterias. Students eat lunch in the classroom with their homeroom teacher.

No argument from me. US school food is famously disgusting and unhealthy. Not only that, the school cafeteria is right up there with the boys' locker room as an incubator for "Lord of the Flies" style social arrangements.

Third, the students stay active at Kadena Elementary. They have recess every day and participate in a rigorous physical exercise program. In contrast, American schools are cutting back or completely eliminating recess and physical education

Is that true? Are American schools really cutting back on Phys Ed? Because, if they are, it's about time. I never understood how the learning process is improved by forcing kids to change into gym uniforms, and then wear themselves down running laps.

You know what's the one thing they do in Japan schools that we should adopt in the US immediately? Change the length of time spent on vacation. Japan's school year is a little longer than ours, but vacations are spread out in a much more rational manner. Rather than a 3 month summer vacation, Japanese kids take 6 weeks off in winter, and six weeks off in summer. The vast and endless 12-week void that is the American summer vacation is based on a 19th century school year, which needed to work around the harvest schedule. That is, uh, no longer operative, but it persists for the same reason Robert Byrd keeps getting re-elected to the Senate: inertia and laziness. The Japanese vacation schedule is better for making sure kids retain what they learn, and keeps them in "school" mode for the whole of the year, rather than 9 months. This isn't a panacea. It won't raise GPA's (much). But it would make kids' school year much more rational and conducive to learning.

A Good Death

Charles Grassley seems to have confused some folks with this comment:

"The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they'd follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things -- resign, or go commit suicide,'' Grassley (R-Iowa) said on an Iowa radio station, WMT, a clip repeated on a Washington news station, WTOP.

Fat chance! This ain't Japan, buddy. Americans - especially obscenely rich Americans who destroy their companies, but demand their bonuses because "there's a contract" - lack the sense of shame and honor that underlies the "Japanese model." (do they teach that in Japanese business schools?)

It's a rare moment when a rich or powerful American businessman takes responsibility for their crimes. The only one in recent years that I can think of was Martha Stewart, who packed up and went to jail like a man, rather than hide behind her appellate lawyer like most white collar defendants.

7thriv