Donations are Worthless, economic issues and the future of Japan

Did I say worthless? No, I meant worth – less (2 words), so put the torches and pitchforks down.

On April 2, the “Dram for Japan” event was held in New York City’s Ward III bar and nightclub, generating a few thousand dollars (I haven’t seen the final figures yet) for the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, organized by a group of very capable entities, including Teleport City’s own Keith Allison. I was happy to donate what I had available to the items that were auctioned off (give them a good home whoever you are) and I also had the chance to sample some very interesting distilled whiskey products including some selections from a distillery in New York hopefully to be featured on Pinky Mixology in a future episode.

It was a nice time and we raised money for a good cause, but this revelry occurred under a cloud so immense and so entrenched in permanence that it went almost completely unnoticed save for a passing mention by a ninja consultant. That is the monster of currency stagflation and what it’s doing to the Yen. To get a picture of it, you can look at this previous post, and since I’ve talked about it before, I won’t cover the entire matter again, but only reference it in order to point out that there now exists a serious potential to finally equalize the yen. It’s no guarantee, but at least it’s real.

At the moment, foreign currencies are quite weak against the Japanese Yen, which means that basically for every $100 you raise for earthquake relief it will basically just buy lunch for 4 guys after the exchange rate kicks in. Yet this current ratio of conversion can not stand forever, and will either be let down gradually in a controlled manner to minimize damage, or eventually progress to the point it triggers a major upheaval or worse, a collapse. It is in the potential ability to facilitate this controlled adjustment that we can (possibly) find a silver lining in the Tohoku/Sendai Earthquake, if one can call it that.

This event will serve as the impetus of action by the BOJ, to release unexpected (or at least unplanned) amounts of currency into the economy, resulting in a flood of JPY into the local and a subsequent inflation that is very desperately needed. In a perfect (aka economically balanced) world, that would be all it would take, however Japan is in a spot best described as being between a rock and a hard place. The country will release a flood of funds but have limited means to implement the programs it hopes to accomplish... leading to an influx. This influx can either be: A) workers not from Japan but willing to work and live in such a country, or B) a mythical number of Japanese which do not exist, willing to work and live in such conditions as the USA forces Mexicans to tolerate. Seriously, in Japan even whitey is an outsider, and given the sociological problems Japan is having right now, this is the literal last straw.

Will Japan lose some culture and history? No, not really. The country has let millions of non-Japanese through over the pre-Meiji era, and the culture it fears losing has been defined after such occurrences. As long as they can get enough money and public support behind the idea of what their culture is, it will never go away.

So we shall see a great acceleration in the formula that was “Japan Inc.” to all of us early otakus and academics... But now that the snow globe has been shaken up... hopefully Japan is ready for a restructuring of that level, which requires foreigners to rebuild many sections of Japan, but this time thedy will stay and there is nothing that can be done.

I wasn't there: An invisible dot, on an invisible dot thinks about the Sendai Earthquake.

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Recent events in Japan can remind us that anime, manga, and everything else that goes with it still operate within the realm of the business that is human frivolity. Entertainment and escapism are "shadows and dust," when compared to the natural forces and events in this world that we humans have only recently been able to erect but a paper thin barrier between. An inescapable event like an earthquake, or a man-made disaster such as war (as equally destructive but tainted in the bitter tasting bile of the knowledge of wars being both avoidable and deliberate), serves to show us that what we have, our fandom, is in fact nothing more than a brief disruption in the natural order of things.

The notion of an individual in a completely separate socio-culture state/entity, earning relatively little money, accessing the digitized animation created by a media entertainment market literally half a planet away with a translation rubric in place at will, and can engage that activity on such a regular basis that it has become an indispensable cornerstone in the social fandom activities that youth engages is as astounding in innovation as it is newness. How many reasons can human history give us, for such a thing not to work? How many obstacles of nature, humanity, technology, and knowledge must there be, vanquished or still awaiting us, that tell us by all possible notions that this exercise should not be possible? Yet an otaku kid in Tulsa watching an episode of Panty & Stocking online at 1am, isn't an an exercise in achievement, rather it's nothing more than the activities of another potential convention attendee for A-Kon. Potentially brought to an end by a "geology."

I have a way of missing such events. I was in Osaka on 9/11, when papers from the fallen towers became lodged in-between the bars on my bedroom window. I was equally as far from my Tokyo apartment on the 12th floor of the New Hiem Sakamachi apartment building for this recent event. I am unfortunate to be so lucky. Much as the sheltered child will never get injured or sick, yet hardship is developed from looking through these protective barriers of distance and seeing others, who are active in the outside world during extraordinary events, so too have I been both spared and denied. Shared experience creates intangible knowledge from experience for a single person, but is also shared between those who experience it together, becoming an understanding of congruence of thought shared by everyone in that "place." Becoming a singularity of time and events firmly and tacitly knowable by everyone who shared that "place" and equally unknowable by those who did not.

This singular event and the millions of tangential experiences and "places" it will create will have reverberations felt in all things, including that stylized media entertainment we follow and which serves as a platform of cultural symbio-development. What that impact cause to will manifest has yet to be seen, but it will be a fundamental as it will be varied. It will come from that "place," different, yet understood without words by those who have been there. This potential gulf created by that manifestation is no barrier, but simply the product of articulating that tacit intangibility of known experience, into an explicit medium of words, speech, art, animation, or performance. As our pure thoughts remain prisoners of our mind's interior, it falls to us to make explicit mediums of communication with which we hope to facilitate the same thoughts in the inaccessible interior minds of others. Such has been the driving force behind much of human creativity, and those of us who were not there to share that "place," will certainly find value in the artistic expressions of those who were.

I wasn't there. I was watching Oedo Rocket off of the internet in Upstate New York at 1am. An invisible dot, on an invisible dot.

Shinjuku, Tokyo 2010.


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地震, 地震, everwhere a 地震

OK, so 3 earthquakes in 6 days and all of a sudden these signs are everywhere around Shinjuku.



Yeah, that's just what I want to see the morning after my alarm clock was replaced with my apartment doing an impersonation of a martini shaker at 5am. Something that reminds me about the current anime based on the end of the world magnitude earthquake that the news keeps telling me we're overdue for.





Also, the Tokyo Toy Show video is not as awesome as to be acceptable to our standards.... (that may mean what you think it means), so it's coming from another source. Stand by.