Far East Cynic

Opening day. The only day of the year the Pirates will be in first place.

This year is especially interesting-since the Pirates open against the Cubs at Wrigley field. Wish I had known that earlier-I would have flown up for it. The Cubs are the other team I root for all year. Just like the Pirates-they rip your heart out every year.

Its all down hill from here.

 One of the ideas that has come to the forefront in our current political debate-is a very flawed one. That it has been allowed to take root in our civil discourse is indeed a tragic development for the nation as a whole and it is probably the one thing that is holding America up from advancing into the 21^stcentury.  That idea is the idea of American exceptionalism-that hoary and totally ridiculous idea foisted upon our populace by our politicians- that the United States of America is somehow qualitatively different from other nations. I’ve stated it before and I will continue to state it-I firmly reject that idea and so should any sane inhabitant of the United States.

Regrettably, it would appear that the current President of the United States has not rejected that idea. And that’s a bad thing in the long run-because it would appear that he is taking the country down the same rat hole that his predecessor did. For the record-the United States is not uniquely called to solve the world’s problems. Even if it was capable of doing so ( which it is not-and especially now is not resourced to do), the obligation to intervene in the hope of creating a better world is simply not there.

 It is unfortunate that acceptance or rejection of the idea of American exceptionalism has become a litmus test of one’s patriotism and sense of civic responsibility. In Tea Bagger parlance-if you don’t accept the theory you are some kind of lost soul who is not fit to be involved in the affairs of the nation. Like most Tea Party viewpoints-this idea is based on a flawed conclusion drawn from the available historical data. As with other things they espouse,  they are 100% wrong.

Here’s why. The key principle of American exceptionalism derives from the flawed premise that America’s ideals are unique to the country of America and are not resident in any other country on earth.  That is clearly nonsense. America is a product of its own history and the European history that preceded it.  One begat the other. Seeing American ideals and principles as unique to America is to erase the British building blocks of that tradition, as well as the French thoughts of the Enlightenment that are at the core of the thoughts and ideals of the founding fathers. Furthermore-embracing this idea that America is somehow gifted and unique is to ignore some incredibly ugly segments of our own history.  That’s a bad thing to do-especially in our current context-where so many bad ideas are passed around as if they are factually based.

Furthermore, it is an arrogant proposition to state, as some of the more devout devotees do, that God has somehow “favored the United States” over other nations. If that’s true-what is says about God is not really good.  It certainly does not square well with idea of an all loving God who loves all the people of the world on a basis of compassion for them as His children.

If America’s ideals are universal, they cannot be reduced to the ownership of one country. And our country’s actual history – as opposed to Tea Party mythology – is as flawed as many others.   It ignores the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived here, as well as ignoring our almost 100 year embrace of a concept such as slavery which was indefensible then-and certainly more so now. It also ignores the unique influence of some incredibly lucky events that kept the nation on a path of unity-when clearly the global trend was in the opposite direction. The simple truth is that America was very lucky-and its success had many fathers, but the path of the success was uneven at best.  Our wealth did and does not now exempt us from making hideous national mistakes. The invasion of Iraq was one such mistake, as is our current misguided intervention into what is essentially an internal matter in Libya.

This is not to say the United States of America does not have a lot of advantages going for it. Our Constitution-when properly interpreted-is an amazing and very durable document. The fact that the nation has not followed the “independence” path of fragmentation that we saw in Africa during the 1960’s and Central Asia in the 1990’s is another. More continents should be like  America with larger single nations than the opposite model.  But we owe that to some unique circumstances-not the least of which is being un-bombed and uninvaded for over a century and a half. Americans would do well to remember that and not think other nations will who have been bombed and invaded will behave the same way.

In the period following World War II, this misguided belief in the oneness of the American experience may actually have served a useful purpose. Certainly it kept the US from becoming isolationist and it allowed us to help a generation of Europeans, Japanese, and others to get back on their feet economically and politically. But now-in the multi-polar world we willed into being by our lack of recognition that not all anti-colonialism was in our best interest-the idea of American exceptionalism is more of a stumbling block to progress . Glen Greenwald sums it up:

The fact remains that declaring yourself special, superior and/or exceptional — and believing that to be true, and, especially, acting on that belief — has serious consequences. it can (and usually does) mean that the same standards of judgment aren’t applied to your acts as are applied to everyone else’s (when you do x, it’s justified, but when they do, it isn’t). It means that you’re entitled (or obligated) to do things that nobody else is entitled or obligated to do (does anyone doubt that the self-perceived superiority and self-arrogated entitlements of Wall Street tycoons is what lead them to believe they can act without constraints?). it means that no matter how many bad things you do in the world, it doesn’t ever reflect on who you are, because you’re inherently exceptional and thus driven by good motives. And it probably means — at least as it expresses itself in the American form — that you’ll find yourself in a posture of endless war, because your “unique power, responsibilities, and moral obligations” will always find causes and justifications for new conflicts.

As a business proposition, not to mention a moral proposition, continuous war is a loser. Your competitors are under no such special obligation, and are able to sit out the conflicts-while all the while accumulating wealth and prosperity for their own ends. Thanks to the Faustian bargain our politicians have made the likes of evil men like Grover Norquist, we can’t even raise our own revenue for such endeavors because it has become an accepted (and equally flawed) principle that you can never, ever, raise taxes-no matter how many wars you are in at one time, or how many of your own population are unemployed. So the “unexceptional “ nations get the privilege of loaning you money.

They also get a free ride off your distraction and potential failure.

What Sarah Palin and the rest of the ilk like her have not grasped is that exhortations of American greatness aside-the facts are unchangeable and in our case, don’t tell a good story. The 21’st century is about competition: competition for resources, markets, and capital.  Our competitors have learned well enough how to “play the game”-saying the right things to avoid outright provocation, while still doing the actions that undermine the local position of the US within and around their countries.  Because the American Empire is “empire light”-empire with all of the responsibilities and bloodshed, but none of the perks ( conquering and exploiting land and the local natives)-the competitors know they only have to match the capability within their neighborhood.

President Obama had a chance to reverse all this nonsense.  That’s what he was elected to do-end the insanity of the wars started by George Bush. Instead Obama reverted to embracing the forces he was elected to resist and restrain. Politically-thanks to the warped political environment created by an electorate that is stupid enough to elect someone like Allen West-it was the pragmatic choice for him to take. But it does  not make it any less wrong-or in the long run any less self destructive for the nation.

As a result we are still at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. And because these Arabs and other brands of the lower end of the human food chain-they will screw up any advantage given to them by our intervention. And as I have pointed out previously-in the case of Libya we don’t even know who these so called rebels really represent. Algeria, you will recall, became independent-only to spend 40 years worse off than under French rule.

Obama could have lead a retrenchment from all that-and focused effort on improving the lot of our own people. Instead we cave to the noisiness of a group of spoiled children-doing the bidding of a wealthy few in our own country-while giving in to the neocon wet dreams of the  utopian notion of the US as the rescuer of all those subjected to tyranny.

Trust me-we have seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.

I’m not sure what it will take for us to learn our lessons. Perhaps it will come when the rebellion in Libya or elsewhere fails-and we face an even murkier choice-or it will come when we finally wake up and realize that we are arguing over cutting minuscule amounts of federal spending-while wasting billions on worthless Arabs who are unworthy of the privilege.

What’s perhaps the most astonishing to me, is that some of the same people who are so outwardly supportive of this incredible generosity of effort towards a foreign people who will eventually turn on us-have not the slightest bit of compassion for their own fellow citizens. Following the tea party script-they are all too willing to attribute any shortfalls among those folks to their own failings-while giving an Arab rabble a free pass.

If that does not seem abhorrent to you-then you lost sight of the ball early in the game.

I’m not sure whether we will realize it in time before our competitors force that realization on us. Either way its not exceptional-its a stupid drama that has been replayed many times.

As a boy in my early teens-I had the misfortune of reading every Allen Drury book ever written ( At least through the early 70′s). And that’s a long list. As I grew older, and came under the influence of some really dedicated teachers and professors-I realized how really bad these novels were. ( You know-those teachers that are now the enemy of the Galtian paradise our McKinleyesque overlords want to set up for us).

With the exception of Advise and Consent, Drury spiraled downward into a teabagger’s wet dream-with dreams of conspiracies between the media, liberal politicians, and the United Nations. Most of his characters were very shallow-more stereotypes really, and it was relatively evident that he didn’t like black people very much. ( Witness his treatment of some of his black characters in The Throne of Saturn and Preserve and Protect). His prose was long-and turgid.  And his endings were entirely predictable. In those days it was the Russians who were behind the conspiracy. Nowadays, one has to assume it is Islam, I guess.

However I always consoled myself with the fact that it was just a work of fiction. The real world did not play out that way.

Until now:

Last week, the New York Times reported that, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, General Electric, the largest corporation in the United States, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010 and actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion dollars. The article noted that GE’s tax avoidance team is comprised of “former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.”

After not paying any taxes and making huge profits,  General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions.

This year, 14 unions representing more than 15,000 workers will negotiate a new master contract with General Electric. Among the major concessions GE has signaled that it will ask of union workers is the elimination of a defined contribution benefit pension for new employees, a move the company has already implemented for its non-union salaried employees. Likewise, GE is signaling to the union that it will ask for the elimination of current health insurance plans in favor of lower quality health saving accounts, a move the company has already implemented for non-union salaried employees as well. (Skippy comment-health savings accounts suck-my company has been trying to sell them as the greatest thing since sliced bread.)

In addition, General Electric may ask some workers for a wage freeze. Since the recession began in 2007, GE threatened to close plants in Schenectady, NY and Louisville, KY unless workers took wage concessions and adopted two-tier wage structure.

 

$14 billion in profits, $3 billion in tax credits, and instead of celebrating, they are instead trying to screw their workers. They can’t even use the poverty excuse-because GE had a great year in 2010. They just can’t share any of it with the people who made them successful.

I’m sure its all Frankly Unctuous’ fault. And Orrin Knox would approve.

All while we wage war against Felix Labaya in Libya.

Come Nineveh Come Tyre indeed.

Unlike our so called Arab ” friends”-Japan has stood beside the United States when it was not expdient to do so.

Unlike our so called “allies” in the war on terror- Japan has stood with us, when it cost them a lot to do so.

Japan is the only place where US forces are stationed where the bulk of the infrastructure costs are paid for by the nation of Japan-at great cost to the Japanese government. Yet there is no Japanese “Tea Party” frothing at the mouth over what they are not getting.

Thinking Americans know that it is 66 years since the end of the World War and time to move on into the new century. And so-they stand with our real friends in the Pacific.  And unlike our supposed “friends” in the Middle East, they have advanced the place of all of their citizens.

Stand with Japan.

As I noted in my previous post-one family from a Naval Base in Japan seems to not know when to shut up.

10,000 DOLLARS! YGTBSM!

Let me give you a tip Mrs Cash-you had best keep a low profile when you return to Japan. This story is going viral among some parts of that particular base’s community and hell hath no fury like other spouses upon other spouses.

And someone is going to have to explain to me how being a DODDS employee qualifies one as a “missionary”.

About what’s going on in Japan. This post will consist primarily of the S.O.’s and other folks messages to me about what they are up to right now. Since most of my friends in Japan are associated with the Navy in Japan-it is of necessity more focused on Japan and Yokosuka.

The S.O.’s comments are in bold italics. Everyone else’s are simply in italics.

Lets begin:

Under the category of : it’s really going to suck to be these guys when they get back to Japan-this Tulsa news paper article has more than a few people pissed off. Besides the fact that it is full of incorrect-and to put it frankly-a pretty arrogant attitude, it creates a distorted picture of the real situation of the place where they were living.

This article really &^%$% me off! First, is full of outright lies, second, is unbelievable that someone could think that their situation is even worth whining about in the face of what the people of Japan are facing, as well as what our military forces, civilians and dependents that decided to stay are exposed to daily in their efforts to help rebuild this nation and to help those in real need.

I’d say so. The thing is, the bases in Japan are really closed communities-now that this is out there, don’t think that someone is not going to mention it. Furthermore-as the article states, the guy was a DODDS school teacher. They are not going to evacuate him mandatorily unless there is a full evacuation of students. He’s lucky he got to leave at all.

And if they were in fact “missionaries”-then perhaps the best way to witness would be to stay and pitch in with those acts of kindness that speak more loudly than any amount of proselytizing. Oh wait-that would wreck the storyline……..

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Meanwhile, back in among the working man’s Navy and Marines Corps-HMM-265 is moving the goods:

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Last night, I called mom, she was ok but still many supplies, food, gas, kerosene, etc. are short in stores, she said. Then I got a phone call from 1 of my Japanese friends in Yokosuka. She said, she had to make line to buy food from stores and purchase qty was limited, e.g. milk 1pack, water 2bottles, and can’t find batteries anywhere, still having blackout often. She thinks that taking a bath (not shower) is very extravagant as most evacuees in Tohoku can’t take a bath. Life over there is still FAR from normal! Just sigh…..
 

This is in Western Fukushima prefecture. The main roads were re-opened to non-emergency traffic a few days ago.

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“Before and After”, normally we see better picture on “After” part, improved or nicer but now we see worse picture on “After” part, it’s the picture after the tsumani attacked beautiful towns in Japan. I do hope to be able to see next “Before and After” picture with a beautifully reborn, rebuild towns! Ganbare Nippon!

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This is interesting:

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — After initially allowing voluntarily evacuees from Japan to fly only to the continental United States, the Pentagon will allow some family members to fly to any of the 50 states, as well as several Asian countries.

The Pentagon is preparing detailed guidance that will allow units in the Pacific to authorize evacuations to the additional locales, Defense Department spokesman Eileen Lainez said. Travel expenses will be covered and families will receive per diem pay based on their destination.

The changes could affect the relocation plans of many of the 10,000 family members who registered for the military-assisted, “voluntary departures” from U.S. bases in Japan following the March 11 earthquake and subsequent catastrophe at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.

As I have said often times before-there is probably a story here-and I’m not so sure its a good one. Probably best leave it at that-but folks who have been around the Navy in Japan long enough know which population group I am talking about. Paid home leave to the PI anyone?

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Needs no explanation:

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Looks like people in Japan are buying bottled water a lot!

I think so!

Danny Choo has some pretty good pictures up detailing the supply shortages in Japan.

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The first part of that excerpt is true—foreigners really have fled, and lots of Japanese companies are really pissed about it. I just heard a story of a person fired from a (rather domestic, small-minded) Japanese company for fleeing the country and missing 8 days of work. (I think the biggest problem in this sitaution wast the backward employer and the failure of communication by the fleeing foreign employee.)

This concerns an recent article in the Wall Street Journal-that coined the term “Flyjin” for foreigners leaving Japan. Only one problem-no self respecting Nihonjin is using it:

But has anyone heard the word “Furai-jin” in actual Japanese conversation? A search of the Japanese version of news.google brought in zero results for “?????” and no relevant searches for “????”. A google search for the later brought up lots of pages regarding people who are in love with fly fishing. A targeted google search brought up one thread on a 2ch Japanese chat threat—which is a translation of the Wall Street Journal article! In fact, I find myself in full agreement with a commenter on that 2ch thread:

?”flyjin”?fly + gaijin?
?????????????????…

Translation: “’Flyjin’… I bet the guy who wrote this article came up with that.”

So a challenge to Mariko Sanchanta, author of the above WSJ article: can you show us the word “furai-jin” was used before you put it in your article?

H/T to Mutant Frog for this one!

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Speaking of the S. O.-her priorities are in the right place:

When I made coffee for Skippy this morning, I wasn’t happy ‘case I couldn’t drink it due to blood exam. After came back home, first I drunk coffee w/my favorite mug, it made me SO happy. Then I thought about all evacuees & victims @ shelters in Japan. I know most of them lost everything, or so many things. I was just grateful for my cup of coffee.

That sums it up pretty well.

And once again the fates have conspired to keep me from being where I should be.

In Hong Kong! Drinking beer and watching the Sevens!

Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion: a burning devil take them!

Twas always thus, E @ L reminds us-and a damned good thing too.

 

None other than Anglican bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber, admitted that he had difficulty keeping his eyes off the local Bengali women he saw bathing in the river at dawn, confessing that “the deep bronze tint was more naturally agreeable to the human eyes than the fair skins of Europe.” With slightly different reasoning, first Viscount Garnet Wolseley, field marshal in the British army, admitted that he consorted with an “Eastern princess” who fulfilled “all the purposes of a wife without any of the bother” and that he had no intention of marriage with “some bitch” in Europe, unless she were an heiress.

 

 

Sound reasoning that.

We’ve had enough about wars this week-time for some lechery:

The French get going. Just another thing to surrender to I guess:

Selon le décompte du Quai d’Orsay, sur les 9000 Français enregistrés dans les consulats, il n’en restait plus que la moitié dans le pays à la fin de la semaine dernière, dont 2500 à Tokyo et 2000 dans le sud de l’Archipel.

Of the 9,000 French citizens registered with their consulates, about 2,500 remain in Tokyo, while 2,000 remain in other parts of Japan. That’s about 4,500 – roughly 50%.

If they don’t come back, can I have their cushy expat job and apartment? I’m ready to head to Tokyo NOW.

I don’t feel well tonight-for a wide variety of reasons. So hunkered down on the couch and watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid. I was a whopping 14 years old when I saw that movie the first time in the theater.

And that movie and one of its opening scenes is probably a good analogy for our mistaken adventure in Libya:

“Think you used enough dynamite there, Obama?”

People who lecture in favor of intervention in Libya have lost all rights to complain about, in no random order:  the deficit, wasteful government spending, taxes that are too high, or the general no good that a neo colonial foreign policy accomplishes.

Lets cut to the chase-when we discard ideas about national soverignty and think we have a right intervene in the internal affairs of another soverign nation that is not threatening us in any way-then we are setting ourselves up for a much bigger disaster down the pike.

And as painful as it may be to admit, Khadaffi attacking his own people is an internal Libyan matter. Period end of statement. Just because the rebels did not win in a walk in the early innings-was no reason to impose the infield no- fly rule in order to prevent the other side from tying up the score.

It’s dumb-and mark my words-it is going to end up biting the US in the ass.

1) Khadaffi is not even a tenth rate threat to the United States.Maybe 20+ years ago when I was flying at or above the so-called line of death, participating in Operation “Taunt the MiGs to come out so we can shoot them down and get some air medals“-but he’s been pretty much in the box for the better part of ten years.

A guy writing for Fallows at the Atlantic sums it up well:

Up to 17 February 2011, we were perfectly happy with Muhammar Qaddafi. We bought his oil and gas, we did very good business with him, we sold him our goods. Most importantly, he had been tamed. The peccadilloes of his youth, such as downing passenger planes in the skies of Scotland, had been forgiven. What was important was that he had stopped ranting against the US and Israel and given up on providing help to their overenthusiastic foes. Everybody knew that he was a ruthless and violent dictator, but it was far more convenient to picture him as an eccentric Bedouin who loved sunglasses, tents, amazons and colorful clothes.

But after 17 February 2011, things changed radically. All of a sudden, it appeared that he could rapidly be swept away by huge Libyan crowds that had materialized out of nowhere. This was worrying, because it was not easy to imagine who exactly would end up taking over the country, its oil and gas, the revenues from its oil and gas, and more importantly, the weight that could be pulled with the revenues from its oil and gas. But the wave of enthusiasm that the media had spread about the New Arab Awakening was simply overpowering.

 

This is where naive idiots like Nicholas Kristof deserve a heaping round of scorn. A whole new generation of pilots and navigators will spend hours boring holes in the sky, burning dead dinosaurs, to accomplish very little. Thanks asshole-thanks a lot. ( Or getting shot down or having to bailout of Libya).

2) Airpower does not save civilian lives in the sense it is being presented in the papers.  There are only three things airpower does: 1)Drop bombs for the purpose of killing people and destroying buildings and things. 2) Move items and people from point a to point b (this includes moving JP-8 to a point in the sky so a Hornet can then suck on a hose). 3) Perform surveillance on some one you want to watch ( Visually or electronically).

Notice-”impressing dictators who want to stay in power” is not any where on that list. This is generally why No Fly zones don’t really work except in a limited sense in that given sufficient volumes of all three of the types of sorties listed above, you can keep the other side from flying aircraft. You can’t stop them from attacking people on the ground-unless you pick a side and then perform mission 1) on the other side. We can’t make up our minds if this is what we are doing or not.

3.  Humanitarian imperatives make a poor basis for foreign policy. Otherwise there  would have been a no fly zone over Myanmar long ago. Or Sri Lanka. Or Congo. Or……..   well there are a lot of names to fill in the list.

BTW-how much comfort is a no fly zone in Libya providing to the people of Bahrain right now? Or Yemen? Or even Egypt.

4. Even if Khadaffi goes, do we really know what we are getting in his place? I don’t think so.

And then there is the opportunity cost to consider. How much damage does this do to an already overstretched military, and how many Chinese, Russian, or Indian aircraft are participating? For that matter how many Arabs are playing? ZERO.  These folks however will reap the benefit of our spending money that we supposedly don’t have. They will also reap the benefit of the higher oil prices its going to cause. (For good and ill as they pay more for gas, but launder more of the money the rest of the world uses to pay for it).

The administration has not made a sufficient case that Libya’s situation is so unique that it required a massive Western intervention. Khadaffi may have been attacking his own people-but he was not attacking anyone else. He won’t be the first or the last Arab leader to do that. Certainly there are a lot more tragedies going on in the world that we simply do nothing about. So appeals to the moral high ground tend to have no affect on me.

This is wrong for the same reason that Iraq was wrong. The United States of America ended up pressing an military intervention into a sovereign country that had not attacked it. Or even participated with others in an attack on it.

Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the GOP would never have stood for this. He would have had the CIA funnel arms to the rebels-and maybe even could have gotten into a scandal of where the secret money came from. But he certainly would have recognized, as he did in Lebanon, that prolonged involvement in an Arab country never leads anywhere good.

This intervention is bad foreign policy and its a bad precedent to set. We, the West, will really come to regret this.

Even the Yakuza is doing their fair share:

There is also a lesson here for certain govenors in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin to name a few:

Japan has an active and visible police force of nearly 300,000 officers across the country. Cops walk their beats and chat up local residents and shopkeepers. Police are posted at ubiquitous kobans, police boxes manned by one or two officers, and in cities there’s almost always a koban within walking distance of another koban. A survey in 1992 found that 95 percent of residents knew where the nearest koban was, and 14 percent knew the name of an officer who worked there. Cops are paid well—the force attracts many college graduates—and can live in cheap government housing. (Emphasis mine-SS) They also care a lot about public relations: The Tokyo Metropolitan Police even has a mascot, Pipo-kun, whose name means “people + police.” They’re good at their jobs, too: The clearance rate for murder in 2010 was an unbelievable 98.2 percent, according to West—so unbelievable that some attribute it to underreporting.

And not giving it where is it is not due.

This video is a great indictment of the foreign media coverage-by all of the US major cable news networks.

His points about:

1) The geography are quite pertinent.

2) Life in Tokyo is moving to normal

3) The media has lost its mind in reporting this disaster-and is putting uneccessary pressure on families to leave Japan.

I think he is right about the news reporting-and is in great contrast to the Japanese and even the Channel News Asia reporting on the subject.

And why you should practice it.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/secret-libya-psyops/

You can see more information and photos at the following links:

• Operation Tomodachi Photostream on Flickr
• The latest on Navy support to Japan (Stars and Stripes)
• U.S. troops supporting, rather than executing relief missions (Stars and Stripes)
• U.S. Troops Continue Relief Efforts in Japan (Department of Defense)
• U.S. Ambassador John V. Roos’ Twitter Account – Provides regular updates on Operation Tomodachi

Over at Itai News, they’ve posted some excerpts from a 2channel thread in which Japanese netizens comment on how “cool” the American military looks in TV reports about Operation Tomodachi. (2channel is a Japanese Social network).

And Japan Probe has a good rundown here. Tomodachi means friend in Japanese.

Some comments praising the US:

This is a poster telling people not to hoard things.

Here is one too:

Evidently, according to Watashi to Tokyo, the Twitter #tag “edano_nero” is hot in Japan now. Edano is Cabinet Secretary, Since the earthquake, he appeared on TV everyday and told us what is going on in the calm tone voice and he tired not to avoid question from the press. Now people tweet to encounrage him with the tag“#edano_nero”to the end of their tweets. It maens“Edano— go to sleep” in Japanese. Because we know he has not slept enough after that. And some Twitter users do not feel the affection for Prime Minister Kan. They have added the hashtag “kan_okiro” — “Kan – Wake Up” — to the end of their messages.

And finally a poster telling people that they are helping Tohoku people if they buy only what they need:

And it would appear the search for blame has begun:

TEPCO executives quietly under investigation for charges of professional negligence resulting in death or injury.

The Japanese police are quietly beginning an investigation into TEPCO, the managing entity of the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor for charges of professional negligence resulting in death or injury. It is not “official” and still in the early stages…