Quand des régimes autoritaires et des "cartels" bâillonnent la presse ✍

Bilingual message EN & FR

Here is an extract of our FCCJ Board's message which I co-signed yesterday. I want to believe that Thai authorities will come to reasonable solution:

"The Board of Directors of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan [FCCJ] is appalled to learn that the entire board of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand (FCCT) has been accused of committing lese majeste, a crime that carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years. The FCCJ is also gravely concerned that in the recent past the Thai authorities have used the country's lese majeste laws to restrict freedom of expression and have otherwise abused it for its own political ends. The Board of the FCCJ is dismayed by reports that the 13-member Board of the FCCT will be investigated by police after a complaint was filed by a freelance translator." The entire communique http://www.fccj.or.jp/node/4708

Mais les obstacles au travail de journaliste ce n'est pas seulement une question de régime autoritaire, c'est aussi une affaire de cartel qui s'en donne a coeur joie! A l'occasion des reprises estivales des grands sujets de l'année, on peut relire ce papier: (17 Novembre 2008 sur Asian Gazette)

"Les "cartels" de la presse d'agence à l'heure d'Internet."

Des géants de l'édition et des médias broient des journalistes.

http://tinyurl.com/lekpwe

"Yonaguni": Japanese troops pondering over East China Sea

According to the Tokyo Shimbun, a well informed newspaper, Japan's defense ministry is studying deploying troops on an island in the East China Sea near a group of islets that is claimed by Tokyo, Beijing and Taipei: "it could be included in the planned year-end revision of the basic defense program".

Objective: to send an army unit to Yonaguni island. Yonaguni is located 120 kilometers east of Taiwan and 170 kilometers south of uninhabited islands known as the Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese.

The MOD said the location of military deployments along a chain of islands between the southern tip of Japan's Kyushu island and Taiwan is "an important factor in the nation's defense deployment."

For the Tokyo Shimbun this strategy is part of Japan's shift of its defense focus from its northern borders during the Cold War era to the country's southwestern borders facing China.

✍ Yonaguni is Japan's southern island

EN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIu2rA0yd9s

JP:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPCq3yo4SLc with an underwater ruins formation some say thousands of years old which attract a lot of divers; it looks like ancient building or pyramid with undersea terraces less than 40 meters deep. A local diver first noticed the Yonaguni formations in 1986. Spectacular pictures and story here http://tinyurl.com/3ckoy2

FCCJ Board Election 2009: Elected!

I am elected Member of the Board. I sincerely thank all those whose support and trust me with their favorable votes.

FCCJ Board Election 2009, why I am a candidate !

Vote for LEGENDRE as DIRECTOR

私に投票してください！

Trust, ethics and professionalism

信頼、倫理、そしてプロフェッショナリズム

This is the poster of my campaign for the election of the Board of the Tokyo Yurakucho based FCCJ, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan with 2000 members including 400 active journalists correspondents. "Run for the Board, you are a modernizer" my supporters say, so this is really an issue in today's Japan I'm sure. The following is my Campaign statement, any question, please call me at the press club:

"Genuinely, I am honored to have been nominated as a candidate for the FCCJ’s Board of Directors by Mr. Hirobuchi Masuhiko, former bureau chief of TV Asahi in London and New York, and Mr. Monzurul Huq, correspondent of the Daily Prothom Alo, a leading Bangladesh newspaper. Based in Japan, I cover Asia, where I work as a TV and radio correspondent and columnist for RTL.

The last couple of years I have witnessed things I never imagined at the FCCJ: Board members breaking time-honored rules, concealing facts and disregarding member and staff rights. It is no surprise that our employees were driven to the brink of striking these past few weeks.

Of course our industry is also facing difficult challenges. Information is public property, therefore the right to be informed should not exclude anyone or any group nor any aspect of economic, social, cultural or political life.

Thus, my first commitment if elected is to help the new Board to restore dignity, friendship and respect for diversity. Without these, we cannot have good governance, nor can we succeed in our basic mission, which is to “provide services to facilitate the collection and distribution of news without discrimination,” as stated in the Club’s Articles of Association.

My second initiative is to assist the President in initiating a long-term plan to retain our shadan hojin status, which is now under review. If we deviate too far from our "press" mission, we shall lose our standing.

A third objective is to reopen the Club’s committee system, in particular the Professional Activities Committee which once was open to all Regular members who wished to volunteer.

I would like to acknowledge the outstanding work of FCCJ members spanning many decades. But I understand that decisions of recent Boards and the current management undermined the confidence and trust both of members and staff.

I ask for your vote for Director at Large and I will develop policies that guarantee creativity, ethics, professionalism, trust.

Thank you very much."

Basho's Haiku, powerful element of truth

"First day of spring

I keep thinking about

the end of autumn."

"Now the swinging bridge

Is quieted with creepers

Like our tendrilled life"

Tsutsuji hill, on a sunny day of Japanese spring.

(Pic. from garden tours gallery keno2)

Matsuo Basho (1644 - 1694)

Basho (bah-shoh), pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa (1644-94), Japanese poet, considered the finest writer of Japanese haiku during the formative years of the genre. Born into a samurai family prominent among nobility, Basho rejected that world and became a wanderer, studying Zen, history, and classical Chinese poetry, living in apparently blissful poverty under a modest patronage and from donations by his many students. From 1667 he lived in Edo (now Tokyo), where he began to compose haiku.

The structure of his haiku reflects the simplicity of his meditative life. When he felt the need for solitude, he withdrew to his basho-an, a hut made of plantain leaves (basho)- hence his pseudonym. Basho infused a mystical quality into much of his verse and attempted to express universal themes through simple natural images, from the harvest moon to the fleas in his cottage. Basho brought to haiku "the Way of Elegance" (fuga-no-michi), deepened its Zen influence, and approached poetry itself as a way of life (kado, the way of poetry) in the belief that poetry could be a source of enlightenment. "Achieve enlightenment, then return to this world of ordinary humanity," he advised. And, "Do not follow in the footsteps of the old masters, but seek what they sought." His "way of elegance" did not include the mere trappings associated with elegance; he sought the authentic vision of "the ancients." His attention to the natural world transformed this verse form from a frivolous social pastime into a major genre of Japanese poetry.

In the last ten years of his life Basho made several journeys, drawing from them more images to inspire his contemplative poetry. He also collaborated with local poets on the linked-verse forms known as renga. In addition to being the supreme artist of haiku and renga, Basho wrote haibun, brief prose-and-poetry travelogues such as Oku-no-hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Far North; 1689), that are absolutely nonpareil in the literature of the world.

(Quotes of poetryconnection net)

Child organ transplants ordeal

The new law could save hundreds of lives.

The Japanese Parliament passed a bill Thursday recognizing brain death as legal death, scrapping the age limit for organ transplants, paving the way for patients aged under 15 to receive life-saving transplants here for the first time.

The law has so far banned organ transplants by children, a situation which activists say has claimed thousands of lives and forced many families to send children in need of transplants on costly overseas trips for surgery.

Transplants have been rare even for adults because tough rules have required donors to give prior written consent to having their organs harvested when they are brain dead, while their families must also agree.

"I'm glad to see the bill being approved by the house but I still have to ask why it took so many years," Michikata Okubo. She leads a network of organ transplant recipients. "Thousands of people are dying every year."

In the move against so-called transplant tourism, which seeks to limit abuses, Australia, Britain and Germany have already announced they refused Japanese patients seeking organ transplants.

Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Taro Nakayama, the chief proponent of Plan A, said after the vote that the endorsement of the bill by the Lower House gives hope to families and children in need of transplants.

It now has to be adopted by the Upper House.

And this is not yet sure because of current political blockade practiced by DPJ Hatoyama Ozawa political duo, read more here http://tinyurl.com/lvzj98

(quotes of newswire, japan times, wane newsletter)

Japan banks: "zombie" banks? Not any more

Japan endured an economic and financial malaise in the 1990s known as the "lost decade" after a real estate bubble, built on excessive lending, burst. Insolvent lenders propped up by government bailouts became known as "zombie" banks, and cast a long shadow over the world's second-largest economy.

The banking system of the 1990s was burdened with 90 trillion yen ($930 billion) to 100 trillion yen ($1 trillion) of bad loans, Financial Services Agency Commissioner Takafumi Sato said Wednesday at my press club, the Foreign Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.

Banks have repaid 8.45 trillion yen of the 9.6 trillion yen of public money injected into the financial system during the troubled decade. "That was good business in retrospect," Sato said. What Japan underwent offers lessons for the global financial crisis unfolding now, including the need for public money to prop up weakened banks.

«We have argued that Japan's experience in the 1990s provides useful suggestions as to how our fellow regulators should respond to the ongoing difficulties»

Lessons to follow?

Still, it's difficult to cash a foreign check in Japan or for a profitable foreign small and medium company to get a loan from a Japanese bank. They call it economic nationalism. Click here http://tinyurl.com/dbhurz

Kim Jong-un, profile of a dictator☢?

Mr. Kim Jong-un does not look like a dictator to come, especially after being educated in Bern (Switzerland). Or is it that Swiss banks have such a bad influence? Well... Here is what some of the reporters in Japan and Korea have to say about Kim Jong-il's offspring.

Kim Jong-un is pictured* in this June 1999 photo taken when he was a seventh grader at a Bern secondary school. (Photo taken from a group photo with his classmates) The Mainichi shimbun writes today http://tinyurl.com/ldjaor

Who exactly is Kim Jong-un, and why was he chosen to succeed Kim Jong-il? Kim Jong-il’s health problems seems to be highlighted, so questions and speculations began to arise about his successor. Kim Jong-il selected his third son, Kim Jong-un, to be his eventual heir

Here is what Ohmynews has to say:

"Believed to be around 25 years old, Jong-un was educated in Switzerland during his youth. Certain sources, including Kenji Fujimoto (Kim Jong-il’s former chef), claim that Kim Jong-un is “exactly like his father”. Fujimoto is also quoted as explaining that “If power is to be handed over then Jong-un is the best for it”. Fujimoto went on to claim that Jong-un has "superb physical gifts", drinks heavily and "never admits defeat”. Click here to access the report http://tinyurl.com/nqxonz

“When Prince Jong-un shook hands with me, he fixed me with a vicious look,” Kim Jong-il’s former Japanese sushi chef wrote in a 2003 memoir describing his first encounter with the boy, then 7, dressed in a military uniform and known as a “prince” among his father’s aides. “I still cannot forget the look in his eyes. It seemed to say: "This is a despicable Japanese." The chef, who goes by the pen name Kenji Fujimoto, said in an interview that as a teenager, Kim Jong-un was already his father’s favorite and “looked just like him.” The New York Times is quoted a saying http://tinyurl.com/l6jkwg

How can a 7 years old boy be described as having a vicious look? (ndag) Then all the tough teens I've seen in the 80's in Tiananmen, dressed like little soldiers of Mao Zedong all opted for the massacre in 89?

Now, now: Will little Kim make it with the in-laws... and with the Chinese leadership who supports North Korea's Terminator x game and plays it versus what is regarded as the rest of the humanity in the Western hemisphere?

I'll keep you posted.

*Asian Gazette does not formally identify this picture as being the kid in question. We just quote some of the Asia based reporters who say so.

Sexy Samurai ❁

　戦国時代の史跡が若い女性たちでにぎわい、武将をテーマにしたグッズも女子大生らに人気だ。背景にあるのは、歴史好きの女性「レキジョ」（歴女）の増加。歴史を扱う本の売れ行きも好調で、武将を取り上げた文庫本を復刊する動きも出ている。なぜ、いまレキジョなのか。【田村彰子、遠藤拓】　

When culture, history and consumption fits Zipango marketing... "Japanese women are attracted to the masculinity of the Samurai and warlords, compared to the more passive modern men that they know."

Back to the future?

"... On weekends, Jidai Shobo, a bookstore specializing in historical books in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward, is packed with groups of young women. Most of the shop's customers were men when it first opened in February 2006, but by last year, half were women, of which around 90 percent are in their 20s and 30s.

✿❁❃

Stationery and mobile phone accessories with family crests of feudal lords line the shelves, with figurines of Sanada Yukimura, the most popular of the warlords, and others also for sale. "I like Kato Kiyomasa," says customer Izumi Sekine, 34, of a warlord who served the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. "There's an almost picture-perfect masculinity about him."

"Monthly magazine "Rekishi kaido" ("History way") had a circulation of less than 70,000 copies five years ago; now it sees sales of 120,000 copies. "The proportion of female readers has gone up from 15 percent of total readers to 40 percent," says editor-in-chief Kiyotaka Tatsumoto. The magazine's publisher, PHP Institute, revived publication of the biographies of warlords Date Masamune (1567-1636) and Uesugi Kenshin (1530-1578) in late March this year, and plans to revive publication of the biographies of Hosokawa Tadaoki (1563-1646) and Gamo Ujisato (1556-1595) due to popular demand."

Ronin?

"Interest in the civil wars of the 15th and 16th centuries is always high in Japan and a latest craze is capitalizing on this trend. Rogin, a Tokyo apparel company has 10 kinds of Samurai underwear including those that resemble the designs worn by leaders Oda Nobunaga and Takeda Shingen."

Excuse me...?

"... unorthodox products have seen a boost in sales as well. There is a constant shortage in stock of Sido brand underwear or men's "armor" underwear, which cost a considerable 9,240 a pair. According to Tokyo-based manufacturer Rogin, about 80 percent of buyers are women."

Also the TV.

"The Samurai tights are hot at a time when many women are fascinated with samurai-related TV programs. The game ‘‘Sengoku Basara’’ features fictitious good-looking samurai warriors which can't hurt."

✍ This is the Kitty chan world after all. The mirror is distorted. Japanese young women much prefer the vision of young handsome TV drama actors instead of studying their real historical figure. Even in "JapanLand Manga Inc" world I have not yet encountered one woman who asked to the French man to behave or get dressed like Louis XIV, the Count de Chantilly or the Chevalier d'Éon downtown. What they mostly desire is to have diner in a posh French restaurant 3 *** Michelin awarded. They also like to watch Takarazuka theatre shows, interpreted exclusively by severe female actresses, playing such drama as the "Rose of Versailles" or stories of the same vintage for a public of martial middle-aged women. Therefore, this new media fantasia seems well constructed by marketing agencies to boost sales, whatever irrelevant illustrious or farcical strategies it might be...

To read all about it, here is the Mainichi Shimbun story (English version) http://preview.tinyurl.com/ldr2lu

Nightmare for 2 journalists jailed 12 years for doing their job ✍

Laura Ling and Euna Lee

After Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, who was recently detained for three months in Iran, it is now Laura Ling and Euna Lee who are jailed, this time in North Korea, convicted of a grave crime against the nation, for illegally crossing into North Korea, and sentenced to 12 years in labor prison. These two American (Chinese and Korean origin) television journalists Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, were arrested March 17 along the China-North Korean border after top officials in Pyongyang said they had encroached on North Korean soil while reporting a story on human trafficking by Kim Jong Il's regime.

After their arrest, Ling and Lee were initially accused of "hostile activities". The two journalists, who work for the California-based web television station Current TV, had approached the border from inside China in order to cover the trafficking of North Korean women across the border, a dangerous border as one can testify with heavily armed armed DPRK soldiers, "including Dragunov Russian rifles equipped snipers", according to reporters from Tokyo.

The sentence to 12 years of hard labor increased mounting tensions between the foreign community and the reclusive Asian state. Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced by the top Central Court in Pyongyang as U.S. officials demanded the release of the two women.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency reported that the court "sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor" but gave no further details and because the pair were tried by the nation's highest court, we are told that there can be no appeal. Ling's sister, Lisa Ling, said: "I will say with absolute certainty that, when they left US soil, they never intended to cross the border into North Korea. If at any point they did, we are truly sorry and we know the girls are too."

Their guide is being held by the Chinese authorities.

Reporters Without Borders

Reporters Without Borders is appalled by the sentences of 12 years of "reform through labour" which a North Korean court passed today on American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee after convicting them in a sham trial of an unspecified "grave crime" and illegally entering the country.

"These 12-year sentences are a terrible shock for all those who have repeatedly insisted on their innocence," Reporters Without Borders said. "The sentences are much more severe than anything we had imagined. The authorities in Pyongyang must urgently reverse this decision and allow Ling and Lee to rejoin their families."

The sentences were clearly designed to scare journalists trying to do investigative reporting in the border area between China and North Korea, which is ranked as Asia's worst country in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index. To access Reporters sans Frontieres comments click here http://tinyurl.com/nq5kf3

Investigation

Crossing a border without being invited is a natural methodology act for investigative journalists. I did it several times especially in S.E. Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Burma). It is at such dangerous price that facts and truth can be discovered by journalists from secretive or war states where brutality is a method to rule, oppress, jail and murder their people turned preys.

Quotes: "Human rights groups, basing their estimates on defector testimonies, believe that about 200,000 prisoners are in North Koreas gulag system. Many are family members imprisoned for the crimes of their relatives, especially when the crimes are political." (The W. Times)

Current TV founder is former USA Vice President Al Gore. At this point, commentators speculate it is unlikely the two will serve time in a gulag. Instead Euna Lee and Laura Ling were expected to become negotiating pawns as the North tests the Obama administration by steadily escalating tensions with the United States.

North Korea just said it banned vessels from traveling in a designated area off its northeast shore between Wednesday and June 30, raising speculation that another rocket missile is to be launched adding to the destabilization of North East Asia.

☞ The interesting thing I see here is about the never ending DPRK own contradictions: I know of some foreign journalists and photographs who have been arrested in the past in North Korea while crossing the PRC - DPRK border, and were, later on, freed with apology and, even more amazing, were invited by North Korean officials to stay in the country for their reports. No arrest and no jail then at that time. So, one question: Were the two reporters blackmailed, manipulated or kidnaped after treacherous plan? And what about the allegations that there were 4 journalists actually trying to report on the border. Where are the two others?

Kidnapping is a trend in secretive North Korea. In 2002, Pyongyang admitted that it had systematically kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and '80s, using them to train its spies, who were then filtered back into Japan. It kidnapped hundreds of South Koreans over the years.

Quotes: "But it's not always some twisted policy goal that drives Pyongyang to kidnapping; Kim has also resorted to abduction to satisfy his personal whims. The North Korean dictator has long had a passion for movies, but he evidently believed North Korea's cinema wasn't up to his standards. In the late '70s, when his father Kim Il Sung was running the country, Kim apparently ordered the abduction of Shin Sang-ok, then perhaps the most famous film producer in the South, and his wife, Choi Eun-hee, a famous actress. Shin was imprisoned for four years, then forced to make a socialist-friendly version of Godzilla. He and his wife eventually escaped during a business trip to Vienna in 1986. Shin died in 2006 at age 80." (Time magazine)

Quotes from agencies, Time, W Times, RSF, Diary.