TOKYO: About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Attack on Pearl Harbor as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting American claims that Japanese soldiers launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1941.

The members of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party said there was no evidence to prove the aerial assault against the Hawaiian naval base, then known as “Pearl Harbor.” They accused Washington of using the alleged incident as a “political advertisement.”

Nariaki Nakayama, head of the group created to study World War II historical issues and education, said documents from the Japanese government’s archives indicated that about 240 people were killed — about one-tenth of the more commonly cited figure of 2400 — in the 1941 attack. The U.S. says that 2,400 people were killed and 1,178 wounded.

Historians generally agree that the Japanese Navy launched the preemptive strike to wipe out the American fleet in one fell swoop.

Nakayama said the study, which was initiated in part because this year is the 66th anniversary of the battle, determined there was no violation of international law.

Toru Toida, another member of the group, demanded that photographs portraying the Japanese military in a negative light be removed from U.S. war memorials.

“We are absolutely positive that there was no attack on Pearl Harbor,” Toida said.

On Wednesday night, Kameda Koki won the WBA light flyweight belt in Yokohama on a 2-1 judges decision. A brief glance at the morning papers, Yahoo! polls, and blogs, and it appears that nearly every single Japanese person believes the fight was a fix. Kikko received 13755 emails out of 13767 stating that Kameda clearly lost.

His defeat has become such an obvious fact that the dialogue has shifted towards the sources of bribery. Was it TBS who bribed the judges for ratings? Was it the boxing association in order to crown a new star and raise viewer involvement? Is there a web of intrigue between the fight’s pachinko sponsor, the Korean peninsula, and the Korean judge who ended up giving the match to Kameda?

Professional fighting — whether wrestling, Pride, and K-1 — is well-known to be mob-linked and tends to emphasize the entertainment spectacle over authentic sportsmanship. Everyone loved Rikidozan — and maybe no one had any idea that all his fights were fixed at the time. But Rikidozan actually looked like he won!

The Kameda fix was so poorly played off: The concept was eerily similar to the Rikidozan model — bringing familes together again to watch Japanese fighters battle the world on their home TVs — but they left too much to athletic realities. Kameda could not keep up his side of the bargain by actually appearing to win. And it is a lot to ask of a viewing public hot off the Olympics and the World Cup — true battles based on international standards — to go back to the hybrid fantasy-sports sagas of the past. Instead of crowning a new king by silent sinister manipulation, they ended up pulling out the big guns and sinking the ship.

Thirty years ago, an obvious fix may have led to small grumbles on commuter trains and in office cubicles, but now the suspicious can go online and find thousands of others with the same doubt. No matter if TBS can align their subsidiary publications to their side of the story: this controversy will rage in the online world. The sports papers and shukanshi will add fuel to the fire. The mainstream media is powerless to slow down the momentum.

If anything, this episode further rejects the ridiculous notion that the Japanese public — somehow different from their peers around the world — want to be lied to. But it is only when the fix is so clear that the doubts can be aired and indignation is embraced. When things go 15% smoother, the criminals get away with their chicanery and lingering skepticism gets put aside.

A common declaration of the disaffected is, “This is embarrassing for Japan.” Fans do not see this as a problem of the boxing federation and its affiliate parties: everyone understands that yaochō and bout-fixing is not acceptable on the world stage.

Forget the noise terrorism and the anger and the political distortions of Ultra-Nationalists — let’s talk about the tunes.

Oh, so very square.

First: the prerequisite pentatonic scales — because the Imperial nation-family (國體) believes in an austerity of note-saving and probably agrees with my 10th grade English teacher that “sad things have more artistic gravity than happy things.”

Second: the vaguely Prussian/Germanic orchestration — because grand military majesty is not the sound of one-hand-clapping and shamisen and taiko drum polyrhythms, but millions of Japanese marching lockstep towards modernity in the Meiji era.

This brings us to an important point: the Ultra-Right in Japan does not want to “get back” to pre-Western, pre-modern Japan; whether intentionally or not, their clarion calls hark back to the Western-influenced Modern Japan — that electric era when a bunch of old men got together and flattened out all regional customs, sundry superstitions, and local variations to pave the way for one monolithic idea of “Japanese culture.” If our local Armchair Fascists were into the Edo era instead, they’d all be chugging sake and sayin’ “Ee ja nai ka” and partying in the streets and sleeping with their neighbors’ wives. Instead we get intolerable Prussian military marches with sour Oriental melodies — because men look good in uniform and Empire-building was the owning-a-Ferrari of the early 20th century. But all this subsumed Germanic obduracy is hilarious now: If some new set of trucks rolled down Omotesando-doori protesting the death of Frederick II, no one would be able to aurally distinguish them from the uyoku.

If conservatives in the U.S. had soundtrucks, they would probably do a loop of “Sweet Home Alabama” and the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Without blinking, both Democrats and Republicans would unwittingly run out of the house after the DJ-mobile, get drunk, sing along, and then somehow end up electing Bush for a third term. These gunka don’t let you have any fun while you’re setting back the political clock 100 years.

Just as the “Breaking News” first reported yesterday at dinner time, police arrested Livedoor CEO Horie Takafumi and three other executives on suspicion of financial fraud. For those new to the story, check the excellent coverage on Joi Ito’s blog. This is a gigantic news event with significant economic and cultural ramifications. Although Livedoor’s self-destruction will not cause any huge ripples in the practical workings of the Internet infrastructure, there does seem to be a huge psychological shock. When the stock market crashed last week on news of the well-televised Livedoor office raid, completely unrelated tech stocks like Softbank also lost huge amounts of worth. The whole New Economy is now on the table for criticism and dissection.

Whether Horie is innocent or guilty, framed by massive Statist conspiracy or done in by his own greed, last year’s Livedoor saga certainly has created a new mental framework for thinking about the future of the Japanese economy. On one side of the ring, the Old Cabal, and on the other side, the New Capitalists. After a shock victory in the Fuji TV battle, things looked good for Livedoor. But the bureaucrats and their O.B.s in charge at the ancien medias have now clearly won the war. Not only has Livedoor been taught a lesson, the maverick company’s leader is literally in jail — with only the formality of trial to prove his guilt to an already angry mob public.

Culturally this is a big moment. The horses had been galloping asunder, and now the Old Men have tightened the reigns. Horie was perhaps a terrible representative of the New Economy, but few others have been so bold to standout and give a face to this important new business sector. If Steve Jobs is arrested tomorrow for falsifying data, I’m not sure all of the Siilcon Valley companies would suffer. Japan has caught up somewhat with Korea and the U.S. in terms of internet diffusion, but there seems to be no broad understanding that this IT world is something more than annoying trend.

In an issue of last year’s CanCam, one of the weird photographic “manga” pieces had a fashionable young female character proudly working at Livedoor. The New Economy had a certain cachet, especially with young people. The newest issue of CanCam will probably show Ebihara Yuri working at METI. Power is sexy, and a bureaucratically-run Japan has never looked hotter.

Yes, this scandal is just the fall of one not-particularly great company, but I fear the coming malaise upon realization that Horie’s experiment was a massive failure. The suits will out be drinking Blue Label in Ginza tonight, certain that Japan has been saved from a scandalous horde. Others may be feeling the despair of a symbolic defeat, drinking can after can of happoshu bought at 7/11.

Yesterday I attended Tokion Magazine’s sold-out Creativity Now Conference, again at the La Foret museum in Harajuku. I cannot provide a play-by-play report like last year, but I want to mention a couple points about social class and Japanese culture brought up in the discussion.

* In the panel about “otome” women’s culture, photographer and original Egg publisher Yonehara Yasumasa talked about discovering the gyaru/kogal movement in the early ’90s. These were the days before loose socks and fake tans, when roaming gangs of rich kids called “chiimaa” (“teamer”) ruled the streets of Shibuya, rolling-and-patrolling in their cars, stopping only to pick fights with rival groups infringing on their territory. The first kogyaru were chiimaa girlfriends, and like their beaux, were from elite private schools and wealthy families. These young women would often engage in enjo kosai, which at the time was a method of oyaji ijime (picking on older men.) For example, they would charge salarymen ten to twenty thousand yen to sit at tea together — for exactly one minute.

But when the news weeklies started to pick up on the story in the mid-’90s, the editors changed the content and meaning of enjo kosai to be more titillating and more easily comprehensible. Suddenly, the word denoted a new form of prostitution, instead of the “compensated dating” that was actually happening. As the media message spread out to the countryside, working class girls rushed into Tokyo to take part in this new movement — which some of them understood to involve a fashionable form of sex-for-cash. At the same time, older business men flocked into Shibuya to test out the waters themselves, thus creating the sensational enjo kosai crisis of the late ’90s.

I asked Yonehara later about the class issues at work here, and he said, “At first Egg was about the rich girls that working class yankii girls look up to, but now the magazine is dedicated to the working class girls themselves.” Does the lower socioeconomic background of the subculture’s participants help explain the group’s different code of sexual morality? “The Japanese tend to adopt every part of a trend, so if ‘free sex’ is in, everyone thinks, ‘OK, free sex it is.’” Like many Japanese social commentators in their late 30s/early 40s, Yonehara is somewhat exaggerating the thoughtlessness of Japanese youth consumer behavior, but I think the gyaru story does follow the traditional pattern of “top-down” cultural transmission. What started as an urban upper-class delinquent trend attracted a mass following of rural lower-middle class girls; enjo kosai started as a way to torment pathetic salarymen and ended up as a financial means to pay for an expensive designer-handbag lifestyle.

* In the last panel on “Tokyo System Crash,” MC and visual art genius Ukawa Naohiro discussed Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro’s recent crackdown on dance clubs. Apparently, they no longer issue permits for “discos” in the city, and even with the permit, clubs are supposed to shut down at 1am. So, most venues have been registering as “restaurants,” and when the floor managers get word about plain-clothes cops knocking on the front door, they pull out the required number of tables and turn on the required number of lights. At one party, the plain clothes cops requested Ukawa and Moodman shut it down at 1am — an act which the promoters argued would unleash hundreds of young people out on the streets, unable to get home by train. So, they asked if telling ghost stories was okay. The cops said yes and they spent the next half-hour telling ghost stories to a confused audience, increasing the volume of the dance beats in the background little by little until the party was back on track.

Ukawa blamed the problem on Ishihara’s privileged background: “As a member of the Taiyou-zoku (1950s rich-kid delinquents in Shonan), his idea of fun is going to house parties at friends’ summer homes and yachting. He doesn’t understand our working class ideas of dancing.” Ishihara’s new mission is to open a fancy casino in Odaiba, which is again, a leisure activity primarily targeted for the wealthy. Rumors seem to suggest that the LDP is taking the issue very seriously, as a casino would attract foreign jetsetters and funnel their pocket money into the tax pool. So, in a couple of years when you’re sick of tech house, you can go blow your cash on keno.

About two months ago, our favorite Japanese consumer-lifestyle magazine Relax did a special feature on “peace,” which our favorite Scottish musician/critic Momus called in a recent comment on this blog, “quite admirable.” I agree there is something positive about dedicating space to world peace and anti-nuclear proliferation instead of limited-edition sneakers, but the issue asks the question: Can “peace” be a lifestyle choice devoid of political underpinnings?

As this Relax hit the stands, Japanese voters were gearing up to go to the polls, and while postal privatization was the primary issue, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party has recently been showing explicit interest in altering the “Peace Constitution” to remilitarize Japan, antagonizing China and Korea with visits to the nationalistic Yasukuni shrine, and continuing the use of Japanese Self-Defense Forces in the American Iraq War. So, voting against the LDP would be an extremely easy way to “give peace a chance.”

Relax, of course, cannot bring politics into the “Peace” issue. For fear of upsetting advertisers, readers, and the Magazine House higher-ups, the concept must remain a form of laid-back consumer lifestyle and not an anti-social or political rally point. I salute Relax for not doing an issue on “Yasukuni O-share” but I wonder how much credit one deserves for wearing a black-and-white “WAR IS OVER if you want it” t-shirt one month and then forgetting to actually “want it” at the next election. At this moment in time, Japan is closer to rearming than it has ever been, and motivated youth voters could actually use the democratic outlets available to them to send a message to the Neo-Nationalists in the majority party.

Perhaps we cannot expect the media to really work towards peace, and they may be limited in action to collecting fashionable artists to do exclusive pieces on the subject. “Rock the Vote” and other American youth-oriented political programs were hardly enough to bring down the warmongering Bush presidency. I very much doubt, however, that a German magazine would dedicate an issue to “Pacifism” and not mention the War (WWII or Iraq) nor political action. I have no doubt that a majority of the Japanese public wants to maintain a peaceful existence, but I fear that just wearing the concept like a warm scarf is not enough to change the minds of those who hold the ultimate decision-making power.

The non-fiction bestseller Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner — a book about using economic methodology to analyze a whole host of social behavior — is currently huge in America, and I finally got a chance to read it over the last week. I was intrigued by the chapter looking at sumo wrestling being fixed. Essentially, the authors make the case that wrestlers who have a 7-7 record going into the last match win a statistically-improbable number of bouts against wrestlers who, regardless of the outcome, will finish the tournament with a winning record.

I’m not a sumo expert, but I’ve never heard anything about this widespread sumo fixing in Japan. Has anyone out there heard about this from Japanese sources? Is this a commonly known fact outside of the Freakonomics readership? The book claims that two wrestlers were hoping to out the system at a press conference but died mysteriously and simultaneously at the same hospital beforehand. (The police did not investigate for any foul play.)

These patterns of collusion between sumo stables seem to resemble other kinds of collusion in the Japanese media, political, and economic world, but I would wager that fixing “non-scripted” events in Japan can only continue as long as those involved have an informational advantage over the consumers/citizens. Would this practice continue even if sumo fans started receiving open and full information about the topic?

The Japanese-language Wikipedia is a very helpful online resource — especially for those looking for information about celebrities and Japanese popular culture. The management companies tightly control most information in the mainstream media on these topics, so Wikipedia writers appear to be excitedly writing entries about issues normally “taboo” elsewhere in society.

Take, for example, the entry about one of Japan’s most powerful talento production companies, Burning Production. There is a very short section of basic descriptive information, and then it jumps into the following story:

At daybreak May 9th, 2001, an incident occurred involving bullets being shot into the window glass of Burning Production’s office. An anonymous report was called in to the Akasaka police that “in the early morning, there was sound of a gunshot in the mansion occupied by Burning Pro.” An officer from that station investigated the scene and found two bullets each were shot into two rooms. Later that day, the office staff — who should have noticed the incident — did not notify the police.

On October 8th, bullets were again shot into the window glass, and the police’s 4th investigative section investigated the relation, opening up an investigation into whether or not there had been trouble with parties related to organized crime. After an inspection of the crime scene, officers learned that “the 38-caliber revolver bullets had adequate faculty to kill or wound.”

For the most part, this story was not reported in the newspapers or mass media. In May 29th, 2005, the Tokyo National Tax Agency accused the firm of failing to report 1.1 billion yen in taxes.

And then the entry nonchalantly lists the names of Burning’s famous talent as if this kind of activity was normal for Japan’s entertainment world. For those unfamiliar with Japan’s amazingly low crime rates, gunshots are rare, and their occurrence generally makes the evening news. You would think that (gunshots) + (Japan’s most powerful entertainment agency) = (a big story) but apparently not.

Burning should probably work a lot harder to clean up this Wikipedia article. From the way it’s written now, it almost reads as if they were affiliated with organized crime!

Nothing has eaten into the Japanese cultural industries more than the spread of cell-phones (keitai). Where kids from the ’80s and early ’90s had ¥10,000-20,000 a month to spend on records, clothing, and karaoke, kids today have to scrap together the same amount just to pay their monthly phone bills. Numerous studies on the decline of the music market blame keitai, and since the Japanese still primarily go “online” through their phones, using the Internet appears to have an inverse relationship with cultural participation.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the post-industrial world, the computer-based Net is relatively low priced, and for most kids under 22, provided for free by parents or universities. And what’s more, all the illegal downloading and file trading has provided amazing access to music and movies at the rock bottom price of zero. The long-term effects on the cultural industry have yet to be seen, but at least the American markets have fought off constant decline like in Japan.

Of course, the Japanese record industry blames CDRs and file-trading on their yearly 10% descent, but file-trading culture here is still in its infant stages. For starts, there aren’t massive networks of T3-connected college kids in dorms, and most Japanese Internet users are men in their 30s and 40s who don’t have so much incentive for illegal downloads. There is not much to suggest that the number of music fans has remained constantly while fewer pay for real releases. Simply, less Japanese people care about music than in the past.

With print media and fashion, there is no real threat of bootlegging, and yet there are similar rates of market contraction. The phone bills and general economic malaise have redistributed funds out of the “leisure” business into the communications business, and I would not assume that kids are using phones to access more culture. They easily rack up ¥10,000-20,000 bills just talking and emailing friends.

For at least the last twenty-five years in Japan, all pop/youth culture has been consumer culture, and now that kids can’t buy anything, “culture” has gone into a strange transitory period where the old “buy=participation” market structure remains, but the values and consumer abilities have changed. Meanwhile in the United States (and possibly, in Korea and elsewhere), youth Internet usage may not be increasing media sales, but it seems to be boosting overall participation and involvement in culture.

In order to find source material for a current research mission, I rescued a huge stack of women’s fashion magazines awaiting trash pickup and gave them a new home (thus, the Can Cam post.) Minutes ago, I was making my way through the April issue of the triumphantly bland With when I spotted the odd yellow advert pictured at right. The red text warns, “The Northern Territories were decided as Japan’s islands.” (in smaller black text, “150 years earlier in the 1855 Japan-Russia Amity Treaty”). For those not up-to-date on Japan’s desperate claims to various tiny islands in their environs, this ad refers to the Kuril(e) Islands above Hokkaido, seized by Stalin at the end of WWII.

Today, these islands have no Japanese residents and are mostly oversized volcanic rocks, but Japan wants these suckers back. And the government will take out ads in women’s fashion monthlies until all the Japanese people understand that their government totally called those islands 150 years ago on the diplomatic playground! Japan didn’t spend all that manpower eradicating the Ainu for nothing!

Now back to the latest installment of “How to Dedicate Your Room with Wicker Baskets”…