Vikas Swarup presented a sneak preview of his next novel, “The Accidental Apprentice,” to the Japan Writers Conference in Kyoto yesterday (Nov. 10, 2012). The book will be published in Janaury.
Swarup’s previous novels are “Q&A” (the basis of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”) and “Six Suspects” (which Swarup mentioned is also in the process of becoming a film).
Swarup, appearing at the Japan Writers Conference for a third consecutive year, gave a reading of the opening pages of “The Accidental Apprentice” before taking questions from conference-goers.
It begins with a young Indian woman named Sapna Sinha sitting in a jail cell, reflecting on how she came to be accused of murder. She traces her troubles back to the day when, on a lunch break from her sales job at an electronics store, she visited a temple seeking expiation over a death for which she feels responsible. (It sounded as if this was not the death that led to her murder charge, but presumably all will be made clear as the novel unfolds.) At the temple, an old man plucked her out of the crowd, introduced himself as a fabulously wealthy industrialist whose companies produce everything “from toothpaste to turbines,” and said he wanted to recruit Sapna as his heir — if she would agree to undergo seven tests. It sounded like a fishy deal, so Sapna sensibly refused. At least, she refused at first…
In the question-and-answer period after the reading, Swarup said he believes it is important to start a story with a strong hook, so readers will stick around to see what happens.
In addition to being a best-selling novelist, Swarup is also the consul-general of India for the Osaka-Kobe area. He therefore referred to himself as a “weekend writer” whose day job keeps him too busy to write during the week. But he cheerily remarked that having a non-writing career freed him from some of the concerns that likely burden full-time fiction writers, such as meeting deadlines or trying to guess the tastes of the market.
All three of his novels so far have been set in India. He said that people in this country sometimes ask why he doesn’t write about Japan. He tells them that if he did, his stories would be all about yakuza gangsters — and his Japanese friends might not like that. But his characters couldn’t be ordinary Japanese people, he says, because they are too nice, calm, polite and orderly to write exciting stories about them.
A frail old woman with white hair, a bent back, and a deeply lined face sits by herself in a small, shabby room.
That description would fit several of the black-and-white photos I saw at an exhibition last night in Tokyo. As mundane as the pictures are, certain people strenuously object to their being seen. And that’s why I had to see them.
To get into the exhibition, held on the 28th floor of a Shinjuku office building, I had to wait in a corridor while a uniformed guard used his arm to block the doorway of the small gallery space, allowing people to go in one by one. A woman ahead of me had a very large bag, and he looked inside it before admitting her. Once I got through the door, another guard watched as I walked through a metal detector.
And then I saw a bunch of perfectly ordinary black-and-white portraits of harmless-looking old ladies.
What was the big deal?
A certain number of women, many of them Korean, were forced to work as sex slaves for members of the Japanese military during World War II. They were euphemistically called “comfort women.” The ones who are still alive today are very old. A few of them are the subjects of the photos in this exhibit, taken by photographer Ahn Sehong.
The existence of “comfort women” is an accepted historical fact, but right-wing groups in Japan would prefer to sweep it under the rug.
The Nikon Salon in Shinjuku had planned to display Ahn’s photos, but then canceled its plan. It seems that no clear reason for the cancellation has been given, but you can sample the unofficial speculation and official evasions in coverage by The Japan Times here, here and here, The Wall Street Journal here and here, and Radio Australia here.
Ahn sued, and won. The court ordered Nikon to hold the exhibition after all, and it is now doing so. The show runs through July 9, this coming Monday on the 28th floor of the Shinjuku L Tower, on the west side of Shinjuku Station.
The gallery’s website states, “Although the originally scheduled photo exhibition by Ahn Sehong was canceled for certain reasons, the Tokyo High Court has issued a provisional disposition order allowing the temporary use of the Shinjuku Nikon Salon for Mr. Ahn’s exhibition. In accordance with this provisional disposition, the Shinjuku Nikon Salon will be temporarily used for Mr. Ahn’s exhibition.”
You can see a few of the photos at Ahn’s website, here. The images themselves are not particularly remarkable, but the effort to censor them is outrageous.
A few weeks ago, I began to notice that some of the Coca-Cola vending machines I saw on the streets in and around Tokyo had a new word painted on them: Ecoru.
Spelled with the Roman letters E, C, and O plus the hiragana character “ru,” this was clearly a verb that meant something along the lines of “to be eco-friendly” or just “to eco.”
Lots of Japanese verbs end in the suffix “-ru.” For example, eat, think, sleep, run, throw, forget, and live are taberu, kangaeru, neru, hashiru, nageru, wasureru and ikiru.
According to “Zakennayo,” a 1995 book on Japanese slang, the Denny’s restaurant chain was such a popular hangout for Japanese teens in those days that they turned its name into a verb: “deniru,” meaning “to do Denny’s.” I never encountered that word in real life myself, but I get the concept. And apparently so does some clever copywriter at the Coca-Cola company.
It seems that the ecoru machines have been around for a couple of years. They involve such eco-tweaks as LED lighting and non-CFC coolants, and they claim to put less strain on the power grid by charging up in the off hours so they don’t have to draw on the public electricity supply during periods of peak demand.
You can find technical details in Japanese at Coca Cola’s website here. It shows that some of the machines even have solar panels on top. I haven’t seen those yet.
Condsidering what a big business vending machines are in Japan, this looks like a step in the right direction.
In a previous post (here), I wrote about a trademark dispute between the makers of “White Lover” cookies and “Funny Lover” cookies. Now there’s a “Black Lover” on the scene:
White Lovers (Shiroi Koibito) are cookies made by Hokkaido-based Ishiya Co. Funny Lovers (Omoshiroi Koibito) are cookies made by Osaka-based Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. And Black Lovers (Kuroi Koibito) are little bars of chocolate-covered corn made by Hokkaido-based Sapporo Gourmet Foods.
The design on the Black Lover box features the silhouettes of a man and a woman beneath and old-fashioned streetlamp with a block of text hovering above them. I hoped the text would describe some classic old love story, but here’s how I’d translate what it really says: “Grains of love. These are the jewels of a vast land — sweet and crispy snacks of corn and Asahikawa-grown black beans coated in chocolate to fascinate lovers.”
I brought my Black Lovers to the office, ate one, and shared the rest with coworkers — one of whom remarked on their similarity to a “Corn Chocolate“ product made by another Hokkaido-based confectioner called Hori. So, in the name of research, I dropped by the Hokkaido antenna shop in Yurakucho, Tokyo, to buy some of those:
They certainly look similar. But to my palate, Corn Chocolate is tastier Black Lovers. The Hori product has a more disctinct corn taste — especially the white chocolate variety, which has a milder-flavored coating.
Considering that Ishiya decided to fight Yoshimoto Kogyou over the Funny Lovers, I wonder what is going on in Hokkaido right now among Ishiya, Hori, and Sapporo Gourmet Foods over the Black Lovers.
There’s a tradition in American journalism of using a buzzy topic from pop culture as a jumping-off point to discuss the more serious issues of the day. Having just seen the movie “Battleship,” in which Japan and the United States join forces in a war (against space aliens), I thought I’d try my hand at this type of essay, thinking about what a general American audience may not know but might be interested to learn. Here goes:
How can you be friends with a guy who kicks you in the face the first time you meet him? In the new movie “Battleship,” that is exactly how the relationship between the two main characters begins, yet the eventual buddies – a U.S. Navy officer and his Japanese counterpart – go on to save the world from invading space aliens.
Based on the classic board game of the same name, “Battleship” premiered in Japan in April and opens in America on May 18. It may be a splashy sci-fi action movie, but it also provides an opportunity to reflect on the real-life military alliance between the United States and Japan.
Things get off on the wrong foot between mariners Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) and Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) when Nagata’s foot connects with Hopper’s jaw during an inter-services soccer game near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The blindside kick may not have been intentional, but parallels to the 1941 surprise attack must have been.
Everyone knows what happened after that attack, and how Japan rebuilt its economy from the ashes of World War II. Less well known is that Japan also rebuilt its military to become a sleeping giant in its own right, with more troops, tanks, submarines and fighter planes than Britain, France or Italy.
Such strength is awkward in light of Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution, which renounces “war…and the use or threat of force as a means of settling international disputes” and declares that “land, sea and air forces…will never be maintained.” Officially, Japan doesn’t even have a “military.” Instead, it has “Self-Defense Forces” (SDF), the legitimacy and uses of which are well-worn topics of debate in Japan.
On constitutional grounds, Japan contributed money rather than troops to the 1990-91 Gulf War, only to find itself criticized for “checkbook diplomacy.” Therefore, when the U.S. began fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, Japan dipped a toe in the water by sending Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) ships to support the U.S. Navy with refueling operations in the Indian Ocean – an active role, but deliberately far from combat.
The Indian Ocean program lasted eight years. It ended after the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party lost power in a 2009 election and a new government under the generally more dovish Democratic Party of Japan declined to renew the legislation that authorized it.
The new government also threw into disarray a previously agreed plan to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps’ Futenma Air Station within Okinawa Prefecture, a cluster of small southern islands crowded with U.S. bases. The benefits of the U.S. military presence accrue to Japan as a whole, but the burdens fall mostly on Okinawa. Yukio Hatoyama, the first DPJ prime minister, wanted the air station relocated out of the prefecture altogether.
Even as the Futenma issue strained U.S.-Japanese relations, China—whose military has also grown along with its economy—began aggressively asserting claims to Asian waters where other countries have long-standing interests. Recent provocations include 2010 and 2011 incidents in which Chinese Navy helicopters buzzed MSDF ships while Chinese warships passed between remote Japanese islands. A Chinese fishing vessel in disputed waters even rammed two Japan Coast Guard ships in 2010. The fishing captain was arrested but quickly freed in a political move that did little to placate China, which temporarily cut off vital exports of rare earth minerals to Japan in apparent retaliation.
While such incidents make Japan’s civilian leaders appear feckless, the status of the military has been growing. In 2007, the once lowly Japan Defense Agency was upgraded to a cabinet-level Ministry of Defense. In 2011, Japan established its first overseas military base since the end of World War II, an outpost in Djibouti charged with fighting piracy near Somalia. SDF personnel have also joined U.N. peacekeeping operations in places like South Sudan, even if the infrastructure projects they are working on there are distant from violent border areas. And after last year’s horrific earthquake and tsunami, SDF rescuers were virtually the only arm of the government whose actions earned widespread public approval.
U.S. forces also lent a much-appreciated helping hand after the 2011 disaster, and their cooperation with the SDF is set to grow stronger. A breakthrough in negotiations last month will likely lead to the transfer of 9,000 U.S. Marine Corps personnel out of Okinawa, though many will remain (and the Futenma issue is still not fully resolved). As part of the deal, Japan will help to pay for facilities for the shared use of U.S. and Japanese forces in U.S. territories such as Guam and Tinian Island.
The two nations’ military forces were on alert together last month as they awaited the launch of a North Korean rocket. The SDF intended to shoot it down with Patriot missiles if it threatened Japanese territory. A U.S. satellite observed the April 13 launch, but the failed rocket blew up at such a low altitude that the curve of the Earth hid it from ground-based SDF radar. (In “Battleship,” the alien vessels are also invisible to radar, but Nagata devises a clever way to determine their locations – providing one of the movie’s best sight gags.)
On April 30, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and President Barack Obama met at the White House and expressed in a joint statement their commitment to ensuring “responsible and rule-based” use of the high seas and further strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance.
As if to put an exclamation mark on that statement, during Noda’s trip to Washington several Chinese Navy warships sailed unannounced through a narrow strait between Kyushu, Japan’s third-largest island (about the size of Maine), and Tanegashima, a smaller island that is the launch center for Japan’s space program.
Maybe it isn’t very likely that space aliens will invade the Earth using weapons derived from a Hasbro board game. But the United States and Japan teaming up to face a common threat at sea? That’s not so far-fetched.
What was the first country to land a spacecraft on an asteroid? What was the first country to bring asteroid samples back to Earth? What was the first country to celebrate these achievements with at least four different movies … and a commemorative curry?
The answers are Japan, Japan and of course Japan.
The Japanese space probe Hayabusa was launched in 2003. Its destination, which it reached using cutting-edge ion engines, was the asteroid Itokawa. The asteroid is a peanut-shaped mass of rock and dust about 500 meters long, usually described as being 300 million kilometers from Earth. Just reaching a target of that size at that distance is an amazing feat.
Unfortunately, a lot of things went wrong on the mission. But in most cases, engineers at JAXA (Japan’s space agency) were able to improvise solutions.
The worst problem was that a device meant to collect material from the asteroid malfunctioned. When Hayabusa returned to Earth in 2010, making a fiery landing in Australia, its sample canister appeared to be empty. Microscopic inspection, however, revealed tiny particles of asteroid dust that scientists are continuing to study. Although not the hoped-for treasure trove, it was a historic achievement nonetheless. Itokawa and the moon are the only celestial bodies from which humans have ever managed to bring back any material to Earth.
I recently learned, though a Yomiuri Shimbun article, that the Sunkus convience store chain was selling “Itokawa Curry” for a limited time. A block of rice in the shape of the asteroid was positioned on a plate of curry sauce that represented the darkness of space. Floating in the background were a meatball standing in for Earth and a sliced egg playing the sun. Crowning it all was a bite-sized piece of fried chicken perched on the rice to represent Hayabusa landing on the asteroid. (This is appropriate, given that Hayabusa is named after a bird – albeit a peregrine falcon, not a chicken.)
I was desperate to try this historic dish for myself, and over the past week and a half I have made a total of six visits to four different Sunkus locations, but it wasn’t until yesterday – the very last day of the promotion – that I finally found the coveted curry in stock.
Asteroid sampling tool
In case you’re disappointed at not being able to try it yourself, I can assure you that the flavors were well within the gray middle zone of convenience-store standards and thus totally forgettable. But the symbolism was delicious.
It turns out that this product was meant as a promotion for the Shochiku film company’s new 3-D movie about the Hayabusa mission. It’s called “Okaeri, Hayabusa,” which means “Welcome home, Hayabusa.” Here’s a trailer:
That movie is just the latest of several on the topic. Twentieth Century Fox also came out with a film simply called “Hayabusa,” starring Toshiyuki Nishida, an actor best known for his lead role in the movie series “Tsuri Baka Nisshi” (Diary of a fishing fool). Here’s the trailer:
The Kadokawa film company made a computer-graphic retelling of Hayabusa’s journey called “Hayabusa: Back to the Earth.” The final line of this trailer, “Saa … kairou … natsukashii chikyu ni” (Well … let’s go home … to our fondly remembered Earth) actually chokes me up for some reason. Maybe it’s the accompanying music. Maybe it’s the fact that I actually understood it. Or maybe there was a mood-altering ingredient in that curry. Watch:
The Hayabusa film with the most star power (pun unavoidable) is Toei’s “Hayabusa Harukanaru Kikan” (a title I would roughly translate as “Hayabusa’s homecoming from afar”), with Ken Watanabe as an awkwardly coiffed engineer:
I don’t think any of these movies could be described as massive hits. Does this reflect on their cinematic quality, or were there just too many of them for the market to absorb? Not having actually watched the films, I’ll leave that for others to judge.
Last month, Hokkaido-based Ishiya Co. sued Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. for trademark infringement. Ishiya has been selling its “Shiroi Koibito” cookies since 1976, and Yoshimoto Kogyo began selling “Omoshiroi Koibito” cookies last year.
The name of the original cookies means “white lover.” The new cookies have nearly the same name, except that the addition of an extra character at the beginning changes “shiroi” (white) to “omoshiroi” (funny). Yoshimoto Kogyo is an Osaka-based entertainment company best known for its comedians. So if you might find a “white” lover in snowy Hokkaido, perhaps you’d find a “funny” lover in Osaka.
Shiroi Koibito cookies are famous in Japan. If one of your coworkers in this country takes a trip to Hokkaido, there’s a good chance they’ll bring Shiroi Koibito cookies back as an omiyage treat. According to an article in The Daily Yomiuri, the Shiroi Koibito name has been trademarked since 1980, and its packaging has been trademarked since 2004. The brand managed to maintain its popularity even after an expiration-date mislabelling scandal described in a Japan Times article from 2008. According to an article in the Mainichi Daily News, Ishiya sold 7.2 billion yen (more than 90 million U.S. dollars) worth of the cookies in fiscal 2010.
Ishiya says some people have accidentally purchased Omoshiroi Koibito cookies after mistaking them for Shiroi Koibito cookes. It is easy to see how this might happen. The name of the new cookies is nearly identical to the original cookies, and the packaging is extremely similar.
However, a spokesperson for Yoshimoto Kogyo said the company was “bewildered” by the lawsuit against it. Perhaps this remark was meant to be omoshiroi.
The packaging may be confusingly similar, but the cookies are surprisingly different.
One of my coworkers brought a box of each type to the office recently, and I sampled them both. Ishiya’s original Shiroi Koibito is the small square cookie in the photo above. It consists of two buttery langue de chat cookies, baked until brown at the edges, sandwiching a small tablet of either white or dark chocolate. Yoshimoto Kogyo’s Omoshiroi Koibito is the large round cookie. It consists of two thin waffle cookies sandwiching a layer of maple cream that smelled and tasted like it was artificial.
I don’t claim to be an authority Japanese intellectual property law, but I am interested in seeing how this case plays out in court. My gut tells me Ishiya should win.
A great thing about living in Tokyo is that trains can take you anywhere, quickly and conveniently.
A bad thing about living in Tokyo is that if you fall off the station platform, a train can kill you.
Those two statements may sound like a pair of eternal truths, but the second one is gradually becoming less true as safety barriers are installed along platforms in more and more stations.
Earlier this year, a good friend of mine was hit by a train in New York. Fortunately, he survived. When I went to visit him, I read in the New York Daily News that the Big Apple was considering installing its own safety barriers. But there was some resistance to the idea, not the least of which came from the Daily News itself.
Resistance to the idea of safety barriers seems unfounded. It reminds me of the resistance that once existed to the idea of wearing seatbelts in cars, and I’m sure that in the future people will look back on it as being just as silly.
I made the video at the top of this post in an effort to shed some light on the issue. I start by visiting the sites of a few notable accidents in Tokyo, and then demonstrate how the safety barriers operate.
Production note: A couple of scenes shot at train stations include background noise, so I added subtitles. In future efforts, I’ll either look for quieter spots or buy a quality microphone.
Last Monday (June 27, 2011), the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in a free-speech case of major importance to the video game industry.
In 2005, the California state legislature passed – and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed – a law to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. It would have taken effect on Jan. 6, 2006, except that the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the Video Software Dealers Association quickly sued to block its enforcement.
The industry side won that round, but the Schwarzenegger administration appealed, and the case began slowly winding its way to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
The software industry includes many Japanese companies. Sony, Nintendo, Capcom, Bandai Namco, Sega, Konami and Square Enix are all members of the ESA (which has a press release on the Supreme Court’s decision here). Through their involvement in this case, such companies were naturally looking out for their own commercial interests. But those interests happened to coincide with free-speech values that many Americans, including myself, cherish.
When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case in November of last year I blogged here about why I hoped the law would be struck down. Now I am happy to report that it has been.
In a 7-2 vote, the court rejected the California law on free speech grounds. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion, joined by justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer dissented.
Cases sometimes change their names as they wind through the system. For reasons including the fact that Schwarzenegger is no longer in office, this one finally ended up as “Brown vs Entertainment Merchants Association.” You can read the full text of the opinions, totaling 92 pages, on the Supreme Court’s website. Or you can read on in this post for an abbreviated version with my comments.
Note: In the interest of smoother reading, I have eliminated most of the citations with which court opinions are usually peppered. For the absolutely definitive text, go to the Supreme Court’s site.
The majority opinion by Justice Scalia
Scalia: A free speech defender who is not afraid of video games
Scalia begins with a one-sentence statement of the basic issue:
We consider whether a California law imposing restrictions on violent video games comports with the First Amendment.
Then he describes the contested law:
[It] prohibits the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors, and requires their packaging to be labeled “18.” The Act covers games “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being, if those acts are depicted” in a manner that “[a] reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors,” that is “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors,” and that “causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”
Next he describes the principles at stake:
California correctly acknowledges that video games qualify for First Amendment protection. The Free Speech Clause exists principally to protect discourse on public matters, but we have long recognized that it is difficult to distinguish politics from entertainment, and dangerous to try…Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection. Under our Constitution, “esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature . . . are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even with the mandate or approval of a majority.”
He notes that free speech can legally be restricted in a few very specific areas, such as obscenity, but that violence has not been recognized as one of these areas. He refers to U.S. vs. Stevens, a case decided just last year, which invalidated a ban on videos depicting animal cruelty:
We held that statute to be an impermissible content-based restriction on speech. There was no American tradition of forbidding the depiction of animal cruelty—though States have long had laws against committing it.
Scalia is not impressed with the idea the law is intended to protect children:
California’s argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just deserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers “till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy.” Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven.
High-school reading lists are full of similar fare. Homer’s Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops by grinding out his eye with a heated stake. (“Even so did we seize the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows all about, as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame”). In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they be skewered by devils above the surface. And Golding’s Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other children while marooned on an island.
While I agree with Scalia’s general point, I think he is overreaching in a couple of his examples. Grimm’s fairy tales are nearly always presented to children in sanitized form. I have been a major bookworm since shortly after kindergarten, and his reference to eyes getting pecked out by doves in the Cinderella story was the first time I had ever heard of it. If he wanted examples of brutal violence that nearly all American kids are actually exposed to, he could have chosen virtually any animated cartoon from the Loony Tunes library, in which characters such as Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, or Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner electrocute each other, hurl each other off of cliffs, clobber each other with sledgehammers, and hand each other dynamite-filled cigars – always with only mild negative consequences.
Scalia recounts a history of “bad influences” from which well-meaning but misguided censors have attempted protect young people, from penny dreadful novels in the 1800s to movies, comics, TV shows and song lyrics in the 20th century.
But some people say that playing a video game is substantially different from watching a movie, reading a book or listening to a song.
California claims that video games present special problems because they are “interactive,” in that the player participates in the violent action on screen and determines its outcome. The latter feature is nothing new: Since at least the publication of The Adventures of You: Sugarcane Island in 1969, young readers of choose-your-own adventure stories have been able to make decisions that determine the plot by following instructions about which page to turn to.
Again, Scalia overreaches in his defense of a good cause. The interactive novels he speaks of enjoyed a heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s (as I recall from being a kid in those days), but they were always something of a novelty or a fad and never a major social phenomenon on the scale of movies then or video games now. Moreover, the stories were innocent enough, with characters mostly trying to escape violence rather than committing it.
His next point is much stronger:
As for the argument that video games enable participation in the violent action, that seems to us more a matter of degree than of kind. As Judge [Richard] Posner has observed, all literature is interactive. “[T]he better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.” [From a 2001 case] (striking down a similar restriction on violent video games).
Indeed, it is the interactive aspect that gives video games their greatest potential to make positive moral statements. In games such as Shadow of the Colossus and Red Dead Redemption (the latter of which I blogged about here), players do participate in violent acts such as slaying monsters or shooting enemies – but in such a way that they are forced to ponder the morality of violence. The stories are designed to lead players into circumstances in which they do things they later have cause to reflect on and regret.
Getting into the legal meat of the decision, Scalia writes:
Because the Act imposes a restriction on the content of protected speech, it is invalid unless California can demonstrate that it passes strict scrutiny—that is, unless it is justified by a compelling government interest and is narrowly drawn to serve that interest. The State must specifically identify an “actual problem” in need of solving, and the curtailment of free speech must be actually necessary to the solution. That is a demanding standard.
California cannot meet that standard. At the outset, it acknowledges that it cannot show a direct causal link between violent video games and harm to minors.
He then proceeds to dismiss the two main arguments for the law: that it protects children and helps parents. Regarding studies on the effects of video games on children, he says:
They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, “[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children’s feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game.
If the state were serious about avoiding such effects on children, Scalia says, it would also go after the purveyors of books and cartoons rather than narrowly focusing on video games.
As for the law’s supposed helpfulness to parents, Scalia writes:
California cannot show that the Act’s restrictions meet a substantial need of parents who wish to restrict their children’s access to violent video games but cannot do so. The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games. The system, implemented by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), assigns age-specific ratings to each video game submitted: EC (Early Childhood); E (Everyone); E10+ (Everyone 10 and older); T (Teens); M (17 and older); and AO (Adults Only—18 and older). The Video Software Dealers Association encourages retailers to prominently display information about the ESRB system in their stores; to refrain from renting or selling adults only games to minors; and to rent or sell “M” rated games to minors only with parental consent.
Incidentally, a similar system exists in Japan, with the Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (CERO) assigning ratings of A (suitable for all ages), B (12 and up), C (15 and up), D (17 and up) and Z (sold only to those aged 18 and up).
In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that, as a result of this system, “the video game industry outpaces the movie and music industries” in “(1) restricting target marketing of mature-rated products to children; (2) clearly and prominently disclosing rating information; and (3) restricting children’s access to mature-rated products at retail.” This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home. Filling the remaining modest gap in concerned-parents’ control can hardly be a compelling state interest.
And finally, the Act’s purported aid to parental authority is vastly overinclusive. Not all of the children who are forbidden to purchase violent video games on their own have parents who care whether they purchase violent video games. While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want.
In the concluding section of the majority opinion, Scalia writes:
California’s effort to regulate violent video games is the latest episode in a long series of failed attempts to censor violent entertainment for minors. While we have pointed out above that some of the evidence brought forward to support the harmfulness of video games is unpersuasive, we do not mean to demean or disparage the concerns that underlie the attempt to regulate them—concerns that may and doubtless do prompt a good deal of parental oversight. We have no business passing judgment on the view of the California Legislature that violent video games (or, for that matter, any other forms of speech) corrupt the young or harm their moral development. Our task is only to say whether or not such works constitute a “well-defined and narrowly limited clas[s] of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem” (the answer plainly is no); and if not, whether the regulation of such works is justified by that high degree of necessity we have described as a compelling state interest (it is not). Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on governmental action apply…
As a means of protecting children from portrayals of violence, the legislation is seriously underinclusive, not only because it excludes portrayals other than video games, but also because it permits a parental or avuncular veto. And as a means of assisting concerned parents it is seriously overinclusive because it abridges the First Amendment rights of young people whose parents (and aunts and uncles) think violent video games are a harmless pastime…
We affirm the judgment below [which found the law unconstitutional].
Justice Alito’s concurrence
In his concurring opinion, Alito agrees with majority’s conclusion, but he reaches it on different legal grounds and takes exception to the majority’s sanguine attitude toward the impact of video games on real-world behavior.
In my blog post about this case last year, I argued that the California law had a chilling effect on free speech and should be found void for vagueness. In these regards, I am pleased to report that Alito saw it my way. He wrote:
Alito: Misgivings about violent games outweighed by vagueness of law
Here, the California law does not define “violent video games” with the “narrow specificity” that the Constitution demands.
Alito notes that the drafters of the California law clearly crafted their statute with an eye on obscenity restrictions that the court has upheld in the past. The statute described the violent games it sought to ban as “appeal[ing] to a deviant or morbid interest of minors,” “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community…for minors,” and “lack[ing] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.” The references to “minors” are new. The rest of the wording comes straight the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller vs. California (1973), describing what sort of materials could be regulated as “obscene.”
But obscenity and violence are not the same, Alito writes:
At least when Miller was decided, depictions of “hard core” sexual conduct were not a common feature of mainstream entertainment. But nothing similar can be said about much of the conduct covered by the California law. It provides that a video game cannot qualify as “violent” unless “the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.”
For better or worse, our society has long regarded many depictions of killing and maiming as suitable features of popular entertainment, including entertainment that is widely available to minors. The California law’s threshold requirement would more closely resemble the limitation in Miller if it targeted a narrower class of graphic depictions.
…
Although our society does not generally regard all depictions of violence as suitable for children or adolescents, the prevalence of violent depictions in children’s literature and entertainment creates numerous opportunities for reasonable people to disagree about which depictions may excite “deviant” or “morbid” impulses.
…
For these reasons, I conclude that the California violent video game law fails to provide the fair notice that the Constitution requires. And I would go no further….
Alito’s reluctance to “go further” is at least in part a dig at what he sees as the majority’s complacency about how threatening video games might be:
In considering the application of unchanging constitutional principles to new and rapidly evolving technology, this Court should proceed with caution. We should make every effort to understand the new technology. We should take into account the possibility that developing technology may have important societal implications that will become apparent only with time. We should not jump to the conclusion that new technology is fundamentally the same as some older thing with which we are familiar…
…
Today’s most advanced video games create realistic alternative worlds in which millions of players immerse themselves for hours on end. These games feature visual imagery and sounds that are strikingly realistic, and in the near future video-game graphics may be virtually indistinguishable from actual video footage. Many of the games already on the market can produce high definition images, and it is predicted that it will not be long before video-game images will be seen in three dimensions. It is also forecast that video games will soon provide sensory feedback. By wearing a special vest or other device, a player will be able to experience physical sensations supposedly felt by a character on the screen. Some amici who support respondents foresee the day when “‘virtual reality shoot-‘em-ups’” will allow children to “‘actually feel the splatting blood from the blown-off head’” of a victim.
Persons who play video games also have an unprecedented ability to participate in the events that take place in the virtual worlds that these games create. Players can create their own video-game characters and can use photos to produce characters that closely resemble actual people. A person playing a sophisticated game can make a multitude of choices and can thereby alter the course of the action in the game. In addition, the means by which players control the action in video games now bear a closer relationship to the means by which people control action in the real world. While the action in older games was often directed with buttons or a joystick, players dictate the action in newer games by engaging in the same motions that they desire a character in the game to perform. For example, a player who wants a video-game character to swing a baseball bat—either to hit a ball or smash a skull—could bring that about by simulating the motion of actually swinging a bat.
Alito certainly paints an alarming picture. But just as Scalia did, he takes his examples too far when he then goes on to describe ultraviolent video games that reenact recent real-life crimes or indulge in homicidally racist fantasies. Such games are quite rare and cater to extremely small niche markets. They should not be treated as relevant to regulation of mainstream entertainment.
And on this point, back in the majority opinion, Scalia responds to Alito in a footnote:
Nor is JUSTICE ALITO correct in attributing to us the view that “violent video games really present no serious problem.” Perhaps they do present a problem, and perhaps none of us would allow our own children to play them. But there are all sorts of “problems”—some of them surely more serious than this one—that cannot be addressed by governmental restriction of free expression: for example, the problem of encouraging anti-Semitism (National Socialist Party of America v. Skokie (1977)), the problem of spreading a political philosophy hostile to the Constitution (Noto v. United States, (1961)), or the problem of encouraging disrespect for the Nation’s flag (Texas v. Johnson, (1989)).
Alito worries that the majority’s opinion may undermine itself in practice:
In this case, the Court’s sweeping opinion will likely be read by many, both inside and outside the video-game industry, as suggesting that no regulation of minors’ access to violent video games is allowed…
Citing the video-game industry’s voluntary rating system, the Court argues that the California law does not “meet a substantial need of parents who wish to restrict their children’s access to violent video games but cannot do so.” The Court does not mention the fact that the industry adopted this system in response to the threat of federal regulation, a threat that the Court’s opinion may now be seen as largely eliminating. Nor does the Court acknowledge that compliance with this system at the time of the enactment of the California law left much to be desired—or that future enforcement may decline if the video-game industry perceives that any threat of government regulation has vanished.
I think this worry is overblown. The Motion Picture Association of America introduced its movie-rating system in the United States as a system of self-regulation that was meant to fend off efforts at government censorship. (The MPAA’s own website is reasonably up-front about this.) The continued absence of government censorship has not led to the collapse of the movie rating system, and there is no reason to think the video game rating system will fare any worse.
Justice Thomas’ dissent
Thomas: Don't talk to his kids
Justice Thomas thinks the California law does not violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech:
The historical evidence shows that the founding generation believed parents had absolute authority over their minor children and expected parents to use that authority to direct the proper development of their children. It would be absurd to suggest that such a society understood “the freedom of speech” to include a right to speak to minors (or a corresponding right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents.
The bulk of his dissenting opinion is a 13-page history of American childrearing customs, from Puritan times to early 19th century. It is somewhat interesting to read, but really seems to have no bearing on the current case. I agree with Scalia, who brushes off Thomas’ dissent in a short footnote:
“JUSTICE THOMAS…denies that persons under 18 have any constitutional right to speak or be spoken to without their parents’ consent. He cites no case, state or federal, supporting this view, and to our knowledge there is none.”
Justice Breyer’s dissent
Breyer begins his dissenting opinion by explaining that, unlike Alito, he does not find the statute vague.
Then he writes:
Like the majority, I believe that the California law must be “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling interest,” without there being a “less restrictive” alternative that would be “at least as effective.”
Breyer: Would defer to the California legislature
But unlike the majority, he believe the law meets that test:
California’s law imposes no more than a modest restriction on expression. The statute prevents no one from playing a video game, it prevents no adult from buying a video game, and it prevents no child or adolescent from obtaining a game provided a parent is willing to help. All it prevents is a child or adolescent from buying, without a parent’s assistance, a gruesomely violent video game of a kind that the industry itself tells us it wants to keep out of the hands of those under the age of 17.
Like Alito, Breyer is especially concerned that the interactive nature of video games could make them harmful. There are studies that come out on all sides of this issue, and Breyer cites so many of them that his opinion includes a lengthy bibliographic index. However:
I, like most judges, lack the social science expertise to say definitively who is right…
But that doubt is actually a key part of his reasoning.
Unlike the majority, I would find sufficient grounds in these studies and expert opinions for this Court to defer to an elected legislature’s conclusion that the video games in question are particularly likely to harm children. This Court has always thought it owed an elected legislature some degree of deference in respect to legislative facts of this kind, particularly when they involve technical matters that are beyond our competence, and even in First Amendment cases.
If video games are dangerous, he says, then the law should stop minors from buying them. He cites an FTC study saying that 20 percent of those under 17 can buy M-rated games. But Scalia has a comeback for that, saying that sales of liquor to minors occur at about the same rate, despite the fact that this too is illegal. The game industry’s voluntary system is about as effective as a law would be.
Breyer thinks parents need all the help they can get, especially when their tech-savvy kids are left at home alone:
Today, 5.3 million gradeschool-age children of working parents are routinely home alone. Thus, it has, if anything, become more important to supplement parents’ authority to guide their children’s development.
The industry also argues for an alternative technological solution, namely “filtering at the console level.” But it takes only a quick search of the Internet to find guides explaining how to circumvent any such technological controls. YouTube viewers, for example, have watched one of those guides (called “How to bypass parental controls on the Xbox 360”) more than 47,000 times.
I just watched the video Breyer mentioned myself while preparing this post, and you can see it yourself above. Parents may find this sort of thing annoying, but they shouldn’t be afraid of it. No matter how tech-savvy the kids may be, parents always hold the nuclear option: “If I ever catch you playing an M-rated game, or if I ever see one in this house, then the X-box is going straight to Goodwill.” There’s no software patch for that.
The people ultimately responsible for parenting are parents. If you aren’t home enough to realize that your kid is immersed in a violent video game that literally takes dozens of hours to complete, then you just aren’t home enough.
Breyer concludes:
I add that the majority’s different conclusion creates a serious anomaly in First Amendment law… [A] State can prohibit the sale to minors of depictions of nudity; today the Court makes clear that a State cannot prohibit the sale to minors of the most violent interactive video games. But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman—bound, gagged, tortured, and killed—is also topless?
Breyer makes a challenging point. This is an anomaly — and it must remain an irksome one for anyone unwilling to accept Alito’s attempt to explain why the law has so far treated depictions of violence and depictions of sex in different ways. But it is worth noting the law does not forbid minors from seeing R-rated movies, either. Theater operators do that, just as retailers restrict the sale of certain games to minors. In line with Scalia’s argument, not every problem requires a state-imposed solution.
The JMEC 17 first place team: Marc Nyhan, Asami Okusawa, Mary Fidler, Kyoko Mikami and Soichi Koshikawa
Japan has often been considered a tough nut for foreign businesses to crack. In 1993, the Australia and New Zealand Chamber of Commerce in Japan decided to do something about that by establishing the Japan Market Expansion Competition, or JMEC. Now supported by 16 foreign chambers of commerce in Japan, it’s a contest in which businesspeople vie to see who can come up with the best plan for a foreign company to successfully introduce a product or service to the Japanese market.
Earlier this month, I attended the awards ceremony for the 17th annual JMEC in Tokyo. There were 10 teams this year. The photo above shows the winning team holding a glass trophy moments after their victory was announced. They had impressed the judges with a business plan they had come up with for Sumitomo 3M Ltd to introduce a certain new product to the Japanese market.
From the comments and demeanor of the people I saw and spoke with at the event, JMEC sounds like a kind of business boot camp (but in a good way).
It was a four-phase program that began in November. In Phase 1, the participants – young or young-ish businesspeople officially described as “English-speaking Japanese and non-Japanese individuals living and working in Japan who have a genuine interest in improving their business skills, broadening their business network and achieving higher career and personal goals” – attend a series of lectures and workshops by more experienced individuals.
This year there were 20 such presentations, on topics such as market research, financial analysis, public relations, meetings and business writing. Rikkyo University Prof. Roy Larke taught the participants about distribution in Japan, Thorsten Meyer of J Walter Thompson spoke about communication, Second Harvest Japan CEO Charles McJilton described how his NPO became a success, and so on.
Australian communications consultant Anthony Fensom, who was on the winning JMEC team in 2004 (and is a friend of mine), told me, “The lectures are really worth attending. I found that worthwhile just by itself.”
“You can read books about Japan, you can read articles, you can watch TV, but if you get lectures from people who are actually out there doing things – who have actually had hands-on experience in the Japanese business environment – that kind of advice is much more valuable than any book or any lecture by an academic that you could go to. So I think that was probably one of the best things about it, the fact that you had lectures from people who know what they are doing,” Fensom said.
After the classroom portion of JMEC, comes Phase 2, in which participants are divided into teams of five or six and assigned to write a business plan for a real-world company that wants to accomplish something in Japan. The firms involved this year included not only the giant Sumitomo 3M but smaller companies such as Internet phone-system provider PBXL and Finnish log home builder Honka. There was even one charity, the Tyler Foundation.
Each team works with a professional mentor. Fensom spoke highly of his team’s mentor, Greg Story. “He’d been in Japan for about 10 or 15 years, worked for Austrade, worked for Shinsei Bank, spoke Japanese pretty well. He was actually quite experienced in Japan. You don’t usually get that kind of access to that kind of knowledge in a regular course you might go to at university,” he said. (Story, now president of Dale Carnegie Japan, was one of the instructors for this year’s JMEC.)
According to the JMEC judges, each team spent a total of about 1,400 hours working on their business plans from January to April. One team put in nearly 2,000 hours. That’s the boot camp part.
But if the plans are good enough, they may be put into actual use. Most of the results are protected by nondisclosure agreements – to my own personal dismay – but JMEC does boast publicly about a couple of past projects. One business with its roots in a JMEC project is GoLloyds, a wire transfer service of which I have been a satisfied customer for years. When I first came to Japan, I had to use postal money orders to send money to the United States. It was a slow and tedious process. But as a GoLloyds customer I can send money to my U.S. account just by pushing a few buttons at a Japanese ATM.
In Phase 3, the participants make their presentations to a panel of judges. Phase 4 is the awards ceremony.
The companies and individuals involved in JMEC must pay to participate. The cost this time was 1.2 million yen for a company and 125,000 yen for a person.
Naturally I wondered where all that money went. I asked and received this reply from JMEC by e-mail : “The funds are used to cover all the operating costs in the given program year, including salaries, course materials, honoraria to mentors/consultants/lecturers, office overhead, the Awards Ceremony, marketing etc. The teams do incur expenses associated with printing the business plans, renting meetings spaces etc., and these are covered by an allowance JMEC gives to each team.”
JMEC finances also include money from the sale of raffle tickets at the awards ceremony, which usually goes toward the following year’s expenses. But “this year was an exception and we are pleased that we have raised 575,000 yen to go toward helping SMEs [small to medium-size enterprises] in Tohoku, which is in the JMEC spirit of helping mostly SMEs thrive in the Japanese market.” The money referred to here was given to an entity called Tohoku New Business Conference. Hopefully it will contribute to the economic recovery of that region, which was devastated by the March 11 tsunami.
Although the JMEC participants are not paid for their labors, they learn a lot and they make potentially valuable connections. According to the JMEC site, at least one participant got a job as a direct result last year, when the company Instant UpRight hired Mari Yamakawa to help implement the plan she and her JMEC team had come up with.
Even though it was hard to find participants this year who were willing to speak on the record – those darn NDAs – most seemed to think the experience had been worthwhile.
At least Fensom was able to tell me this: “It certainly was a challenging program, and I think I’d recommend anyone who is in Japan for a while to do it.”
Vikas Swarup at the Japan Writers Conference
November 11, 2012Vikas Swarup presented a sneak preview of his next novel, “The Accidental Apprentice,” to the Japan Writers Conference in Kyoto yesterday (Nov. 10, 2012). The book will be published in Janaury.
Swarup’s previous novels are “Q&A” (the basis of the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”) and “Six Suspects” (which Swarup mentioned is also in the process of becoming a film).
Swarup, appearing at the Japan Writers Conference for a third consecutive year, gave a reading of the opening pages of “The Accidental Apprentice” before taking questions from conference-goers.
It begins with a young Indian woman named Sapna Sinha sitting in a jail cell, reflecting on how she came to be accused of murder. She traces her troubles back to the day when, on a lunch break from her sales job at an electronics store, she visited a temple seeking expiation over a death for which she feels responsible. (It sounded as if this was not the death that led to her murder charge, but presumably all will be made clear as the novel unfolds.) At the temple, an old man plucked her out of the crowd, introduced himself as a fabulously wealthy industrialist whose companies produce everything “from toothpaste to turbines,” and said he wanted to recruit Sapna as his heir — if she would agree to undergo seven tests. It sounded like a fishy deal, so Sapna sensibly refused. At least, she refused at first…
In the question-and-answer period after the reading, Swarup said he believes it is important to start a story with a strong hook, so readers will stick around to see what happens.
In addition to being a best-selling novelist, Swarup is also the consul-general of India for the Osaka-Kobe area. He therefore referred to himself as a “weekend writer” whose day job keeps him too busy to write during the week. But he cheerily remarked that having a non-writing career freed him from some of the concerns that likely burden full-time fiction writers, such as meeting deadlines or trying to guess the tastes of the market.
All three of his novels so far have been set in India. He said that people in this country sometimes ask why he doesn’t write about Japan. He tells them that if he did, his stories would be all about yakuza gangsters — and his Japanese friends might not like that. But his characters couldn’t be ordinary Japanese people, he says, because they are too nice, calm, polite and orderly to write exciting stories about them.
Spoken like a true diplomat.
Tags:accidental apprentice, Japan Writers Conference, JWC, slumdog millionaire, vikas swarup
Posted in Book reviews and commentary, News | Leave a Comment »