Returning Lost Property

 Via Kottke, this article on return of lost property in Japan.  I'm reminded of some experiments done in this country--IIRC some involved leaving a wallet containing the owner's phone number with some money and seeing whether the wallet was returned, with the money. 

I think maybe it ties in with my recent reading of McManus on the Army's war in the Pacific--how was it possible to motivate Japanese soldiers to die rather than surrender--partially a concern for reputation in the community?  

The last thing I would think of if I found a wallet is whether my actions would be condemned or praised by the community. 

Big Japanese Dairies

A look at the Japanese dairy industry here.

Seems the farms are smaller than US.

Dairy in Japan

Google's official blog has a  post on a big (900 cow) dairy in Japan.

While most/many Asians may be lactose-intolerant, there seems to be enough exceptions to support a dairy industry.

Some googling found this paper by the Japanese Dairy Council which covers the ground from a to z.

A couple highlights--no. of dairy farms has declined from over 400,000 in the 60's to 20,000 in the 2010's, number of cows has been relatively steady at about 1.4 million or so.  Consumption is about half in milk and half in cheese/butter.  For anyone with more stamina than I there's an explanation of how milk is marketed and how the government's subsidy/regulation setup works.

GMO's in Africa

Technology Review has a piece on trials of GMO crops in Tanzania and the possibility African countries are becoming more open to them.  I think this is how change occurs--while humans may resist the new, usually there come times when the advantages of the new outweigh the resistance.

But the example of Japan's resistance to modern firearms cautions that it can take a long time for the advantages to become clear.

Japanese Self-Cleaning Ovens

From Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling we learn that the Japanese have no word for "self-cleaning oven".   That inspired me to search: inquiring minds wanted to know why?  Were all ovens self-cleaning, or what?  This led me to an interesting write-up on Japanese kitchen appliances.

It doesn't directly answer the question, but this is what I read between the lines:

• kitchens are small and appliances are small
• meals are physically small (no Thanksgiving turkey)
• ovens are small (microwaves now)
• ranges are gas (I presume given the size of Japan and population density fuel was never abundant, so no (i.e. "no" = "few') wood/coal stoves for cooking and no transition to electric stoves.

Japan and America

Via Marginal Revolution, a Mental Floss post of 10 tips for Japanese visiting the US.  Provides a glimpse of the cultural differences between the societies.

Japan Agriculture and Cuba Agriculture

A fast check of the CIA factbook shows me that Cuba and Japan have roughly equivalent amounts of arable land.  Cuba is a third the size of Japan, but have about a third of the land arable, while Japan has about 10 percent.  John Phipps points to a piece on Cuba here, which includes the statement that Cuba imports 70 to 80 percent of its food. Meanwhile, Modern Farmer has a piece on Japanese agriculture after the Fukushima tsunami.

Though reforms instituted in the aftermath of World War II had drastically improved the California-size country’s self-sufficiency, the ensuing decades saw farmers abandoning the profession in droves. In 1965, 73 percent of the calories consumed in Japan were being produced there, compared with only 39 percent by 2010. During that same period, the area of land being cultivated had shrunk from 15 million to 11 million acres. The average age of a Japanese farmer climbed from 59 to 66 between 1995 and 2011.[emphasis added]

According to the CIA factbook, Cuba's population is 11 million, Japan's 126 million. Bottom line: Japanese agriculture is several times more productive than Cuba's.

The Culture That Is Japan

Two bits from the news (NYTimes) today, without links unless I get ambitious:

• Apples poor map software in the iPhone 5 hit Japan hard, but they have their own mapping software because it's so important in cities like Tokyo.  Because the city just grew, it doesn't have a system of street naming and house numbering which permits verbal directions; you basically need a map to find your way.
• Ichiro carries 8 bats in a humidity controlled case because it's very important for the bat to be at the right humidity. Apparently a 31 oz bat can increase in weight by .75 oz due to humidity.  It's also revealing when he was playing in Japan as a young man, he broke his bat in anger, and then wrote an apology to the man who made the bat.

Bureaucrat of the Month: Mr. Masao Yoshida

Who is this Yoshida and why does he matter? 

According to this NYTimes article, he was a manager at the Japanese nuclear reactor site hit by the tsunami.  The article reports on a set of videos just released which document the chaos at the site over some days.  But, if I read it correctly, Yoshida was onsite, doing his best to direct workers, getting bad advice and orders from big shots who were ignorant, and generally being a good bureaucrat by this definition: when the environment the bureaucracy was designed to handle goes berserk, a good bureaucrat does her best.  Two paragraphs:

At one point in the videos, as conditions at Reactor No. 3 are deteriorating, raising fears of an explosion, Mr. Yoshida sends a team of workers out from the bunker with this message: “I’m truly sorry. Please proceed with the utmost care.” 

He later suggests that if the situation does not improve soon, he and some older workers will consider “a suicide mission” to pump water into the reactor, a decision officials at headquarters said they would leave to him.

Ginsu: Made in the U.S. of A

Another illusion shattered.  I wonder if the implication of the previous sentence is true: do we start life with a defined set of illusions (Santa Claus, tooth fairy, etc.) and gradually they're shattered one by one so that by the end of life we face reality with no illusions?  Or is the truth that we create new illusions as we lose the old ( housing prices can go up continuously,etc.0 so that I'm now seeing the world through a whole new set of illusions?

Anyhow, the NYTimes has an obit of Barry Becher, in which it reveals the shattering truth: the ginsu knife was made in Ohio.  Not only that, "ginsu" has no meaning in Japanese. 

A tangent: this is interesting.  I remember the first things I ever saw which were made in Japan: a couple cheap mock fighter planes with friction motors, which may not be the right word but when you pushed them along a flat surface, they made an engine like noise.  This was probably 1949 or so, the time when "Japanese" meant "cheap" and "junk", at least if it didn't mean something more hateful.  So from that point to 1978 the image and associations with the word changed completely. Still a bit exotic, but completely believable that Japan could export great knives, which could do miracles.

Exporting Timothy Hay

Via Tyler Cowen, here's a totally totally surprising article from the Seattle Times.

I never in a thousand lifetimes would have expected anyone in the US to make money by exporting timothy hay, but they do, it seems.  The hay on our farm was a mix: timothy, orchard grass, assorted vegetation.  It was not great hay, to say the least.  Apparently this outfit in Washington has great land and can make great timothy hay, hay which looks great, because that seems to be the major criterion for the Japanese who are the leading importers.

The secret is the hay is fed to racehorses (originally here in the US, now in several countries).  So the hay is not important for its nutritional value, it's important for its looks, so the trainer can assure the owner that the horse is only eating the very best, the best because it's greenest.  Given the uncertainty involved in racing, it's like the superstitions ballplayers have, something which gives emotional reassurance to all concerned.

My Loss of Faith in Japan

The Japanese are great engineers, right?  And their society is unified.  And in the face of disaster they cooperate, they don't loot, they work together.

But my faith is severely undermined by this factoid, from a Times piece on the supply of electricity:

In theory, the Tokyo area could import electricity from the south. But a historical rivalry between Tokyo and the city of Osaka led the two areas to develop grids using different frequencies — Osaka’s is 60 cycles and Tokyo’s is 50 cycles — so sharing is inefficient.

 Darn right it would be inefficient.  That's even worse than the division of the US into separate grids, where the Texas grid doesn't really connect with the others so the idea for wind power on the High Plains doesn't work well.  It reminds me of the difference in railroad track gauges which we used to have.  (The Erie Railroad had a wider gauge than others; Southern roads varied.  The idea was to create a monopoly, a niche. It's rather like the difference between Apple and Microsoft: Gates went with open architecture and the advantages of networking; Jobs went with closed architecture and the advantages of specialization.  For years it looked as if Gates had the better argument, but now we're starting to doubt.)