Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

The top story on tonight’s NHK 9:00 p.m. news (following a breaking report about an avalanche in Akita Prefecture) was of the latest outrage from Okinawa. The Japanese government, supposedly the representative of the will of the people, has been caught trying artificially to manufacture that will. Over the last two days, repeated acts of interference by the Tokyo government in local Okinawan elections have come to light. The Japan Times:

A senior Defense Ministry official came under suspicion Wednesday of not only trying to tamper with the upcoming mayoral election in Ginowan but taking similar action in 2010 for a vote in Nago — the two cities in Okinawa deeply connected to the controversial relocation of the Futenma U.S. air base.

(Read the rest of the story here).

Given the ugly history of American and Japanese manipulation of Okinawa, this is hardly surprising. Neither Tokyo nor Washington is willing to admit what has become obvious: the U.S. military occupation of Japan’s southernmost prefecture needs to end. People on the political left were the first to realize this. For example, in a recent update published on Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal, Gavan McCormack, Sakurai Kunitoshi, and Urashima Etsuko recap recent developments in the attempt to force Okinawans to accept a highly unpopular proposal to relocate the Futenma air base to the environmentally delicate Henoko coast.

It seems that folks on the political right are also starting to see the light. Last week, Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a former Reagan administration official, published “Give Okinawa Back to the Okinawans” in that radical rag, Forbes:

Rather than resist Okinawan demands, the U.S. should voluntarily reduce its military presence on the island. Jeffrey Hornung of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies observed: “Given how much problems this is causing in Okinawa, it’s finally time to rethink things.” [...] The U.S. should end its security guarantee and then remove, rather than relocate, its military facilities in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan. Indeed, instead of augmenting its forces elsewhere in East Asia, such as in Australia, Washington should withdraw and demobilize troops and close bases throughout the region. World War II ended 67 years ago. America no longer need guarantee the security of its many prosperous and capable allies.

Indeed.

I’m feeling gorged in contemporary music that eschews the guitar. There is, for starters, the brilliant British charity holiday single by “Cage Against the Machine,” an all-star assemblage of performers gathered in one studio to record an epic cover version of John Cage’s 4’33″ (you know, the one that is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence). It’s all designed to derail the evil Simon Cowell’s vice-grip on the annual competition to top the UK pop charts at Yuletide. It’s been quite successful, and now the inevitable remix versions are available, too. The Guardian has the story here.

Then there is “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” a great new track by Chicago hiphop diva Kid Sister. Scheduled for official release early next year, the song’s been leaked and is available all over the Internet now — including here. Not a guitar in sight: voices, percussion (most of it seemingly synthetic), and a few electronic effects are all you need to produce a very catchy piece of music.

Finally, there are the Agitators, a new band that is emerging as one of the musical voices of the ongoing British student rebellion. They’ve released a couple of singles and have appeared live at several campus protests. The Guardian has a nice feature on the band, which boasts a strict “no guitars” policy. Three voices and drums, and that’s it. “A new kind of music, nothing more than banging, stamping, clapping and voices,” they declare, “something anyone could do anywhere – on a march, at a protest, on the barricades.”

I pick up my guitar and play,
Just like yesterday,
Then I get on my knees and pray,
We won’t get fooled again.

We’re tired of doin’ nothing,
Let’s start marching

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ now-classic 2003 portrait of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. A decade ago Beane led the statistical revolution in contemporary Major League baseball, using computers, the Internet, and statistics to identify sources of talent that were undervalued by traditional baseball wisdom (meaning, primarily, the collective wisdom of scouts) and thereby helping the A’s to consistently field teams that were competitive despite low payrolls.

Beane clearly is a terrific general manager, and the book on the whole offers a good read. But there is also something troubling about it, something I’ll try to put my finger on here. The book identifies Bill James as the heroic pioneer of the new knowledge that Beane exploited, but it seems to me there is a decisive difference between James’ approach to the game and that of Beane and Lewis–a qualitative change in the nature of our enjoyment of baseball. For James in his classic Baseball Abstracts from the 1980s (I was an avid reader from 1983 on), statistics were a tool for identifying more precisely what made Joe Morgan or George Brett such invaluable figures: his focus was on the marvelous skills that major leaguers brandish on the field.

James was interested in fun, while Lewis’ Beane is interested in power–and I don’t mean slugging average. For Beane and Lewis, statistics are weapons to shift power to the general manager. In their version of baseball, the heroes no longer wear spikes on the diamond; instead, they wear cuff links in the front office. You see this new focus in the explosive popularity of fantasy baseball games (which I enjoy as much as anyone), in which participants take pleasure in imagining themselves not as the batter at the plate in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, but rather as a general manager trying to cobble together the best possible roster on a limited budget. The language used in recent editions of Baseball Prospectus (the annual publication that has largely replaced James’ Abstracts) reflects this: veteran players are perceived as suspect malingerers who want only to eat up too much salary.

In Moneyball, this shift is rendered explicit. Lewis quotes A’s executive Sandy Alderson, the man who hired Beane as GM, as saying “What Billy figured out at some point…is that he wanted to be me more than he wanted to be Jose Canseco.” Alderson, according to Lewis, wanted to “concentrate unprecedented powers in the hands of a general manager,” a stance Lewis describes as “rational.” It requires (in Alderson’s words) shedding “player-type prejudices” (pp. 62-63).

This isn’t just a question limited to baseball, I think. Moneyball crystallizes the celebration of what is sometimes called managerial science, a new branch of knowledge. Again, Lewis is explicit on this: the revolution he describes

…set the table for geeks to rush in and take over the general management of the game. Everywhere one turned in competitive markets, technology was offering the people who understood it an edge. What was happening to capitalism should have happened to baseball: the technical man with his analytical magic should have risen to prominence in in baseball management, just as he was rising to prominence on, say, Wall Street. (p. 88)

The essence: an outsider comes in and radically devalues the forms of specialized knowledge accrued by veteran insiders, reshuffles the deck, and thereby improves the bottom line.

Don’t get me wrong: I recognize that this sometimes works. An outsider’s perspective often provides a valuable rethinking of the way things are done in a given field. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in history arose when someone crossed a boundary and transported knowledge developed in one sphere and applied it in a novel manner in a foreign discipline or field.

It can also, however, lead to disaster. The trainwreck that is the Chicago Tribune arriving on my doorstep each morning provides ample evidence of that. Non-journalist managers have destroyed the paper (and the even better Los Angeles Times) by focusing on their outsider’s version of “the bottom line.” George W. Bush, the “Decider,” is another exemplar and proponent of this version of managerial science. Disasters such as the Iraq War, the Katrina bungle, and the banking meltdown are in large measure products of this version of managerial science. Still to come: radical climate change. In each case, the knowledge accrued by specialized experts over decades was disregarded by managers. We increasingly see this same tendency in education at all levels in the U.S.: managers are brought in from outside to improve “the bottom line,” and they proceed by radically devaluing the knowledge produced within the field over decades.

Often, the error comes in the assumption that the new manager knows better than anyone else what the bottom line is. The bottom line for a baseball fan is, I think, enjoyment. The new approach Lewis champions provides its version of enjoyment, but at the expense of other kinds. In sum, the increasing stress on the power of quantitative knowledge is producing a qualitative change in our experience of the game. We see this change in fans, I think: the quality of watching a game at Wrigley Field today is quite different from what it was when I first visited the park in 1984, and the changes has little to do with the lights (another brilliant “innovation” courtesy of the Chicago Tribune Corporation). In 1984 the thought of booing the Cubs was absurd; it is a regular occurrence nowadays.

This also relates to the increasing dominance of the financial sector in our world. Again, Lewis is quite explicit on this. He describes Beane’s sense of triumph when he acquired Nick Swisher in the 2002 amateur draft:

There’s a new thrust about him, an unabridged expression on his face. He was a bond trader, who had made a killing in the morning and entered the afternoon free of fear. Feeling greedy. Certain that the fear in the market would present him with even more opportunities to exploit….Like any good bond trader, he loves making decisions. The quicker the better. (p. 113)

Again we see a new species of hero being manufactured here, one with an “unabridged expression on his face,” whatever the hell that means. Other kinds of heroes are, of course, being displaced: the “fat scout,” for example, who is driven away with his outmoded knowledge (p. 118).

What’s striking in Moneyball is that the book unconsciously presents a counterargument to its own thesis. Billy Beane’s rise as a general manager is in fact due to the experience he acquired as a (largely failed) major league prospect. The book narrates this as a prime instance of the failings of the “old” knowledge it aims to devalue, but it is Beane’s experience on the field that opened his eyes to the value of certain statistics. The book downplays the ways in which Beane’s knowledge is acquired the old-fashioned way: through hard work on the baseball diamond and the acquisition of “player-type biases.” He wasn’t just a geek with a computer.

The value of so-called managerial science is the opportunity it provides to recognize the limits of existing forms of knowledge. Its disasters come likewise when it fails to recognize the existence of its own limits. Sometimes, the “bottom line” isn’t as clear cut as Lewis and his ilk believe. It’s often more enjoyable to be a fan of a losing team than it is to cheer on a championship club. Why? Because it’s fun.

[Postscript (2 December 2010): I've now read a bit more of the book, and the early hints at giddy celebration of finance capitalism have grown even more explicit. It's almost quaint today to read passages such as the following, celebrating the scientific overcoming of risk by the managerial wizards who invented arcane derivatives: "The fantastic sums of money hauled in by the sophisticated traders transformed the culture on Wall Street, and made quantitative analysis, as opposed to gut feel, the respectable way to go about making bets in the market. The chief economic consequence of the creation of derivative securities was to price risk more accurately, and distribute it more efficiently, than ever before in the long, risk-obsessed history of financial man" (p. 130) That old "fat scout" sounds better and better with each page I read....]

It’s been a jumbled week, with little time for arranging thoughts into anything so orderly as sentences.

A week ago Thursday, I made my first visit of the season to Symphony Center to see Jaap van Zweden lead the local favorites in a very fine program of Mahler, Shostakovich, and John Luther Adams. Both Andrew Patner of the Sun-Times and and John von Rhein of the Tribune loved the Shostakovich but had reservations about the Adams and the Mahler, but I heard it the other way around. My usual bad taste, of course.

Adams’ “Dark Waves” was a hypnotic piece, a single sustained wave of sound that develops details of texture and dynamics across its twelve minutes. Adams was in the house and took a bow with the orchestra after the piece. The Mahler consisted of four songs from his “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” in which the composer wears his charming hat, as opposed to his bombastic helmet (think, for example, of the last movement from his Fourth Symphony). Measha Brueggergosman was the guest vocalist, and she performed with grace and wit. Patner and von Rhein complained about her vocal chops, but my only fear was that we might all be blinded: she wore a shiny all-platinum dress and I thought somebody might take a flash picture. The program closed with Shostakovich’s magnificent (and seldom played) Symphony No. 8 in C minor. The local newspaper critics both fall over themselves in their rush to praise the performance, but I thought the long first movement was rather perfunctory. It did come to life in the latter half, though, with particularly brilliant performances from the woodwinds.

I’ll be back to see the Chicago Symphony again in early December, when Pierre Boulez conducts Janáček and Schoenberg: more glorious twentieth-century classical. I can’t wait.

In the meanwhile, out there in the world there appears to have been an election of some sort. Why anyone would hand the keys back to the same people who crashed the car two years ago is a mystery to me, but then again democracy always is a little bit mysterious.

David Byrne, in the meanwhile, is marrying folks in NYC. Stew is out on the road, playing gigs (he’ll be here in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art next week). And Dave Davies makes it painfully clear that the Kinks won’t be reuniting anytime soon.

Older brother Ray, on the other hand, continues touring in Europe. Let me leave you with some fan video from Sunday night in Paris and Monday night in Amsterdam. Here’s hoping next week is a quiet one, for you and me both.

My translation of a recent commentary by Wada Haruki on the Senkaku/Daioyu Islands territorial dispute between Japan and China has just appeared in the on-line Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Wada, an emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo, is one of Japan’s leading historians of Korea and Japan-Korea relations.

Wada provides useful analysis of the recent flare-up that occurred after Japan seized a Chinese fishing boat off the coast of the islands. He then goes on to trace the tangled history of territorial claims to the islands, before concluding:

Given the present situation, haven’t we reached the point where we need to acknowledge the existence of this territorial dispute, where both sides should exchange and investigate in detail their respective claims? It is foolish for both sides to continue to assert “exclusive territorial rights” over these remote uninhabited islands. Extensive discussions should be held to determine how best to view the historical developments that led to the current situation. These should lead to proposals for a resolution to the dispute. Until then, both governments also need to discuss in realistic terms how the movement of fishing boats will be controlled in the interim. This is the sort of approach that is called for now.

There are three ongoing territorial disputes in Northeast Asia: the four islands of the Northern Territories [disputed between Russia and Japan], Dokdo/Takeshima [known in English as the Liancourt Rocks, disputed between Japan and South Korea], and the Senkaku Islands. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to gather scholars from Russia, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, China, Taiwan and the U.S. to engage in an overarching discussion that dealt with all of these disputes together? Above all, it is crucial to avoid having these burst into open conflict.

You can real Wada’s whole essay in English here (Japanese and Korean versions here).

Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus has run other recent essays on the territorial dispute, include pieces by Tanaka Sakai and Peter Lee.

I’m a little behind the curve on this story, but the Neojaponisme website has a fine postmortem report on the the recent closing of the HMV Store in Shibuya, Tokyo. W. David Marx analyzes the shifting role the influential music retailer played in the years after it first opened in 1990, becoming headquarters for what came to be called Shibuya-kei rock. The shop later lost its unique position of authority, however, and Marx suggests that its demise is due less to the rise of digital file-sharing and more to tectonic shifts in the structure of contemporary Japanese youth culture. As he aptly notes, “Popular music, more than ever in Japan, is an expensive hobby,” and after paying their cellphone bills kids today simply don’t have that kind of money to throw around.

He pontificates:

In retrospect, the vaunted “liberal consensus” that dominated postwar American culture began breaking down in the 1970s. Richard Nixon in many ways represented both its culmination and its collapse: the former right-wing anti-Communist ended up presiding over the last wave of Great Society projects, but Nixon also helped engineer the liberal consensus’s downfall. He was, after all, the author of the Southern Strategy, designed to exploit racial tensions to split white voters away from their century-long adherence to the Democratic Party. Reagan, of course, solidified the new conservative consensus, and it reached its pinnacle ironically with the end of the Cold War (which was the final fruit of the liberal consensus) but I think Nixon was its real author.

After all, it was in the Nixon years that Milton Friedman and others published papers that challenged the liberal orthodoxy of Keynesian economics, providing what seemed at the time a more persuasive account for the mystery of simultaneous high rates of inflation and unemployment. Market forces, deregulation, and tax cuts became the new mantra.

It seems pretty clear that we’ve come to another turning point in American culture. The conservative consensus that has dominated public and media opinion (albeit not in the realms of cultural or intellectual life) for nearly forty years is in full-blown collapse: now it is Friedman’s economic theory that suddenly seems useless to explain the current economic crisis. The Southern Strategy increasingly looks like an anchor around the neck of the Republican Party, as it alienates every group in the country except for aging white conservatives. The death throes of the Conservative Consensus are ugly, as its proponents cling to its fading guarantees and lash out in hysterical anger at those who point out its failings. And just as was the case with the liberal consensus after its loss of hegemony, the aftereffects of the conservative version will no doubt linger in public discourse for the next decade or longer.

The fast approaching end of the Conservative Consensus seems pretty clear. What isn’t so clear is the nature of the new consensus that would emerge to take its place: what we see right now is an absence of any consensus. Things could go in any direction, I think. On bad days, I am struck by the resemblance between contemporary America and 1930s Germany and Japan: widepsread economic distress, palpable loss of faith in democracy and a concomitant blind worship of the military’s supposed competence, the rise of populist demagogues fanning hatred against impoverished minority groups (Father Coughlin, meet Rush Limbaugh), their more radical supporters arming themselves and forming quasi-militia that lack only brown shirts. It’s also striking how the rhetoric of the Cold War (Communist! Socialist!) is being revived today, a recycling of the slogans that helped the liberal consensus gain traction forty years ago recycled now in a desperate attempt to plug the leaks in the sinking ship of the conservative consensus.

The election of Obama seemed to promise the rise of a new progressive, or perhaps technocratic, consensus, but he has mostly weasled away from that (yes, that statement apparently makes me a member of the “professional left”). As a result, there seems no clear candidate on hand from the left or the center for replacing the failing conservative consensus. The U.S. currently faces enormous problems–rampant poverty and an increasingly immoral economic system that steers wealth into the hands of a tiny elite; environmental and infrastructural meltdown; simultaneous decay of our primary, secondary, and tertiary educational systems; the rise of a plutocracy in which corporations and wealthy individuals blatantly buy up elections and branches of government, to name just a few–and effective solutions will require a new consensus. The great American experiment with democracy has muddled through crises in the past; does it have the ability to pull off one more revival?

The powers-that-be in the world of sumo have backed themselves into a corner. The artificially inflated ethical standards that were invoked to dethrone the foreign yokozuna Asashoryu now prove unattainable for the Japanese-born wrestlers and managers. In particular, the holier-than-thou attitude that developed over the past few years has now inadvertently provoked a major piling on in the mass media at the latest scandal, which involves the newly exposed gambling habits of dozens of current and former wrestlers.

Gambling by athletes is undoubtedly a problem. Given that it is illegal, it necessarily involves them with unsavory characters (in Japan, that means the yakuza), and it opens up the potential of players falling deeply in debt and throwing matches in return for clearing the slate. The lifetime ban of Pete Rose in American baseball for betting on the sport in which he played a central role was entirely appropriate, even if no evidence emerged that he attempted to rig the outcomes of games.

On this basis, some of the wrestlers named in current media reports deserve punishment, perhaps even banning. But a witch-hunt atmosphere of hysteria has now set in, and even wrestlers who occasionally bet in private hanafuda card games between wrestlers are being singled out for media pillorying. The Nagoya tournament is supposed to get underway in a couple of weeks, but now that is up in the air. Will it be canceled? If it goes forward, will NHK broadcast it? Will ozeki Kotomitsuki be banned for life from the sport?

There’s an old adage: be careful what you wish for. For years, cranky sumo observers in Japan upset with foreign dominance yearned for the sport to be “cleaned up.” Congratulations, folks: your wish has come true. I only hope the sport survives it.

Watching the World Cup matches from South Africa–including this morning’s anxiety-provoking U.S. 1-0 victory over Algeria to advance us into the second round–and reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, I’ve frequently been reminded of my teen-age years, spent as a fervent follower of the North American Soccer League’s Minnesota Kicks. Several of the Arsenal players that show up in Hornby’s memoir–Geoff Barnett and Charley George, for starters–played for the beloved Kicks. Certainly the greatest sports moment of my youth was the evening I watched the Kicks demolish the dreaded New York Cosmos 9-2 in a playoff game, with Alan Willey alone scoring five goals for us.

Watching the games from South Africa, I’ve been in particular fondly recalling #11, midfielder Patrick “Ace” Ntsoelengoe, probably the finest South African footballer of all time. The BBC recently named him “The Greatest Player You Never Saw,” but if you were a Minnesota soccer fan in the late 1970s, you were lucky enough to witness his remarkable dribbling and passing skills. I remember in particular a spectacular scissors kick shot on goal from 1977: it didn’t go in, unfortunately, but it was one of the flashiest moves I’ve ever seen. Ace was the heart of the Kicks from 1976-1981–and he returned home to South Africa in the off-season to play for the Kaiser Chiefs there (or was it the other way around? Were we the off-season team?). He scored more than fifty goals in his Minnesota years, and for budding soccer players and fans in the Upper Midwest, he was our primary model for what made the beautiful game so pretty.

Ntsoelengoe sadly passed away from a heart attack in 2006. How much he would have enjoyed watching his own national team knocking off the French yesterday! Sigh.

Forgive my bout of wistful nostalgia, please, and return with me now to 1978 and Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a fine late summer’s night dream.

For the most part, I accept the thesis — argued, for example, by Nicholas Carr (thanks for the link, Linda) — that the Internet is making us all stupid and asocial. On my visit to Japan a couple of months ago, a friend put her finger precisely on why reading text on a computer screen is less satisfying than reading a book: when we pursue virtual reading, we enter into the same mental frame as when we watch television.

And yet, and yet…. This afternoon in my office on campus, I took a break from stultifying end-of-the-year administrative work to watch the second half of the Uruguay-France World Cup match being streamed live by ESPN. A so-so game (Uruguay’s defense was the highlight, and you know how exciting defensive soccer can be), I was still thrilled to be watching it in my office, thanks to the Internet.

The first World Cup I followed was in 1978, well before the rise of the Internet or even cable television. As I recall, that year only the final championship game was shown on American television–and at a taped delay, at that. During the 1982 tournament, I was luckier: I was doing the backpack-through-Europe thing and watched games at pubs, youth hostels and train stations across the continent. I was in Frankfort staying with cousins for the final match between Italy and West Germany, and I remember all the Gastarbeiter waiters and janitors from Italy exploding onto the streets of Frankfort to celebrate their team’s win–and to rub it in the faces of their employers.

In subsequent tournaments, cable television kicked in, giving us futbol-ignorant Americans better and better access each time around. Now we get it streamed live over the Internet so that we can watch it in the office, on trains, in coffee shops.

Perhaps not all change is completely bad. Maybe stupidity and alienation are a small price to pay. I’ll have to mull on those thoughts a while longer, if my Internet-addled brain can hold the problem in focus long enough. In the meanwhile, I’ll be setting my alarm clock to get up early tomorrow morning to watch South Korea play Greece, followed by the U.S. taking on England for the first time since the great 1950 upset match, still the greatest moment in American soccer history.