Brain dump, 2025-05-21

(I’ve been experimenting with dictating and lightly editing thoughts to make sense of stuff; this is the first and probably longest example.)

I started reading Craig Mod’s excellent Things Become Other Things, and it got me thinking about all sorts of stuff.

One is a character in Nick Harkaway‘s Gnomon, who has a disorder that means she perceives the world through effectively her own simulation: it’s close enough to the real world that she can function in it, but it’s skewed somewhat from reality, and occasionally she will veer hard left into paranoid attacks that leave her incapable of functioning.

And that in turn made me think of a New York Times journalist called Pico Iyer, who’s acquired—calling it a mythos would be to give it a green car seat—let’s call it a debris cloud of assumptions. He’s lived in Japan for 25 years but doesn’t speak the language because it would impede his sense of wonder at the place, apparently lives on a tourist visa that he renews every three months by presumably exiting the country and returning, And I assume he has facilitators to handle his interactions with the mechanisms of life.

What got me thinking about this was the chapter earlier in Craig’s book about his feelings on coming to Japan for the first time and finding how it worked so differently from the hollowing out US manufacturing town that he grew up in, this sense of being able to perceive the world as the same but it not working how our assumptions might tell us.

And that leads to the suspicion about Iyer that he’s seeing something and interpreting it through his own filter but getting it wrong because he doesn’t actually understand what’s there unless it’s explained to him in English (I guess he’s also ignoring things like Google Translate’s camera function, and remaining wilfully ignorant).

There’s also a sort-of parallel with what we do when we make software, in that we drag the world into a simulation (not in the Elon Musk sense) that’s an idealised millimetre left of the real world, hopefully without the paranoid attacks. The unfortunately valid assumption here is that software can try to impose a worldview, to make policy (yes DOGE, this means you) when it ought to be facilitating.

All of this also led me in a bit of a non sequitur to think about the UK Labour government’s approach to immigration policymaking, which seems to follow the trash panda model whereby you assimilate all of the garbage that’s floating around in your environs and then shit it out as policy. The fact that they could talk about an “island of strangers” without critically thinking about the resonance with Enoch Powell‘s rivers of blood suggests a bunch of people who are also living in their own simulation and trying to drag the world to something that may be several more millimetres left of where it actually is, or at least that’s where their imagined voter lives.

Why is it that we should demonise immigrants? It isn’t that hard to realise that when inequality peaks and none of the money is at the bottom, it’s easier to blame somebody for that than to redistribute the wealth. But the fact that it’s easy to blame immigrants and other marginalised communities means that there is a residual fear of and resentment of the other bubbling under and waiting to be tapped into. It would be good if our society could learn to cope with migration and the assimilation of outside influence without treating it as some sort of pathogen.

“The only organisations in Japan that can turn a vague goal dumped on them by the government into reality are the Self-Defence Force and Dentsu. And maybe Pasona.”

This goes back to my feeling that the government doesn’t *do* anything; it says “our goal is to do xxx,” and expects someone else to back that out into a coherent plan and execute it.

More notes on the LDP:

A major source of public anger is the fact that the government’s pandemic response hasn’t evolved: it’s focused on “asking people (local governments, companies, medical institutions, etc) to do things,” while the quid pro quo of subsidies, cash handouts, planning of vaccination logistics, and so forth has been ignored, or subject to a lot of foot-dragging and red tape.

It feels like this is a microcosm of Japan’s governance as a state: a pyramid with government/bureaucracy at the top, companies in the middle, and the populace at the bottom. (One could put “local governments” in the middle segment too, perhaps?) Essentially, the central government is there to “order people to do stuff” when needed but doesn’t really…function in the way one might expect? Ie, it’s there to tell people what to do, while companies (etc) get on with the task of doing things, and occasionally lobby the government for rules that help them do those things.

(I know this is incomplete, imperfect, and naive; but I’m trying to pick apart the failure to act and what drives the reluctance, aside from the conflicting goals that increase reluctance to make decisions - ie no decision will be “successful” because it has to satisfy two contradictory criteria, of keeping the economy going and preventing the spread of the virus.)

There is also the issue of “those on the front lines know best,” or an inability to divide responsibility appropriately between the front lines and a central command, with the former feeding back accurate information to the latter and enabling an overarching strategy to be developed. I use the military metaphor advisedly because the way the central government has on the one hand made every local authority a mini-government and expected it to fulfil all the functions of the central government, while at the same time arguing with these local authorities for not doing things right despite a lack of resources, is reminiscent of the Battle of Nomonhan, the Japanese defeat at the hands of the USSR early in WWII.

- Abe endorses Suga’s performance because he’s the successor most likely to complete the mission of advancing constitutional reform

- Support for constitutional reform has a strong generational bias - older demographics are mostly for it, younger against

Reform has a strong aura of misdirection: the headline issue is Article 9 and explicitly including the JSDF, but that’s inherently contradictory; all it would do is allow Japan to participate in (US-led?) military operations overseas, which goes against the stated goal of “escaping from the US-imposed constitution”.

- Real goal of reform appears to be a return to the “good old days” in which the constitution didn’t exist to limit the power of the government (see e.g. this).

However, this is incredibly delusional, specifically the notion of a unity of purpose between government and populace lasting for the decade through Japan’s WWII defeat, as Noah Smith discusses here.

The real goal appears to be making it easier to limit public freedom and concentrate authority on the central government, specifically the PM’s office, as the extension of a multi-year exercise in consolidating power in the Kantei and specifically the PM (see e.g. this article by Haru Takenaka of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies).

The justification for the latest attempt to get a referendum bill through parliament (which given the LDP majority will presumably pass) appears to be that the government needs the power to do more than ask for stuff to control the pandemic, though this is also pretty convoluted, and has been met with widespread scepticism.

The main response, naturally, has been along the lines of “probably learn to play the guitar before you ask for a more expensive guitar”. I.e., while the government started out with some pretty clear messaging that got across the urgency of social distancing and avoiding the “three Cs” (and cash handouts both to households and businesses, though the latter were in some cases less than generous) it then diluted it with a travel and eating out campaign and a dual agenda of opening up and preventing infections that encouraged indecision.

The central government also didn’t appear to learn from the US and UK’s experience with their vaccine rollouts, instead offloading the planning to local governments who lacked the necessary resources and experience and creating generalised confusion and massive duplication of effort. It only took the lead in setting up mass vaccination centres and bringing in Self-Defence Force medics to supplement healthcare professionals after a third state of emergency declaration in March prompted a spike in public discontent. (As of 7 May, only around 2% of the population had received at least one vaccine shot; the mass vaxxing centres come online later in May.)

In extending the ongoing state of emergency (until 31 May), PM Suga at last stated on 7 May the target of vaccinating a million people a day and of getting shots to the under-65s starting in June. Whether this is achievable (previous targets for testing, for example, have not been met) remains to be seen; the central government’s attempts thus far to accelerate the rollout have reportedly mostly involved telling local authorities to pull their finger out. However, the fact that Suga cited the UK’s success in using vaccines to bring down infections is a positive sign in terms of getting the messaging around the rollout on track.

So to sum up, it looks like the kids of the ruling generation that presided over Japan’s wartime defeat and didn’t like the result are trying to ram through at least a referendum on the view that the pandemic represents their last good opportunity/excuse for the foreseeable future. But it feels unlikely to succeed, in that (1) it will come across as another case of the government mixing up its priorities unless the vaccine rollout proceeds, and (2) if the rollout does succeed, the rationale for enshrining more drastic measures in the constitution would diminish.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. Shockingly ignorant or wilfully blind? Link to tweet.

Love this. Part Koyaanisquatsi, part Palla.

Online ticket sales for The Force Awakens started in Japan at midnight today. And ended very shortly thereafter when the booking servers got hosed (they’re still not back to normal as of 12:40).

It is at times like this that one is grateful for friends who work next to IMAX cinemas and can slip out to purchase real-world tickets.

The Atlantic, on What ISIS Really Wants; and the Muslim response.