Did Toyota's Prius get Japanese government money?
That question has stirred up some talk.
It started with a Business Week report, which quotes a former Toyota executive as saying that it did.
That comment was just one line at the end of a long article.
But a person I got to know through blogging pointed it out.
So naturally I had to at least try and ask Toyota.
That produced this article.
Reaction was instantaneous:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Just some above and there's a lot more, including the response from Toyota U.S. on its official blog, and a response from Business Week.
And another.
For me, it was this reaction that got me thinking I should get busy and find out, producing this story.
Also on Prius online.
The account with updates on this blog, and this one.
Topping it all, perhaps, in potential controversy is this.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
Ikiru
Poetry 2 entry reworked:
When you cut your finger against the end of a piece of paper, and it hurts and the blood spurts out, you remember blood, lots of it, curdling red ink with a sweaty smell, is rushing around your body, all of it, brain, eyeballs, cell tissue, spine, toes, your heart is pumping like quivering red rubber and your lungs are going in and out, in and out.
When you stop to think about it, you want to scream and you almost forget how to breathe.
People who believe in Reincarnation say it would be a waste of lives to have so many people alive and then die and so god must recycle all those lives.
It is nothing short of a miracle we continue to live everyday despite all the deaths everyday. And each one of us is dying gradually everyday.
But for the most part, we don't get shot, we don't get run over, we don't crash, we don't get a deadly disease, we don't get stabbed, beaten to death, crushed in an earthquake, commit suicide, and we live live live live.
And each day adds to the next day and pretty soon we are old but still we live and we don't think about the blood circulating or the each and every breath we take or the fact that we have averted death for the moment.
We are alive.
But we could at any moment take a long silver needle and poke it in our eye, blinding ourselves in blinding rage.
We could jump into the wind from the station platform as the train glides in with a rattle, although the mirror is there to remind us how ghostly we look and make us think again how foolish this act is that we are contemplating to die this moment instead of the next moment when we do get shot or get cancer or our hearts stop or our lungs fail.
My mother is dying of pancreas cancer, and I can finally smell death, that unmistakable stench that sticks inside your nostrils for hours, maybe even a day, trailing you from the hospice room.
She has lost so much weight she looks like a bird, her nose pointed like a beak in a mummified face.
She lies curled up in the bed, her arms clasped into herself, a scrawny embryonic chick in a nest, and her beady eyes are expressionless, unmoving, staring into your eyes, and she won't close them because she knows you are her daughter and these may be the last moments, and she needs to look, but you just want her to close her eyes so you can leave and forget.
She couldn't even speak then.
When she could still move, when she was at the hospital, not the hospice, where patients are getting treatment to live, she was just a burden on the nurses and they want her to move to a hospice, she would grow delirious on pain-killers and start walking around the hallways naked, announcing: She must leave now because Otoosama _ her husband, my father _ has arrived to get her.
My father is dead.
Before that, when she was still undergoing tests, and she had always instructed us she never wanted to know it, if she ever got cancer, and so we couldn't tell her, she says to me: "I wasn't a very good mother, was I?"
This is a very important conversation.
But I brush it off. I don't want to talk about this, do I? because then wouldn't we be talking about her death?
"I watch you and your sister, how the both of you think about and interact with your children," she says. "And I realize I wasn't a good parent. I know this watching the both of you as parents."
She goes on, matter of fact, her father, was a big believer in education and sent all his children, even the daughters, unusual for those times in Japan, to urban schools.
My mother was second from the youngest so she was barely in elementary school when she was sent to live away from home with her sisters and brothers to go to good schools.
And so she grew up never knowing the intimacy of a relationship between a mother and child.
She doesn't have to apologize. And I should reach out and hug her, but all I remember is how she never stopped him, her husband, my father, when he beat me, how I had to cower, never apologizing, and all she did was sit quietly and pray and be patient and believe the anger will pass like a typhoon, leaving behind just tiny purple bruise marks on sallow skin, as sanity returns to the Ph. D. in engineering, professor, salaryman, head of the household, and all would be well.
He needs a break from work, it is stressful, he needs to go the family beach villa.
She has already made arrangement, and I must go with him, the ever faithful daughter, because he can't go alone.
"It can't be me. It must be you," she says, as though this is decided, ironing the white shirts and folding them on top of each other on the tatami mat.
She doesn't tell me until years later. She worried about me every day, praying he wasn't beating me.
He didn't beat me. We took turns rowing a wooden boat. We went fishing til our fingers smelled like worms. We lowered cages into the water with fish heads, and drew them up to find crabs entangled with each other.
But I can't forgive, not just yet, though no one has to apologize.
I call my sister on the train back from the hospital.
"She is going to die," I say, breathless, more from excitement than from sadness. She is dying but she is realizing and she is changing.
What she is saying is so profound she had to be dying. Really dying.
It should have been like the movies.
I should have forgiven her, a moment of reconciliation before the moment of death.
You are a good mother.
Remember all the Ryunosuke Akutagawa stories you read to me in the kitchen, but you told me the stories I wrote, secretly, in big block letters in a worn out notebook were petty and would never amount to anything?
Remember how you wanted to go back to school for your Master's degree, but you had to cook and clean and you gave up?
Remember how you won awards with those elaborate sumi calligraphy on rice paper, painting ancient words no one could read?
Remember how you sat naked in the bath tub, thinking your solitary thoughts, and you hated your husband, my father, because he bought you the wrong-size ring in an overseas business trip?
Today, you taught me how people keep evolving til the last moment of life.
No, you are not a bad mother at all.
This is the best gift you have given me.
I have learned the lesson of death although I still can't understand how we manage to keep living day by day, lungs breathing and heart beating and you feel so faraway and I can't remember barely anything else about you.
When you cut your finger against the end of a piece of paper, and it hurts and the blood spurts out, you remember blood, lots of it, curdling red ink with a sweaty smell, is rushing around your body, all of it, brain, eyeballs, cell tissue, spine, toes, your heart is pumping like quivering red rubber and your lungs are going in and out, in and out.
When you stop to think about it, you want to scream and you almost forget how to breathe.
People who believe in Reincarnation say it would be a waste of lives to have so many people alive and then die and so god must recycle all those lives.
It is nothing short of a miracle we continue to live everyday despite all the deaths everyday. And each one of us is dying gradually everyday.
But for the most part, we don't get shot, we don't get run over, we don't crash, we don't get a deadly disease, we don't get stabbed, beaten to death, crushed in an earthquake, commit suicide, and we live live live live.
And each day adds to the next day and pretty soon we are old but still we live and we don't think about the blood circulating or the each and every breath we take or the fact that we have averted death for the moment.
We are alive.
But we could at any moment take a long silver needle and poke it in our eye, blinding ourselves in blinding rage.
We could jump into the wind from the station platform as the train glides in with a rattle, although the mirror is there to remind us how ghostly we look and make us think again how foolish this act is that we are contemplating to die this moment instead of the next moment when we do get shot or get cancer or our hearts stop or our lungs fail.
My mother is dying of pancreas cancer, and I can finally smell death, that unmistakable stench that sticks inside your nostrils for hours, maybe even a day, trailing you from the hospice room.
She has lost so much weight she looks like a bird, her nose pointed like a beak in a mummified face.
She lies curled up in the bed, her arms clasped into herself, a scrawny embryonic chick in a nest, and her beady eyes are expressionless, unmoving, staring into your eyes, and she won't close them because she knows you are her daughter and these may be the last moments, and she needs to look, but you just want her to close her eyes so you can leave and forget.
She couldn't even speak then.
When she could still move, when she was at the hospital, not the hospice, where patients are getting treatment to live, she was just a burden on the nurses and they want her to move to a hospice, she would grow delirious on pain-killers and start walking around the hallways naked, announcing: She must leave now because Otoosama _ her husband, my father _ has arrived to get her.
My father is dead.
Before that, when she was still undergoing tests, and she had always instructed us she never wanted to know it, if she ever got cancer, and so we couldn't tell her, she says to me: "I wasn't a very good mother, was I?"
This is a very important conversation.
But I brush it off. I don't want to talk about this, do I? because then wouldn't we be talking about her death?
"I watch you and your sister, how the both of you think about and interact with your children," she says. "And I realize I wasn't a good parent. I know this watching the both of you as parents."
She goes on, matter of fact, her father, was a big believer in education and sent all his children, even the daughters, unusual for those times in Japan, to urban schools.
My mother was second from the youngest so she was barely in elementary school when she was sent to live away from home with her sisters and brothers to go to good schools.
And so she grew up never knowing the intimacy of a relationship between a mother and child.
She doesn't have to apologize. And I should reach out and hug her, but all I remember is how she never stopped him, her husband, my father, when he beat me, how I had to cower, never apologizing, and all she did was sit quietly and pray and be patient and believe the anger will pass like a typhoon, leaving behind just tiny purple bruise marks on sallow skin, as sanity returns to the Ph. D. in engineering, professor, salaryman, head of the household, and all would be well.
He needs a break from work, it is stressful, he needs to go the family beach villa.
She has already made arrangement, and I must go with him, the ever faithful daughter, because he can't go alone.
"It can't be me. It must be you," she says, as though this is decided, ironing the white shirts and folding them on top of each other on the tatami mat.
She doesn't tell me until years later. She worried about me every day, praying he wasn't beating me.
He didn't beat me. We took turns rowing a wooden boat. We went fishing til our fingers smelled like worms. We lowered cages into the water with fish heads, and drew them up to find crabs entangled with each other.
But I can't forgive, not just yet, though no one has to apologize.
I call my sister on the train back from the hospital.
"She is going to die," I say, breathless, more from excitement than from sadness. She is dying but she is realizing and she is changing.
What she is saying is so profound she had to be dying. Really dying.
It should have been like the movies.
I should have forgiven her, a moment of reconciliation before the moment of death.
You are a good mother.
Remember all the Ryunosuke Akutagawa stories you read to me in the kitchen, but you told me the stories I wrote, secretly, in big block letters in a worn out notebook were petty and would never amount to anything?
Remember how you wanted to go back to school for your Master's degree, but you had to cook and clean and you gave up?
Remember how you won awards with those elaborate sumi calligraphy on rice paper, painting ancient words no one could read?
Remember how you sat naked in the bath tub, thinking your solitary thoughts, and you hated your husband, my father, because he bought you the wrong-size ring in an overseas business trip?
Today, you taught me how people keep evolving til the last moment of life.
No, you are not a bad mother at all.
This is the best gift you have given me.
I have learned the lesson of death although I still can't understand how we manage to keep living day by day, lungs breathing and heart beating and you feel so faraway and I can't remember barely anything else about you.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Hiromichi Sakamoto
Hiromichi Sakamoto killed a cello today.
In a tent set up in a Tokyo park, he stuck his cello into a fire and played it as it got engulfed in flames.
He had to dodge a fiery burst that shot up from the instrument, scorching his big hair.
Sakamoto then hung the burning cello by a chain from the ceiling, letting it dangle, Jesus being crucified, gloriously dying for our sins, sending the pungent smell of charring resin and smoke into our throats.
It was both strangely comical and painfully sad to witness.
Before, throughout the two-hour performance, Sakamoto brutalized the instrument with a vehemence, scraping it, banging it, scribbling with a pencil on it.
He took a drill and graced its metal parts, sending sparks that made aerial patterns in the dark.
In defacing the instrument, we reject culture/lifestyle/instrument, as well as the basic presumption that we must follow social standards/rules/views.
Sakamoto's performance piece, which also includes modern dance, poetry readings, singing and video, gives a startling voice to the confrontation of the previous generation by the younger generation of Japan today.
You are great, oh, Father, one singer who read and played the guitar Michiro Endo bellowed in a scratchy voice.
You built this nation, worked hard to give us a better life, built this utopia, but we now have no utopia, the song said.
In the same vein, the reading by singer/novelist Mieko Kawakami was about why you can't pee in the bathtub.
Who are you, mother? she asked. Did you come here so you could tell us not to pee in the tub.
The disenchantment is clear with what the past has so dutifully and properly prepared for today.
Shattered is the stereotype of the lethargic, uncommitted youth of today, who just want to be "freeters."
Instead, the youngsters are telling the older generation: "You fucked up."
In Japan, it's the 1960s/1970s generation of America questioning the 1950s parents' generation all over again, except it's happening now.
We don't want the affluence, the meaninglessness, the dos and don'ts you have built for us, they are saying.
We are left without our own culture, being fed the imitative forms of an alien Western art.
There is no chance for a better life by definition because modernization is over.
And there's no point in putting up a fight, anyway.
There is only the void.
And so the cello must die.
Sitting in the tent packed with 300 people, I am present in a historic moment in contemporary Japanese art, something people will talk about years from today.
It is so Japanese to feel so acutely the dilemma of the individual vs. society, while sensing the nearness of death that wakes up the urgency and reality of living in every breath we take.
At the end of the piece, the tent behind the stage opens, revealing the landscape of the park at night.
The performers are lined up, looking at us solemnly, a quiet reminder that we, who witnessed the cello die, gasping, teary-eyed, intrigued, guilt-ridden, are partners in crime, caught in this tiny unreal space and moment _ maybe just for now, maybe forever _ separated from the everyday outside world.
In a tent set up in a Tokyo park, he stuck his cello into a fire and played it as it got engulfed in flames.
He had to dodge a fiery burst that shot up from the instrument, scorching his big hair.
Sakamoto then hung the burning cello by a chain from the ceiling, letting it dangle, Jesus being crucified, gloriously dying for our sins, sending the pungent smell of charring resin and smoke into our throats.
It was both strangely comical and painfully sad to witness.
Before, throughout the two-hour performance, Sakamoto brutalized the instrument with a vehemence, scraping it, banging it, scribbling with a pencil on it.
He took a drill and graced its metal parts, sending sparks that made aerial patterns in the dark.
In defacing the instrument, we reject culture/lifestyle/instrument, as well as the basic presumption that we must follow social standards/rules/views.
Sakamoto's performance piece, which also includes modern dance, poetry readings, singing and video, gives a startling voice to the confrontation of the previous generation by the younger generation of Japan today.
You are great, oh, Father, one singer who read and played the guitar Michiro Endo bellowed in a scratchy voice.
You built this nation, worked hard to give us a better life, built this utopia, but we now have no utopia, the song said.
In the same vein, the reading by singer/novelist Mieko Kawakami was about why you can't pee in the bathtub.
Who are you, mother? she asked. Did you come here so you could tell us not to pee in the tub.
The disenchantment is clear with what the past has so dutifully and properly prepared for today.
Shattered is the stereotype of the lethargic, uncommitted youth of today, who just want to be "freeters."
Instead, the youngsters are telling the older generation: "You fucked up."
In Japan, it's the 1960s/1970s generation of America questioning the 1950s parents' generation all over again, except it's happening now.
We don't want the affluence, the meaninglessness, the dos and don'ts you have built for us, they are saying.
We are left without our own culture, being fed the imitative forms of an alien Western art.
There is no chance for a better life by definition because modernization is over.
And there's no point in putting up a fight, anyway.
There is only the void.
And so the cello must die.
Sitting in the tent packed with 300 people, I am present in a historic moment in contemporary Japanese art, something people will talk about years from today.
It is so Japanese to feel so acutely the dilemma of the individual vs. society, while sensing the nearness of death that wakes up the urgency and reality of living in every breath we take.
At the end of the piece, the tent behind the stage opens, revealing the landscape of the park at night.
The performers are lined up, looking at us solemnly, a quiet reminder that we, who witnessed the cello die, gasping, teary-eyed, intrigued, guilt-ridden, are partners in crime, caught in this tiny unreal space and moment _ maybe just for now, maybe forever _ separated from the everyday outside world.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Toyota opens a shopping mall
Talk about desperately seeking buyers.
Toyota is opening a giant shopping mall in Yokohama with 220 stores and restaurants, including Uniqlo, Wolfgang Puck's and pastry stores, to be there where people hang out _ not wait for people to come to dealerships.
The scenario is that you introduce the idea of buying a car to people who are shopping.
Japan auto sales are falling lately to 27 year lows.
Analysts say people _ especially young people _ don't want a car, even if they get one for free!
Kids who grew up in a more affluent Japan don't covet the same status-symbol items their parents did.
Manufacturers have been struggling in recent years with the challenge of developing models that meet young people's lifestyle needs.
Maybe one day there'll be a hit car every Japanese is going to want _ like an iPod or a cell phone.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Story of Miu 9
Continued from previous Story of Miu entries.
The "plop plop plop" of electronic waterdrops sound from my cell phone, the ringtone I've set so I know it's e-mail from Miu.
On the subject column, an animation icon of a glittering pink heart bounces around.
"It's him!" her message reads, a little ominously.
I press the tiny keyboard quickly with my thumb for an immediate reply: "Who he?"
It turns out she recently joined a world-music band with African drums, guitar, keyboards, traps drumming and singing that she was introduced to by a friend in high school.
Miu is learning how to play the kpanlogo with this group.
But more importantly, she has met someone.
He is the band leader Yuga. He's 21, and so a few years older than Miu.
This is what Miu says, a bit breathless on the phone, when I call her in the evening after I get home from work:
He has the most beautiful dark eyes like those of a wise elephant.
He write songs about being free, being in love and never forgetting the passion for life.
And what is fascinating about him is that he is not interested in money, status or careers, Miu says.
He works for a Tokyo dot.com that is contracted out to create ringtones for mobile phones.
And this is apparently a lucrative business because every tune on the Japanese pop charts has to be programmed into a ringtone.
But there's special software to do it so it's pretty easy, leaving Yuga a lot of time to work on his art, like composing, writing lyrics, collaborating with illustrators, rehearsing for performances and working on sound engineering on recordings.
Some of his songs are movie scores because the trend for some of the most mainstream Japanese movies lately is to use indies soundtracks.
As I gather from what Miu tells me, this person has never been abroad and doesn't understand any English.
He doesn't even have a passport, Miu says with a giggle, as though that only adds to his charm of being someone totally genuine whom only she has discovered.
He speaks with a slight accent of the Sea of Japan, which makes the speaker's tone softer than the Tokyo dialect, as though that person is somehow in perpetual doubt.
The shifts in intonation are similar to the speaking style of Korean actors that older Japanese women are so crazy about, like "Yon-sama," Miu says, to her, another profound observation.
Not that I like Yon-sama at all, Miu adds with a laugh.
He calls me "MEEEH-you-san," it sounds so sexy!
There isn't much point in contesting her observations.
I know Miu is in no mood to be challenged about any of them, anyway.
I am invited next weekend to what's called "raibu," short for "live performance," meaning a concert, where I will have an opportunity to meet Yuga.
But I am more happy for her than worried.
I can tell from the sound of her voice that she is literally floating, so euphoric is she about Yuga's existence.
Miu is way too young to start growing cynical about relationships.
She deserves to have, for once, this feeling of being so in love your feet don't quite touch the ground.
The "plop plop plop" of electronic waterdrops sound from my cell phone, the ringtone I've set so I know it's e-mail from Miu.
On the subject column, an animation icon of a glittering pink heart bounces around.
"It's him!" her message reads, a little ominously.
I press the tiny keyboard quickly with my thumb for an immediate reply: "Who he?"
It turns out she recently joined a world-music band with African drums, guitar, keyboards, traps drumming and singing that she was introduced to by a friend in high school.
Miu is learning how to play the kpanlogo with this group.
But more importantly, she has met someone.
He is the band leader Yuga. He's 21, and so a few years older than Miu.
This is what Miu says, a bit breathless on the phone, when I call her in the evening after I get home from work:
He has the most beautiful dark eyes like those of a wise elephant.
He write songs about being free, being in love and never forgetting the passion for life.
And what is fascinating about him is that he is not interested in money, status or careers, Miu says.
He works for a Tokyo dot.com that is contracted out to create ringtones for mobile phones.
And this is apparently a lucrative business because every tune on the Japanese pop charts has to be programmed into a ringtone.
But there's special software to do it so it's pretty easy, leaving Yuga a lot of time to work on his art, like composing, writing lyrics, collaborating with illustrators, rehearsing for performances and working on sound engineering on recordings.
Some of his songs are movie scores because the trend for some of the most mainstream Japanese movies lately is to use indies soundtracks.
As I gather from what Miu tells me, this person has never been abroad and doesn't understand any English.
He doesn't even have a passport, Miu says with a giggle, as though that only adds to his charm of being someone totally genuine whom only she has discovered.
He speaks with a slight accent of the Sea of Japan, which makes the speaker's tone softer than the Tokyo dialect, as though that person is somehow in perpetual doubt.
The shifts in intonation are similar to the speaking style of Korean actors that older Japanese women are so crazy about, like "Yon-sama," Miu says, to her, another profound observation.
Not that I like Yon-sama at all, Miu adds with a laugh.
He calls me "MEEEH-you-san," it sounds so sexy!
There isn't much point in contesting her observations.
I know Miu is in no mood to be challenged about any of them, anyway.
I am invited next weekend to what's called "raibu," short for "live performance," meaning a concert, where I will have an opportunity to meet Yuga.
But I am more happy for her than worried.
I can tell from the sound of her voice that she is literally floating, so euphoric is she about Yuga's existence.
Miu is way too young to start growing cynical about relationships.
She deserves to have, for once, this feeling of being so in love your feet don't quite touch the ground.
Poetry at What the Dickens
The first Sunday of every month is poetry night at What the Dickens in Ebisu 4 p.m. - 7 p.m.
We plan to read "Little Yellow Slut," a reworked/improved version Sunday April 6.
We plan to read "Little Yellow Slut," a reworked/improved version Sunday April 6.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Mieko Kawakami
Akutagawa Award winning writer Mieko Kawakami wrote about my interviewing her in her blog March 20.
And so I am writing about interviewing her in my blog.
My article about her talks about how her blog got her discovered as a writer.
Her work is cleverly crafted, and her Osaka dialect gives her a distinct voice that is poetic and dense.
Her next book is going to take a male character, quite a break from her "The Breast and the Egg," which focuses on the relationships and internal dilemmas of women.
The young man is cockeyed, defining the sometimes dubious relationship he has with the world around him.
People he encounters are never sure where he is looking, no matter that, to him, he is looking them right in the eye.
Kawakami used to be cockeyed as a child and had that surgically corrected.
Kawakami got married recently with a music producer.
But she isn't much interested in and probably won't be having children because birth control is so fool-proof lately.
She even questions the meaning of sex when reproduction isn't even a practical possibility.
She may write about eroticism and sexual relations in the future, but not now, she said.
And so I am writing about interviewing her in my blog.
My article about her talks about how her blog got her discovered as a writer.
Her work is cleverly crafted, and her Osaka dialect gives her a distinct voice that is poetic and dense.
Her next book is going to take a male character, quite a break from her "The Breast and the Egg," which focuses on the relationships and internal dilemmas of women.
The young man is cockeyed, defining the sometimes dubious relationship he has with the world around him.
People he encounters are never sure where he is looking, no matter that, to him, he is looking them right in the eye.
Kawakami used to be cockeyed as a child and had that surgically corrected.
Kawakami got married recently with a music producer.
But she isn't much interested in and probably won't be having children because birth control is so fool-proof lately.
She even questions the meaning of sex when reproduction isn't even a practical possibility.
She may write about eroticism and sexual relations in the future, but not now, she said.
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