Kazuaki Shimazaki comments

@virusrexToday 05:41 am JST

First, a declaration of interest. I am NOT one of those who joins street festivities, in Hong Kong, Japan, or elsewhere. The most valuable part of a festival to me is the associated holiday - if it doesn't come with a holiday, it's not special to me. I spend holidays lounging at home. But I do think this is one of those "I might not agree with how you party, but I will defend your right to do so" moments.

But about that holiday. You might notice that in Japan, New Year comes with a holiday. Halloween is a workday. This indicates the Japanese place much more value on New Year than Halloween. Halloween is an event for a minority, while almost every "Wajin" at least gives a nod to New Year (and I think most cultures give a nod to January 1st in some way). Thus it is much less socially acceptable to openly go against New Year (even if they have comparable nuisance levels), and that may be why they cannot say it is actually popular this time around.

As long as people outside of the location are not trying to force themselves on the locals they don't have to be bad.

If you can't at least slightly trepass on other people's tranquility, you won't be able to even play the piano (I'm not talking about heavy metal guitar or drums) in your apartment, which obviously can put a dent in an aspiring musician's growth. I know the sound from my neighbor's piano does penetrate quite well into my flat. Kids won't be able to play in the local park or bare ground - which is likely to stunt their proper psychological and physical development. The potential harm from intolerance is not insignificant.

As for "outside of the location" remember that localism is relative. Are they Shibuyans? No. But they are Tokyoites. One ring further out they are Kanto-ans, and another ring out makes them Japanese. Also, with this one being New Year's, the number of Shibuyan participants is likely to increase, unlike Halloween.

The simple fact that nobody is rushing to replace Shibuya shows the negative image these events have for the locals, pretending you have a right to impose the events is what would be trying to correct a wrong with another wrong.

It's NIMBY.

The mayor has been reelected (for his third term) after putting in order these measures

Mayor Ken Hasebe was re-elected for the third time in April 2023, coinciding with the time when Shibuya could no longer use COVID as a reasonable excuse to not suffer public assemblies. Also, in his first election in 2015, he barely edged out his opponents (36%, the next man having 32.5%). For SoraNews:

This wasn’t always the case. Starting in 2016, the world-famous Shibuya Scramble intersection in front of Shibuya Station would be shut down on the night of December 31 and turned into an official street party venue, with appearances by celebrities and vending booths from sponsoring companies. By 2018, crowds as large as 120,000 people or so would gather to ring in the new year.

After this, in 2019, he got 75% of the vote. In 2023, he retained only 51.4% (in pure numbers he lost about 15K votes - Shibuyans who were deprived of their party, perhaps?). So, are Shibuyans necessarily anti-party? Is it the idea of "representatives of the local shopping districts", meaning shopkeepers and mall-owners which is only a fraction of the population of Shibuya?

I might also note 120K people is more than twice as many Japanese than supporters of Ken Hasebe even in his strongest vote.

Frankly, my sympathy is not with the Georgian authorities on this one, regardless of possible Western involvement in the protests.

1) Deciding that any "NGO" that receives 25% or more foreign funding is suspect? Reasonable.

2) Saying no other country has the right to determine whether or not the Georgian government is validly elected? Perfectly respectable.

3) You didn't have to push your luck by immediately deferring ascession talks to the EU. I have heard a version that the EU would soon be the one stopping talks .... well, if so let them be the one to take the initiative.

@virusrexDec. 9 03:38 pm JST

What slippery slope? Shibuya somehow banning events at any other place of Tokyo? The local government listening even more to what the locals want in the ward?

I believe the last event they banned, the article at least mentioned that it was claimed to be popular to the locals, but not this article.

But in any case, the same issues continue, and you might also give value to how they are salami slicing these bans. It's hard to not see a line out of these dots and predict their final goal is to ban any bit of public fun on Shibuya. If that is indeed the case, the honest thing to do is to lay this motive up front, but they are banning one event at a time, hoping people would go "Oh well, Halloween isn't THAT popular in Japan, doesn't have THAT long a tradition". Now, in less than one year we are going after New Year Festival.

The way you are phrasing your defense, you don't believe these events are bad for Tokyo, or Japan as a whole. From that premise, those events should be held SOMEWHERE. Yet they can't be if we allow "Local Autonomy" to allow every ward to go Not In My Back Yard and refuse these events. The only way we can hold these events in the age of increasing parochialism is to deprive wards of the right to ban these events on their own initiative.

That's a relief. We can all sleep safe and sound knowing that he was 'hauled over the coals' while the other 4 lower guys get the stiff end of the whip.

Well ... officially a reprimand is less heavy than any salary reduction. Those 4 lower guys ARE out of the promotion race though.

Watch the creeping advance and slippery slope.

The entire point is that you don't get to sleep too deeply, so you get a power nap. The problem is, can I get to even a shallow sleep while standing up?

I wonder what the Aussies would do if all the big-time SNS providers respond to this by simply not providing services to Australians - Australia isn't that big in the big scheme of things. Give the SNS people too much aggro and they might just cut them off.

Bad idea, just use electric trams, way cheaper, way simpler .

I'm imagining an electric trolleybus, only being automatically guided by magnetic markers.

Sadly, it is pretty widespread for about the past year when it isn't clear if Trump would win. DLSite is another victim. Paypal is no longer serving Booth (of Pixiv). I love this bait and switch by American companies - get you to trust them and use their services under the belief they only have commerce (money) in their hearts. Then they weaponize it.

It actually is better for Japanese - at least they can use debit cards or a number of in-country alternatives. As for me, I'm stuck, because I have only one of those two big companies and out of country.

@virusrexToday 05:33 pm JST

One function of the government is to not listen to every demand. Consider the case of nearby residents or shopowners complaining about the noise emanating from a school. Yes, those residents may collectively pay a significant amount of taxes while the schoolchildren, of course, pay none. Nor are kids voters, while the adult residents are. Do you think the government should go and stunt the development of children by telling the school to find ways to shut them up?

The ones trying to find excuses are those that try to get people with nothing invested in the location to impose their wishes on the locals without any actual valid reason to do it.

Funny, aren't judges usually supposed to be people who have as little as possible invested in a particular case, in order to maintain neutrality and to not have a conflict of interest?

Once we allow this idea that a municipality's locals can abuse their authority to deny a once per year event, other municipalities will follow. Halloween does have a significant following, but not enough they have a "home base" where they hold a majority. Every other region probably does not Net-Benefit from their presence, and the only thing that keeps them quiet is the ingrained sense that we have to allow people to exercise their rights.

Shibuya is now taking a sledgehammer to this psychological barrier on which so much of our freedom depends.

perhaps with friends in someone's house

Won't work for the same reason the authorities are siding with the "locals" in the first place. In fact, it 's the same reason as many other things foreigners don't love about Japanese culture - such as paternity leave or overtime.

Your party's noise will carry to the neighbors, and Japanese prioritize the Duty to Refrain way too much over the Duty to Suffer. The Japanese literally prefer no one to have fun than for some mutual tolerance of the side effects of each other's fun.

It's part of a bigger issue of Japanese culture. Despite importing the Western idea of rights, the idea that they may only be used to the extent they do not bother others is too heavily emphasized, while the idea that people have a duty to suffer other people exercising their legitimate rights is not well ingrained. When the latter is properly ingrained, it won't even feel like suffering. But it isn't so instead of people thinking "I want my paternity leave too at my time, so I'd happily accept yours" it becomes "We both don't take paternity leave and suffer."

It goes beyond leave and overtime at the office. A similar mentality affects everything from Halloween parties to even playing piano in the privacy of your home. I strongly advocate change.

Even if they are alive, there's a significant gap between finding it is more likely than not that someone within the police fabricated the evidence versus to lock it down to specific perpetrator(s) and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.

I'm going to go my usual route of supporting the AI. It might suck for the content creator, but AI is a national security imperative and limiting yourself from exploring its full possibilities (unless we can somehow get every significant actor to restrain themselves) is to shackle yourself in the tech race.

It's not mimicking or just sounding like their voices, these models are fed the data containing their voices without any rights to that material

I really don't get that argument. Fundamentally, it's doubtful if ANY human creator got to where they were without acquiring samples from their predecessors. In the case of voice actors, they have been watching anime from when they were kids voiced by other voice actors, and even if you are the First Generation you must be exposed to theatre voice work.

I'd be surprised if any one of them managed to completely avoid referencing any of those memories when doing their own voice work. (And of course, they didn't buy the rights either)

[If anything, the AI is no different from a slow, inefficient learner - in that it requires many times the sampling of a human to crank out a usable product]

not everyone knows or remember what these social customs are

I don't need them to know what Japanese customs are. I expect them to apply by analogy their own customs. I don't think this Chilean would be doing handstands in churches back home. Or any mosques or synanoques. So how did she reason this is acceptable in a Shinto shrine?

bass4funkToday 08:04 am JST

I vehemently disagree with that, there are tourists that do out of line things, but out of control just violent and bad, not so much. They do things that are more out of line and out of what the Japanese think are culturally insensitive and unacceptable by their social norms, but that doesn’t mean that people that are committing these acts are racists or hate Japanese, there is no proof of that.

My line in the sand between innocent ignorance of local customs / rules and contempt (followed by false pleas of innocence when called out) is whether they would do the equivalent in their home customs. For example, do you really see a typical Catholic or atheist-in-a-Catholic-country (since Chile is predominantly Catholic) do "handstands" and "pull-ups" in church? If not, is doing it in a Shinto temple in Japan really "innocent ignorance" or is it at least tinged by some (perhaps subconscious) sense that Shinto is inferior and thus less worthy of respect than Catholicism?

I can imagine Japanese taking photos of priests while they are doing their services in a Shinto temple, and if that's right, then doing the same in the Notre Dam is an innocent mistake.

Similarly, I can easily see those in Hong Kong (and many other places) taking a casual attitude towards eating-while-walking on the streets (something of a taboo in Japan) - so I don't think they mean disrespect when they do it in Japan.

@Alan HarrisonToday  01:05 am JST

Do you wish to say that Japanese do not deserve legal protection or justice against the actions of foreigners, because of your personal differences with their legal system?

I really would like to ask those who defend this man ... what defenses do you believe he can meaningfully put up if there was a so-called "fair trial"?

Japan pillaged the southern oceans of whales.

If anything, the base problem there is the politicization of the moratorium, which Japan was strong armed to accede to in the first place. The whole "scientific whaling" thing was a compromise that prevents an open breach between Japan and the IWC - until Australia ruined the game.

Seems like she doesn’t know how to follow the rules.

It's very typical People know the rules and try to break them by stealth. When they are caught, they start complaining in court about how the rule is unconstitutional anyway.

Japan regresses again.

They just have self-respect for their citizenship. I know a lot of countries cheap sell their citizenship these days, but just because Japan doesn't do so doesn't mean it is Unconstitutional.

@virusrexToday 03:06 pm JST

If a billion people want the international language to change?

They would be outvoted by the billions who prefer to stick to English. But if a BILLION people want international organizations to create versions of documents in their language, I'd say they have a very strong case.

Oppression is not what happens when a location refuses to accommodate visitors that want to do something that the locals disagree with

It is when as a result of that "refusal" said visitors (and as I've said, on a broader level they are locals - those 60000 are mostly not Shibuyans, but most are likely to be Tokyoites) don't get to do their event anywhere. It's choosing to be deliberately blind to say that the Shibuyans only banned access to their particular ward and not notice how if every other ward does so, then there will be no place to hold it.

When the reasons are valid and justified they are not pretexts

What are those reasons? It'd be a sad world if all cultural events are judged purely on whether they can bring in net cash income (we pay taxes to governments to fund those programs that are not necessarily commercially profitable), and if you have to look to another country for safety incidents, your justification is thin to the point of being a pretext.

As long as the local population consider the event unjustified it does not matter if it last one hour, one day or 100 years, they are in their right to say they are not interested.

This makes it way too easy for the majority to deny the minority the events they want. It's not hard to come up with at least a few cheap excuses to deny any event.

When you are trying to make an equivalence between the right to protest and the right to have fun in a very specific way you are obviously grasping at straws.

A way which is an assembly, and thus Constitutionally Protected. I'd point out the constitution makes no explicit distinction between political and non-political. And without saying freedom must be unlimited, if you can't have an assembly once a year, then do you really have freedom of assembly at all?

(I'd also point out case law concerning freedom of assembly generally frown on putting said assemblies out in the boonies. Freedom of assembly includes freedom to choose where to have it.)

At best, any privileges given to political assemblies merely mean authorities like Shibuya must be even more deferential. They might need to let that 60,000 man assembly stand for a week or a month, rather than a day, before starting to think what they can do to disperse it. That's not the same as saying they can use the excuse that the assembly is "non-political" to suppress it entirely.

=

Finally, I don't see it only as a matter of locals vs non-locals, but as a battle between the Rights of Doers and Non-Doers. Japan heavily slants towards the rights of the non-doers. For example, when my apartment neighbor starts piano, I can hear what he is playing quite clearly. I don't even think about complaining about him because it's his Right. Meanwhile, in Japan, piano-players get paranoid about noise leakages that only show on instruments and buy a soundproof enclosure that costs as much as the piano itself.

I think Japan needs to prioritize the rights of the Doers more, and that Non-Doers need to learn to tolerate the rights of the Doers to enjoy themselves - preferably to the point they won't feel they are tolerating anything at all. This latest move is thus a step in the wrong direction, and is frankly worrying.

@virusrexToday 07:45 am JST

But this is not an issue of democracy since the people that decided to support the ban are the locals, and the ones against it are visitors that don't even vote locally.

And I'm saying that the visitors don't have a real local in this case. Though their numbers are significant, they are dispersed such that they don't have a "local" where they dominate - a sad reality of many minorities.

When their views are against the views of the locals this is justified, they are not being forbidden to party everywhere, just in this specific way in these specific locations.

Here's the reality - it's probable that if really given their druthers, no ward within Tokyo has the predominance of Halloweeners necessary to really like the idea of holding the event. Again, this is not unusual for small minorities, and the question is whether we just hide behind the shield of "regional autonomy" and let them be oppressed.

Once we shift the Overton window such that it is "OK" to ban these events on parochial considerations, the incentives greatly shift in favor of other wards to ban the event on the same pretexts.

What if 60K people wanted Shibuya to turn into a Chinatown? or a Pachinko paradise? or an Otaku-mecca? would that be enough to impose those views on the locals that disagree? obviously not.

I'd point out you've named examples that represent permanent, year-round burdens. Can we compare at least apples to apples? Can't you come up with a one-day-per-year burden that you think I might recognize as somewhat analogical to our present situation yet would agree is too great a burden to impose?

By trying of course this would include finding a place that is not against this event, not imposing it on a location that is explicitly against it

I'd actually disagree here, and again I turn to assemblies and protests. It's probable no location really wants to have that protest, and yet it would be assigned to someplace. Should we really be rewarding the least tolerant ward by deliberately avoiding the assignment of an undesired assembly on the loudest opposer? (In reality, that's what Metropolitan would probably do because it doesn't want an un-necessary dispute, but that's not the same as it being necessarily right).

I agree that regional autonomy is to give localities at least some kind of defense against excessive burdens. At the same time, in using their authorized rights the regional autonomy must be aware that it is still part of a larger whole, and that means it has to take on some burdens that might not be so good for them, but in the interests of the larger whole - even if it is not about something like money but something like allowing the citizens the fun of their choice, at least when it is once a year.

Simple, because these people want to impose their will on the locals

A factor that's present in an assembly of any significant size.

TBH, Virusrex, my sympathy is with the Halloweeners as well. A democracy is more than a 51-49 race where the 51% gets all their way and the 49% loses everything.

At least 60,000 people want this event. Most of them are Tokyoites because only the most dedicated would go hours by train just to partake in a Halloween event. That's nearly the population of a ward (OK, it's the smallest ward, Chiyoda, but still). However, they are dispersed all over the millions living in Tokyo, so in no place do they control a ward. Does that mean it is right that their views (or events) are effectively suppressed?

If Tokyo had no wards, and 60000 people petitioned the Tokyo Metropolitan government to hold a one-night event, don't you think the Metropolitan government should try to grant the request, just as it would be expected to for a demonstration or protest? It's even probable the people of Shibuya would agree in the abstract (since we are trained to have democratic values from young), as long as it is held Anywhere but Shibuya.

And when it grants the request, one spot or another would be "assigned" the event and thus suffer its holding. Perhaps the assignment would even be made based on the preferences of the Event Holders. But I think few would say it's wrong of the Tokyo government to answer the pleas, even if one area had to suffer for a night (just as it would suffer for a protest).

So, why should the presence of regional autonomy lead to a situation where these 60,000 people would be shafted, because any ward can flaunt its "autonomy" to ban the same event?

Constitutionally, this case bumps into Article 13 (right to happiness) and Article 19 (concerning assembly - this is still an assembly, you know). One reason we have a constitution is so that the majority doesn't just roll over the minority in voting, and a dispersed minority isn't forced to congregate into one ward just to have an inch of real say. I'd thus argue it is an abuse of discretion on the part of the ward level governments, even if we agree they had popular support on this specific point rather than them being chosen because they were the least disgusting of the candidates.

virusrexToday 02:51 pm JST

The correct answer is that Yes, it is a Law. Or to be more accurate, a Legal Act. As an ordinance, it doesn't have the rank of statute, and its effects are limited to the wards enacting it, but it does have legal effect and changes your legal rights and obligations even if a penalty is not specified.

The first effect is that Japanese tend to be deferential to authority. If the government declares clearly what's right and wrong, many (as many as 75% in this case) Japanese will just obey even if it's not what they want to do or even if they think the rule is as absurd as school rules about black hair.

The second effect is how it affects the police. In declaring what's right and wrong, it decides the "correct" police response in case of any dispute between a Halloweener and a local. Without this law the police may indeed fear harassment. The law clears him of that - in fact it tells him he needs to press the Halloweener to desist. While violating the ordinance does not have direct legal penalties, if the Halloweener fails to comply he runs the legal risk of violating the criminal prohibition for interfering police in their duties.

The third effect is how it affects the outcome of any civil lawsuit, again because of the declaration of right and wrong.

it carries no penalties if violated

This is actually an incomplete description of the situation. What these "no penalty" laws do is that they impose civil liability for violations. The State won't intervene actively, but clearly delineating Right and Wrong in law means that in any Civil Lawsuit the plaintiff is at an advantage. He only has to prove the defendant indeed violated his duty to refrain from the proscribed activity - he doesn't have to explain why that was not "Free Speech" or otherwise legal.

My instinct is that the Captain did it intentionally. The question is where that intention originated - from himself, an intermediate higher up, or even the bureaucracy. Anyway, the Japanese State chose to, while insisting on the general legality of such entries under the innocent passage clause, not back their Captain.

If that's so, can't help but feel sorry for him being used as a pawn.

In his final arguments, Kitamura denounced the lower court verdict as “unreasonable,” saying it didn’t make sense for Kelly to be part of a conspiracy for just the last year.

This argument is implausible on its face. Kelly was proven to be part of a conspiracy for the last year. For the other seven, the evidence wasn't sufficiently clear so the court gave priority to his presumed innocence, but that's not the same as he definitely wasn't part of a conspiracy.

Yes but was that because of UNCLOS that there could be no customs inspections or the desire to not start a war over it?

Let's be honest with each other. For one thing, warships have sovereign immunity. Second, you know there's no plausible case for a customs inspection. Customs is about controlling the flow of goods in and out of the country, and the Chinese carrier isn't being part of that.

I'd say the only legitimate reason we hadn't banned Alcohol and Tobacco outright yet is because they are too ingrained in the population such that we can't safely remove them, like a cancer that has gotten too big to cut. We don't need to make or allow a third massive tumor.

Totally disgusting behaviour by the school officials.

Or maybe a law that needs changing. The school's main interest here is not getting into legal trouble. If the law tells them they have to risk the kid's security in favor of some other interest (such as "parental rights"), well that's what they are going to do.