Apparently I’m not the only one who think the whole Toyota ordeal is driven by nationalism. Please read “The War on Toyota.” Ahh… It reminds me of the good ‘ol days of the 80’s when Japan was used as the punching bag for the incompetence and short-sightedness of the American automakers.

Yes, what a great timing for this to happen, especially for the union leaders. Toyota’s Prius gave them a lot of headache since the market crashed in the Fall of 2008. Toyota, once again, made the American automakers look stupid and incompetent, so the latter was looking for any excuse to bash Toyota. Their dream has come true.

Bash on, American automakers. But, remember what happened last time: You guys bashed the Japanese automakers so much that when the times changed to bring the auto factories to the US, they avoided the states where all the bashers were, like Michigan. The Japanese might be quiet when it comes to war of words, but they do remember everything you say.

One of my favorite financial blogs, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, today had a post about the censorship in China. It says his site is blocked in China. I then became curious how one could check which sites are blocked by the Chinese government. I found two methods. Just Ping checks access to your site from 40 different places in the whole world, including Shanghai, China. I then found another tool that checks just China, called “Website Test behind the Great Firewall of China” by WebsitePulse. I have no idea how reliable these tools are, but it’s amusing to try them out.

Both sites show that Facebook is blocked in China. As claimed, Mish’s site is indeed blocked in China according to these sites. Now that I’m discussing the very subject of censorship in China here, I wonder if my site would get blocked too. That would be sort of cool. It would give me bragging rights. I would design a little seal that says, “Blocked in China” and put it on every page.

I wonder what I would have to write about in order to get blocked. The most obvious candidate is Tiananmen Square. Or perhaps, Dalai Lama. I actually don’t like him, but I would write a post about his greatness just for the sake of getting blocked. I would imagine that they must have automated bots that scan websites for certain keywords. So, it’s probably just a matter of using words like “Tiananmen Square” many times on your site. (Yes, “Tiananmen Square”) And, your site would probably get blocked automatically without any human intervention. That would be my guess.

So, let’s wait and see. Tiananmen Square. Love Dalai Lama.

I’ve been living in the US for 25 years now, so I barely feel that I’m Japanese, and it’s rare these days for me to feel concerned about what the Japanese do. But this one caught my attention this morning. Apparently the Japanese are still hunting whales and the activists are still fighting them. I actually had no idea; I thought this conflict ended years ago.

This is a tricky issue and I can see the arguments of both sides. Whale is an easy target to pick for animal activists because not many cultures consume them. In other words, it’s fightable, especially because it can be attacked as a national problem. On the other hand, fighting the killing of cows couldn’t be framed as such. Shaming a nation is much more effective than trying to shame the whole human race.

But ultimately, the moral arguments or rationales used by both sides don’t concern me much. What does concern me is that this conflict could become self-perpetuating, like the way the conflict in the Middle East has become. Just as whaling is a career in Japan, anti-whaling activism has becomes a career too because it’s been going on for so long. Watching this video made me realize how much of a career it has become. Once we spend decades of our lives doing something, we can’t help but have a vested interest in continuing it forever because our sense of self-worth is deeply tied to what we do.

To make the matters even worth, both sides are becoming increasingly more emotional and bitter towards one another, and they are both vengeful and selfrighteous too. The wounds are getting deeper and deeper on both sides, and the deeper the wound, the longer it lasts. This whale war will soon be an industry (if it’s not already), like the war in the Middle East is an industry with many businesses depending on it.

I was hoping that China would help us pull out of this recession but it is looking unlikely. China has its own problems which are becoming difficult to manage. Foreign Policy has an article about how China is cooking its books. Well the US has been doing it too, so why wouldn’t China? Of course, they go a few steps further. According to the article, the government officials show up to your factory and offer you a big chunk of money upfront to “resign”, so that you wouldn’t be part of the unemployment rate.

What I find funny is this: Why do they have to bother with such a scheme? Why don’t they just make up the numbers? Why bother collecting any data? I think they should bail out Madoff and hire him as their minister of finance.

Here is an interesting video I came across on one of my favoriate finanical blogs. The guy in the video explains how all those big buildings are standing completely empty with no prospect of getting anyone in there.

A friend of mine posted this YouTube video on Facebook (see below). It’s a Japanese TV program that investigates the possible historical connection between Jews and Japanese. I asked my dad about this and he said this is old news. He read a book about this 20 years ago.

I’ve always thought that the Jewish values are quite similar to the Japanese values. The fact that I have a lot of Jewish friends, I don’t think, is a coincidence.

In any case, even if this is completely bogus, it’s still interesting (or at least amusing), as I’m a big fan of crazy Jewish conspiracy theories as entertainment.

photo credit: k.Akagami

In an episode of Top Chef Masters, Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 made slow-cooked eggs using an “immersion circulator”, and the judges went wild for them. One of them said he’s never had an egg like that, which is a bit embarrasing given that he is a food critic. According to this article written March of 2007, it was all the rage then already.

In fact, the Japanese have been slow-cooking eggs for hundreds of years in hotsprings. It’s called “Onsen” eggs. Similar eggs are served at some Japanese ramen noodle restaurants, such as Ramen Setagaya. When I saw Dufresne cook it on Top Chef, I didn’t make the connection at first because they made it sound so novel and high-tech. A friend of mine pointed it out to me that it’s just Onsen eggs.

Nathan’s Hot Dot Eating Contest is coming up soon. I found this commercial on YouTube where Koby (Takeru Kobayashi) and Sonya Thomas compete at a convenience store.

When you look at the past winners on the Wikipedia page for Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, you see a bunch of American and Japanese flags. I find that really funny. There is one German flag and one Mexican flag; other than these, it’s all Japanese or American.

I remember when the first Japanese contestant appeared on the scene; I thought it was the funniest thing. I had never thought that the skinny Japanese had a chance, but it turned out that being skinny allows you to eat more. This completely changed the “sport”. Now the fat guys have no chance of winning.

A Castle On the Ocean — Tokyobling’s Blog

Castle made out of paper. It’s quite amazing. Check it out.

This is a Chinese ad I found on Cloned in China blog. At first, I thought this was an ad that a Blackberry retailer in China created, but then I realized that the logo says, “BlockBerry”. Apparently the ad copy says, “Obama has Blackberry, I have Blockberry”.

The shamelessness of this ad and the product is so far-out that it feels like cultural satire in a form of actual product. After all, they could have simply called it “Blackberry”; why bother altering the name? What would swapping the ‘a’ with ‘o’ do in terms of protecting them legally or otherwise? It seems like they swapped them just to poke fun at intellectual property laws, in a similar way Saturday Night Live often obscures curse words just to ridicule FCC regulations.

It would be cool to own one of these. Many people would get a kick out of it.

Umm… I’m not sure what to make of this. These two Japanese men were caught carrying US government bonds worth $135 billion. It’s weird in so many ways. Firstly, my understanding of government bonds is that they do not print anything physical. It’s all in the computers. Nowhere else. Is that wrong?

Secondly, even if it’s true that they print physical certificates, it’s not possible for someone to have $135 billion. Even Bill Gates is worth only $40 billion. If they are real, these Japanese men must be government agents or something. Even then, it’s not possible to move that kind of money without the government officials knowing about it. So, they can’t be real, but they are apparently indistinguishable from the real thing.

This is really a strange story. I will be following this news closely.

Update (6/12/09)

According to this financial blog, the US government used to print certificates but no longer. There is also a theory circulating that these are North Korean agents carrying fake Japanese passports. If the certificates are real, they could belong to the North Korean government. Given that the US is printing money like crazy, it’s possible that North Korea decided to dump their US government bond holdings. If this is true, this might be good news for the US. 40% of it would have to go to the Italian government because of their smuggling law. Anything to make North Korea poorer is a good thing for the US.

It’s also possible that these were Chinese agents too (given the amount of control the Chinese government has on the flow of information). If so, this is bad news for both China and US. If the Chinese government is secretly trying to dump the US government bonds, this could trigger a panic in the bond market. It’s also strange that the US media is not picking up this news. Is it because this was a secret operation sanctioned by the US government? This is a complete speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised, given that China has been complaining about the massive printing of money by the US government. Maybe Geithner is letting them dump some bonds in the black market? Who knows?

Another Update

According to this Bloomberg article, it is more likely that they are fake. Certificates of that high denomination could not have existed at the time it was presumably issued, it says. If this is true, could that legally be considered counterfeit or forgery? It’s like designing your own 7 dollar bill; since no such dollar bill exists, it wouldn’t be a “forgery”, would it?

Update: (6/14/09)

According to Daily Kos, the bonds are real:

According to the official press release by the Italian police these bonds were issued by the US Federal Reserve Bank.

I can’t read Italian, so I can’t confirm anything. The discussion on Daily Kos is pretty interesting too.

Update (6/15/09)

Here is a blogger with an interesting theory on this “Italian incident“. Some new facts that I was not aware of:

These denominations are strictly for government-to-government transactions and are not found in the private sector. The 16 primary dealers who make a market for US government debt are the only private sector organizations even remotely likely to have access to bonds of that size in paper or bearer form. However, the auction process is entirely electronic and has been so for decades ever since the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation was established. This would suggest that these bonds, if real, belonged to a Central Bank.

…it would be extremely difficult for a forger to make a successful market in denominations typically exclusive to central bank transactions because of the eyebrows it would raise.

I’m beginning to think that they were really Japanese. If so, they would have to be government agents. If true, this is scary stuff. Just imagine the panic it could cause.

Update (6/16/09)

I found this article by J. S. Kim. He believes it’s counterfeit for the following reason:

One of the quickest ways to sabotage and usher in the death of a currency is to raise legitimate questions about its ability to withstand counterfeiting efforts. Prove that counterfeiting is not only possible but highly likely, and the world’s confidence in the sabotaged currency will undoubtedly plummet.

In fact, this very tactic was applied during World War II when the Nazis launched Operation Bernhard in an attempt to crash the British economy by producing, by 1945, 132 million expertly counterfeited British pounds, a figure that represented roughly 15% of all real British pounds in circulation at the time.

An interesting theory and history, but as one of the comments says, Japan or China would not want to sabotage US dollar because they have so much of it. If this is a Japanese or Chinese operation, the bonds would have to be real. It would be their way of reducing exposure to the US dollar in the black market. If counterfeit, North Korea would be the only Pacific Asian nation that would make sense.

Update (6/18/09)

So the verdict from the US Treasury is that the bonds are fake. Apparently they look nothing like the real thing. If so, what the hell were those “Japanese” men doing? If they look nothing like the real thing, can they even be considered “counterfeit”?