Japan has inexplicably decided to experiment with copying one of the worst aspects of the American legal system: juries.

As reported in the NYT earlier this month, the new system, to be introduced in 2009, involves citizens called “saiban-in” (“lay assessors”) who will sit on panels together with judges on the more serious cases.

According to the article, “a jury is one of the most important protections of a democracy.” Really? A random group of biased, cherrypicked, uneducated people off the street are going to decide on matters of life and death? For every high-profile case where the jury obviously got it wrong, how many hundreds or thousands do we never hear of?

The Supreme Court recently ruled that it was OK for relatives of a murder victim to sit in court with big buttons featuring the face of the deceased, and that this did not unduly influence the jury. (Carey vs. Musladin.) Maybe or maybe not. But this case raises the deeper issue of how we can possibly know what does or does not influence a jury. Do they really get “innocent until proven guilty”, or even “beyond a reasonable doubt”? I doubt it.

The Founders were quite certain that the jury system was important. After all, they wrote it into the Bill of Rights not once, not twice, but three times. But let’s remember: they were reacting to very particular abuses of the judicial system under colonial English rule. Juries were the only way to absolutely prevent such misuse of government power. And recall, the jurors back then were landed and educated.

There’s no need for a jury system in America today. We call up people with no expertise whatsoever and waste their time to help us condemn one of our underclass to prison for a decade for possessing a rock of cocaine.

There are those who say juries form a key part of the democratic system. The author of the NYT article goes so far as to say “if Japan’s effort to introduce a jury system fails, democracy movements elsewhere in Asia will suffer a serious setback.” But representational democracy and the jury system are similar only in the superficial sense that they involve citizen participation.

The article goes on to say that “it’s hard to imagine how Americans could fulfill their role as democracy advocates any better than by helping the Japanese become jurors.” Well, I don’t think the Japanese need any lessons from us in democracy. If we really wanted to help them become more democratic, why not push for a nationwide referendum on the US troops in Okinawa and elsehwere in Japan, then insist that the two governments actually abide by the results?

What does it mean to say someone is divine, a living God? That they share God’s infallibility, or compassion, or wisdom, or omniscience, or power?

From the neurotheological standpoint, the question we want to ask is what mental state do people enter when they view a human they consider godly? This should be easy to “divine” with current neuroimaging techniques. And the results might well cast light on the experience of the non-embodied divinity as well.

We have such a living God in the form of the late
Showa Tenno (picture), commonly known as “Hirohito” in the West. Although he renounced his divinity in the famous ningen sengen, or “declaration of humanity” (人間宣言), there are still many Japanese, most already in their 80s or 90s, that continue to believe him an arahitogami, or “human god” (ç?¾äººç¥ž), the latest in the long line of descendants of the mythical Amaterasu. And no small number may believe the same of his son and current Tenno Heika (official site), no matter what the Constitution may say.

As part of our program of neurotheological research, let’s grab those old Japanese folks before they die, toss them in an MRI machine, and make sure we take a neurological record of their reaction to viewing pictures of the man they believed was God.

New Rules, Bill Maher’s new book, has shot up the bestseller list. It’s pretty funny. The really funny thing, though, is how little content it has—about one, one-sentence joke per page. The jokes are supposed to be about the way things have changed (hence the title).

I like Bill. I ran into him at the West Hollywood Book Fair last Sunday where he was signing his books. I’m sure his TV program is funny even though I don’t watch it because I don’t get HBO. He’s a indispensable antidote to much of the political silliness going on today.

But unfortunately most of the jokes in his new book are just stupid. Or ignorant. Take this one:

Sumo is not a sport—it’s an eating disorder.

Leaving aside what this has to do with being a “new rule”, what’s our friend Bill doing engaging in dime-store humor about Orientals? What’s next, jokes about buckteeth? Has he ever seen a sumo match or bothered to learn anything about the sport?

Perhaps he’d like to wrestle with Chiyonofuji, the great yokozuna whose 31 championships are second only to Taiho’s and whose body fat ratio would probably put Bill to shame. “Wolf”, as he was known, could lift Bill up with one hand and drop him on a pile of remaindered copies of “New Rules”. Or going back a bit further, perhaps Bill would like to wrangle with Wajima, another yokozuna who weighed in at a scrawny 132kg during his heyday in the ‘70s, when I first visited Japan.

Or maybe Bill would like to learn about the scores of kimarite winning techniques. Bill could even widen his horizons and learn about how sumo and sumo-like sports are popular thoughout Asia, notably in Korea and Mongolia, where it is said to date back to Genghis Khan. And instead of pandering to the ill-informed image of sumo wrestlers as fat bozos with an “eating disorder”, he could learn about their food culture and their remarkable chanko nabe stew.

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki, I’ll share some relevant passages from Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory.

President Truman, in a diary entry from July 25, wrote: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.

“He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance.”

Many of the scientists did not want to drop the second bomb, or even the first. But Groves had been adamant. Consumed by the desire to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt his success in building the monstrous new weapon, he lobbied vigorously for its use. Finally the military managed to convince Truman to drop the bomb on a real target, instead of making a demonstration like many scientists recommended, but Truman insisted the target be military. Fortunately, that took candidates like Kyoto and the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo out of the running. Unfortunately, it was then an easy end-run for the military to claim that Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, was a military target, since of course, both cities did contain factories producing war materiel. The orders that went out on the very same day of Truman’s diary entry, July 25, made no mention of military vs. civilian targets, and simply designated the entire cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among others, as targets.

The bomb detonated over Hiroshima, “Big Boy,” was a uranium bomb, which Hanford had nothing to do with. It was dropped on August 6 1945. Riding along in a separate plane, named “The Great Artiste” and carrying monitoring equipment, was a certain Major Charles William Sweeney. Three days later Sweeney, commanding a B-29 named “Bock’s Car” after its usual pilot, Capt. Frederick Bock, dropped “Fat Man,” so named for its pudgy shape, over Nagasaki, a little Japanese port town on the southern island of Kyushu. Nagasaki was not really a strategic target, other than being where a Mitsubishi plant had produced some of the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor. When Fat Man was ignited, conventional explosives violently squeezed the softball-sized capsule of Hanford plutonium inside until its density reached the point of supercriticality, causing a nuclear explosion. The fierce blast wind, heat rays reaching several thousand degrees, and deadly radiation generated by the explosion crushed, burned and killed everything in sight and reduced the entire area to a barren field of rubble. Hanford’s plutonium had performed its work admirably.

Bock was much less creative in naming his plane than one Capt. George Marquardt, who came up with the cute moniker “Up an’ Atom” for the weatherplane he flew along on the run.

Fat Man almost did not make it to its August 9 date with destiny. There was a firing unit on Fat Man’s front that needed to be connected to a cable going through the bomb’s innards to a radar antenna on its tail that detected when the bomb was at the right altitude to ignite. Technicians in the Marianas from where the flight was to take off were trying to hook up the bomb on the night of August 7 when they discovered to their horror that both connectors were female; somebody had threaded the cable through the bomb backwards! There wasn’t enough time to disassemble the bomb and reverse the cable. Without telling anyone, the two got a soldering iron and some extension cords. They secretly, and very carefully, removed the two plugs on the cable and swapped them so everything fit.

The technicians evidently did their job well, since the bomb detonated as planned. Sweeney recalls that as he watched the bomb falling free on its forward arc, the somewhat bizarre thought flashed through his mind: “It’s too late now. There are no strings or cables attached. We can’t get it back, whether it works or not.” The mushroom cloud was “multicolored…intense…angry…mesmerizing…breathtaking…ominous.”

Convenience stores—shortened to “conbini” in Japanese—are ubiquitous in the Land of the Rising Sun. FamilyMart (website) is a giant in the category, with sales of nearly one trillion yen (US$10bn) and over 10,000 stores blanketing the archipelago.

Now “FamiMa”, as it’s known, is making a big push into the US, thinking an upscale, Japanese-focused concept can be successful here. The press release crows: “First lifestyle speciality all-in-one community to open in West Hollywood! LA gets the first taste of Famima’s “premium experience”. I’m honored. The new store is just up the street from my house, a 15-minute walk (Google map). The press release continues:

West Hollywood. California has always been a trendy place for firsts… design, fashion and food to name a few. Now add to the list, Famima!! A new lifestyle specialty all-in-one community store (Premium Grocer + Quick Service Restaurant + Convenience Store) concept that is thoughtful in its modern design and sophisticated in its product offerings is set to open on July 20, 2005 on the corner of Santa Monica and La Cienega Boulevards. With an appeal that is pop, hip, and Gen-X all in one, Famima!! is superbly positioned to be West Hollywood’s newest hot spot this summer.

Having visited the new store the first chance I got, I can say that the concept works well for me, compared to other “competitors” like 7-11 that basically make me want to kill myself every time I step foot in one. I like the range of foods they carry, including of course lots of Japanese candy (like Pocky) and instant noodles and even rice balls, magazines (which they need to beef up their selection of), and drinks. There’s a little restaurant which I didn’t try, fresh foods, coffee, and even stationery (although it seemed overpriced). The store is friendly and bright and attractive. It has stuff I want and need. I’ll be back.

FamiMa is going to roll out quickly in the US. The West Hollywood store is the first of 250 they plan to open over the next five years. I wish them well. But I have some suggestions. They don’t seem to understand that people drive cars over here, and need to be able to identify the store from the street, then quickly grab a convenient parking spot. And I’m not sure the “FamiMa” name works—maybe they should go back to “Family Mart” over here. I know they had to bring people over from Japan to staff the stores but they should make sure those people function a little better in English. And they need to work on their website. Finally, where is the Yakult? Good luck, FamiMa.

I still remember the first time I saw and held a sea cucumber. These preternaturally squishy, elongated, leathery life forms evoke a combination of repulsion and wonder.

Sea cucumbers are of the genus holothuroidea, and thus are sometimes called holothurians; other names include beche-de-mer and trepang. These bottom dwellers are found across the Pacific Ocean, their home of 400 million years, in an amazing 1400 varieties: brilliantly colored or dull gray, smooth or spiked. (They are one of the six species in the phylum Echinodermata, or echinoderms, which also includes starfish and sea urchins.)

For those interested in neurobiology, I note that the sea cucumber has no brain whatsoever, not even the start of a ganglia. I guess it doesn’t need a brain since it has other ways to satisfy all its basic needs: to reproduce, for instance, it just shoots eggs and sperm out into the water. What intelligence it has is built into its body parts. For instance, it defends itself by ejecting certain body parts from its anus, whereupon they grow long and sticky, entangling the poor crab who thought he had found his dinner.

A particularly succulent part of the sea cucumber is its intestines. The Pacific Islanders have developed a technique for plucking out them out—squeezing a finger into the underside usually does the trick—taking advantage of the fact that the animal auto-eviscerates in response to rough handling, a defensive mechanism against predators. They then throw the animal back in the ocean where, miraculously, it regenerates its own intestines overnight or within a few days (all echinoderms can do this). The Islanders prefer the guts of the curryfish variety of sea cucumber, S. variegatus, which they eat fresh, cooked, or pickled in lime juice.

In Japan, the marine beasts, known as namako, genus Stichopus japonicus, are valued for their chewy, almost tasteless flesh (body wall), often eaten as sunomono (in vinegar sauce)—but then Japan has a distinguished history of preferring foods for their texture, not taste, tofu being the obvious example, fugu (globefish) another. Records dating back to the 1600s record the export from Japan of sea cucumber flesh, mainly to China, where it plays a key role in the cuisine.

But the Japanese also did not overlook the entrails, which they extract, salt, and cure (see picture). The result: konowata (æµ·é¼ è…¸), considered one of the three major chinmi (delicacies) of Japan.

Specifically, the Japanese take sea cucumbers, extract the visceral mass (alimentary canal and reproductive organs) wash it, drain it in a bamboo basket, salt it, then ferment it for one week. The result is marketed in bottles that for top-class Hokkaido product can be surprisingly expensive, up to $50, although our sushi chef told us he got some konowata from Aichi Prefecture, said to be the top producer at present, which cost only $20, even with konoko dried sea cucumber ovaries mixed in. These ovaries, a delicacy in themselves, are also known as hoshiko, kuchiko, or bachiko.

So what does konowata taste like, anyway? Whether or not you believe in qualia, describing the taste of konowata is simple: it’s the taste of the sea, or more specifically, the taste of the iso. Iso is a uniquely Japanese concept, not present in English. It’s often translated as beach or seashore, but actually it’s that area of a rocky shore where land meets sea: the surf washing in and out over the rocks, crabs and tiny fish and water insects darting around and under them. Think of the smell of the iso and you have described the taste of konowata precisely.

Sanyo Electric, the sprawling Japanese electronics conglomerate, has its fingers in just about everything. They make TVs and solar batteries and cogeneration systems and air conditioners and digital cameras and phones and semiconductors. They’ll install things for you or deliver them for you or build you a house or send you temporary workers or even put up your folks in one of their nursing homes. Therer are 332 Sanyo companies around the world.

But Sanyo is in trouble. They managed to lose almost $2 billion in 2004, and have a staggering $10 billion mountain of debt.

Now Sanyo has unleashed an astonishing transformation. They’ve elevated a woman—Tomoyo Nonaka—to the post of CEO, with the founder’s grandson relegated to mere President and COO. Nonaka is the most senior woman in the Japanese business world by far, a Japanese Carly Fiorina who still has her job.

And there’s definitely a woman’s hand visible in the visionary new plan that Sanyo announced. There were the obvious things, such as cutting debt, selling stuff, shuttering factories, firing people, cutting costs. What’s more interesting is the new Sanyo vision: Think GAIA, becoming a “company to make the earth rejoice”. “living in global symbiosis”, “leaving a beautiful earth for the children of the future.”

Make fun if you will, but this is a vision of startling breadth. Now it simply remains to be seen how, or if, the company can actually bring this vision to bear to reinvigorate and revitalize its slumping businesses.

There’s more to the vision. Sanyo has grouped its competencies and technologies into broad areas, which it calls “programs”, with catchy names:

• Blue Planet: address global environmental problems
• Genesis III: develop sustainable clean energy society
• Harmonious Society: create a rich society overflowing with love
• Product Circulation: move to a zero-emissions, completely recycled, undamaging product life cycle

Finally, there’s an actual implementation plan, dubbed “Sanyo Evolution Project”, with three parts. The first, known as “Business Portfolio Evolution Plan”, calls for Sanyo to completely review and revamp its business portfolio, focusing on CO2 compressor technology, solar cells, and home appliances, while building five new “solution” areas:

1. Symbiosis and ecosystem solutions
2. Recyclable environmental solutions
3. Global energy solutions
4. New-generation commuter solutions
5. Family relationship solutions
6. LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) lifestyle solutions

They’ll also refocus R&D strongly based on the new vision. They’ll reorganize their network to lessen product and geographic dependencies.

The second part of the implementation plan is called the “Corporate DNA Evolution Plan”, designed to revolutionize the corporate culture, organization, and management processes. They’ll strengthen the corporate identity and establish a global headquarters with clout. The third part consists of the restructuring steps mentioned at the top of this post.

Sanyo has come a long way since Iue Toshio (ja.wikipedia.org) started making bicycle headlights back in 1947 in Osaka. We certainly wish them well in what they are calling their “Third Beginning”.

Freakonomics is a current best-seller looking at real-world applications of economics. Steven Levitt, the author, says sumo is rigged.

That’s horrible! What’s his evidence? Well, wrestlers who have a 7-7 record on senshuraku, the last day of the bimonthly fifteen-day tournaments, and therefore face demotion if they lose, win 80% of their matches against opponents who have already notched their eighth victory and are safe from demotion, even though statistically they would be expected to win only 50%.

Further, in the next match between the same two wrestlers, the win-loss percentage is precisely reversed! In other words, the wrestler in the first match who is allowed to win then “repays” his opponent in the second match by letting him win.

Statistically, I’m sure the win-loss patterns the author discovered are not attributable purely to differences in skill. But that is not enough to condemn sumo as being “fixed”.

First, by definition, a game being fixed or rigged requires some quid pro quo. The authors of Freakonomics speculate about the possibility of bribes or payoffs, but of course have no way to validate that. Personally, I doubt that money is changing hands. The entire “transaction”, or “agreement”, to lose now and get paid back later, is probably non-verbal. It’s possible that it is not even entirely conscious.

But whether non-verbal or non-conscious, such behavior still offends our Western notion of fairness. We say: the wrestlers are “cheating.”

But in a way this behavior is entirely fair: anyone who enters the last day at 7-7 can expect to be given the same favorable treatment by any opponent who is 8-6. And the effect on rankings is smaller than you might think. It certainly does not rise to the level of a structural effect, like someone throwing a World Series game. The authors make the point that big money is at stake—yokozuna can make a million dollars a year, and being demoted out of juryo cuts off your salary altogether if I recall—but in fact any biasing of the results caused by shading 7-7 matches does not cause major swings in salary-related outcome values either.

Rather, the result is simply to put a bit of a damper on the ups and downs of the game—to decrease the standard deviation, if you will. Wrestlers the fans know and love may stay around a bit longer before getting demoted or retiring to open a chanko nabe restaurant.

Instead of making the pedestrian observation that money can lead people to cheat, a phenomenon hardly worthy of their attention, it would have been great if the authors could have brought some real insight to the sumo question, namely what the value function is that is maximized by the behavior in question—in this case, the Japanese values of stability, prestige, and solidarity.

Look up the word “think” in an English-Japanese dictionary and you’ll find two main alternatives: “kangaeru” and “omou”.

Often when Japanese splits a concept more narrowly than English, native English speakers have a horrible time learning to make the distinction. I’ve never known of anyone who had trouble with “kangaeru” vs. “omou”, though.

That’s because the difference is clear. “Kangaeru” refers to a higher-brain process, “omou” to a lower-brain one. “Kangaeru” is linear and deductive and rational, it figures and reckons, it is based on assumptions, reaches conclusions. “Omou”, on the other hand, is an attitude, a stance, a belief, almost a feeling.

Descartes famously asserted, “I think, therefore I am” (or, “Je pense, donc je suis”). Inexplicably, this has been translated into Japanese as ‘’ware omou, yue ni ware ari”. That’s right—”think” (or “cogito” in “cogito ergo sum”) has been rendered as “omou”, instead of the obviously correct “kangaeru”. I would like to track down the Japanese scholar responsible for this original mistranslation, which has certainly confused countless Japanese students of philosophy over the centuries.

Talking about my cat’s behavior in Japanese, I never use “kangaeru”—that’s simply not something cats do. But I use “omou” all the time: “gG [cat’s name] thinks he’s going to get fed.” So this mistake in translating Descartes’ phrase is by no means benign. The mistranslation has the effect of making Descartes’ proof of existence apply to my cat!

Full moon overhead
In the waning days of March.
Yes, dying in spring
Beneath a blossoming tree
That would be the choice I’d make.

This is my translation of a famed waka by Saigyo (see picture), the 12th-century Japanese poet/monk:

ねがわくば
花の下にて
春死なん
そのきさらぎの
もち月のころ

The knowledgeable reader will notice that I’ve completely reversed the order of the lines, although I’ve maintained the 5-7-5-7-7 meter. It turns out when translating from Japanese into English, reversing the order is often the key to a more compelling, readable, or understandable rendition—not only for poems, but computer manuals as well.

This technique applies to everything from two-word pairs, to clauses in a parallel construction, to phrases in sentences, to sentences within paragraphs. Even entire sections can often be usefully reconstructed by moving the last paragraph in the Japanese to the top, and vice versa. I haven’t yet experimented with reorganizing the chapters of a book along these lines, but it seems worth a try.

Perhaps we should try this with Dogen’s Shobo Genzo as well—moving Genjo Koan from the very front to the very back, where it would serve as a thundering conclusion to the masterpiece, rather than a mere introduction.

For extra credit, I’ll accept reader hypotheses, involving your favorite theories of evolutionary linguistics or neuropsychology, as to why Japanese should exhibit such a radically reversed order from English at all levels.

Saigyo’s wish was granted: he died on the 16th day of Kisaragi (translated as “March” above).