Author: Josh Philip Ross

What’s the largest financial institution in the world? It may surprise you to learn that it’s Japan Post, whose insurance and savings businesses hold nearly $3 trillion in deposits.

It goes without saying that this has an enormously distorting effect on the Japanese economy, tying up vast sums of capital in the hands of the government and serving as a tremendous resource for patronage. Among other things, Japan Post is the biggest buyer of Japanese government bonds. This cozy arrangement has helped to keep the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in power since 1955 (excepting a gap between 1993 and 1996).

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had made the privatization of Japan Post a centerpiece of his administration. Today his postal reform bill was defeated in parliament, leading Koizumi to call a snap election that he might actually lose. What this means for the future of Japan Post, and of Japan, is uncertain.

It’s that time of year again: the New York Korean Film Festival is coming, running from September 2nd to 6th at The Lighthouse Theater on East 59th Street between Lexington and Park, then from September 7th to 11th at BAM in Brooklyn.

In the last few years, Korean film has gained a strong reputation, particularly for action and horror, though my tastes lean more toward the movies that depict Korean culture more straightforwardly. Of this year’s crop of films, I’m especially interested in The President’s Barber, Mapado, and My Mother, the Mermaid.

According to a Washington Post article, the United States plans to transfer 70 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the governments of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. As Talking Points Memo points out, there is no way we’d be turning over anyone we were seriously worried about to governments as sketchy as these, particularly the Afghan government, which may not even remain in existence a few years down the road. So again, the US government is admitting without admitting that a key part of its strategy in the Global War on Terror has failed.

This is, of course, welcome news. It comes a few days after the New Yorker commented on the name change from Global War on Terror, or GWOT, to Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, or G-SAVE, reporting that “In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new thinking in a speech: ‘This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines,’ he said. ‘The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world.'”

This thinking is painfully long overdue, but that doesn’t make it less correct. It seems that our government is at last coming to terms with the reality of who and what it is that we should be fighting — of who and what, in other words, is fighting us. At last the US is recognizing that “Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people,” as the New Yorker reported General Gregson said.

The most dangerous thing about the first Bush administration, I thought, was its utter inability to admit mistakes. The second time around, though, after blundering badly on domestic issues (Social Security, Terri Schiavo, the filibuster battle, the Karl Rove scandal), the administration has shown itself remarkably lithe, able to shift course without drawing harsh criticism for the failures that required the shifts in the first place. To some extent, this is because those who have opposed this White House are so pleased to see it adopting saner policies and showing some spirit of compromise at last. The nomination of John Roberts is a case in point: the hard right may grumble, but Bush doesn’t need them anymore — he’s never running for office again — and the left, after revving itself up for a big fight, has been largely deflated.

I’m not sure what’s driving all this change. Much of this course correction seems to have been in the works for a while. Rumsfeld’s famous memo asking, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” dates from October 2003. Rove’s reelection strategy for Bush seems to have been to admit no mistakes at all, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in the administration was genuinely convinced that all was well. Perhaps we are seeing a strategic shift to greater compromise and subtlety because those in charge genuinely believe that more compromise and subtlety are needed if we are to keep America safe and strong.

One can only hope.

During our apartment search, Jenny and I saw a promising duplex on Luquer Street, but we worried about living on a street we couldn’t pronounce.

At first I pronounced it lucre, as in filthy, but my friend Daniel, who lives a few blocks away, calls it lu-COOR, roughly like the fancy alcohol, and real estate agents called it everything from lu-CURR to lu-CARE to Lu-KWAIR. Fortunately, Forgotten NY has come to the rescue, explaining that today’s Luquer used to be Luqueer, named after a Dutch family, and though I don’t know how the Dutch would say it, locals still pronounce it lu-QUEER.

So why the change? Forgotten NY thinks it has to do with the older negative connotations of the word queer, not the word’s more recent connection with homosexuality, that made folks drop the second E. But it could just as well be random drift, almost like a mutation. Whatever the reason, though, I will now pronounce it lu-QUEER — at least until some local tells me otherwise.

It’s done. We are now living in our new apartment on Court Street between Nelson and Huntington. Never again will we have to walk home to our old place at Butler and Bond.

The move itself was, inevitably, exhausting, but it would have been endlessly worse had we not let the movers pack for us.

Last Saturday, four strapping Israelis arrived and in just six hours crammed all our belongings into boxes and delivered them to our new address. I sneaked out early with a granny cart full of all our frozen foods, wheeling down past the Ferrara Brothers cement plant and along the industrial weirdness that is lower Bond Street along the Gowanus Canal.

But the Gowanus fringe is no longer where we live. Instead, we’ve found our way into Carroll Gardens proper, the old Italian neighborhood depicted in the movie Moonstruck. There are pizzerias and Italian delis, restaurants and markets galore, not to mention a social club with a beautiful garden where old men sit around outside on folding chairs and argue in Italian.

Carroll Gardens has a reputation as a neighborhood where you could break into someone’s basement and break your legs falling from the roof — indeed, in 1918 Al Capone was married at St. Mary Star of the Sea, a Roman Catholic church that was dedicated in 1855. What they say about mafia neighborhoods — that there’s nowhere safer — isn’t entirely true, but there does seem to be a sense that people are watching out to make sure no bad elements move in. I heard a story about a young professional who, when asked how he was doing by his older Italian neighbor, said “Not so good. I got mugged the other day.”

“Really? I’m very sorry to hear that. What did he look like?”

“Um … He was black, young, about my height.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll make sure it gets taken care of. It won’t happen again. How much did he take?”

“Oh, not that much. About eighty bucks.”

“Eighty dollars? I’m very sorry about that.” The older man then pulled a fat billfold from his pocket and peeled off four twenties, which he handed over to the young professional.

In New York City, this level of neighborhood watch is frankly reassuring.

As for the apartment itself, it’s coming together nicely. But I will refrain from going on and on about furniture placement, wall drilling, etc. My friends already have to hear enough about that, because it’s all I’m thinking about. Let me just end by saying that we are very, very happy with our new home.

This week has been a hectic rush to produce detailed comments on the draft outcome document of the high-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly, which will take place on September 14-16. This is the raw material, warts and all, and it has been fascinating to see how rough this draft is, and in what ways. Certain sentences just hit syntactic or grammatical brick walls, and I get the sense that some of this difficulty is translational: the document is presumably being hashed out in all six of the UN’s official languages, so whenever a particular committee agrees on a formulation in, say, Spanish, it is then hurriedly translated into the other five languages. And considering how much attention is paid to this or that word, the translators probably lean toward literalism, with the attendant risk of producing sentences that are somewhat tortured in their destination languages.

Then there’s my personal favorite, in paragraph 31, which reads, “We are convinced that eradication of poverty and hunger is crucial for the achievement of the [Millenium Development Goals].” I, too, am convinced of this, because the very first Millenium Development Goal is Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. I was pleased to be permitted to work into our statement a takedown of this particular tautology.

Okay, so I’m a dork. But I love this stuff.

UN Quietly Pushed Into East River
Or so says The Onion.

Meanwhile, Daniel Kleinfeld has alerted me to an apparently serious comic about the UN taking over America. In the preview pages, we learn that the secretary-general is Jaques Chirac, that Usama Bin Laden is the representative from Afghanistan, that Chelsea Clinton has married Michael Moore(!), and that Sean Hannity is not only a pirate radio broadcaster (just like Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume) and the last voice of reason in UN-America, but also the proud owner of a seriously hardcore robotic arm.

Sometimes the hysterical right is just weird.

So it looks like the withdrawal talk is going mainstream, or at least as mainstream as Fred Kaplan in Slate, who is generally supportive of getting American troops the hell out of Iraq.

Kaplan raises the interesting possibility that Prime Minister al-Jafaari has been thwarting attempts to train an Iraqi security force precisely because the U.S. has said it will stick around until such a force is viable, and he doesn’t want us to leave because he fears being toppled by Sunni revanchists. So goes the rumor in Baghdad, anyway, according to Kaplan. In response, he argues, we ought to put the fear into al-Jafaari by giving him a timetable for withdrawal.

Then one of two things will happen. Either the Iraqi security forces will start coming together, in which case we could leave by mid-2007; or else the Iraqi security forces will remain a hopeless disaster, in which case there would be no reason for our troops to stick around because the war would be unwinnable, so we could leave by mid-2007.

I’m amazed by how fast this sort of thinking has been taking hold. Not that it’s bad or wrong thinking, but it goes against the platitudes of the 2004 election about staying the course. But I guess everyone wants an exit strategy, and no one wants to prolong this fiasco.

Personally, I think it’d probably be good for us to get the hell out of Iraq. If things go badly enough once we’re gone, we can always reinvade and topple the latest government in Baghdad. That’s the sort of thing we’re good at. In the meantime, the rest of the world, including Iran and North Korea, would have to take note of the fact that we would once again have our whole military available to fling at whoever pisses us off. And while I have no desire to see us at war with either of those countries, it would be good if our enemies at least had to fear that a full-scale invasion is plausible.

Courtesy of the excellent music blog aurgasm, I have just discovered The Cat Empire, an Australian band with an eclectic, jammy sound that is somehow reminiscent of both early G. Love and old AC/DC, if AC/DC had a killer horn section, or if G. Love were into ska. Or something.

I highly recommend checking out their website and watching the video for “Hello,” then visiting aurgasm and downloading the two tracks they’ve made available.

If you asked your typical Brooklynite to name a major development project in town, you’d probably hear about the controversial, Frank Gehry-designed Brooklyn Nets arena that developer Bruce Ratner wants built over the Atlantic Yards, a derelict patch of MTA land. Or you might hear about the Fairway and Ikea planned for Red Hook.

But surprisingly little attention has been paid to the plans for a new Visual and Performing Arts Library, or VPA, which would sit across the street from the new Nets complex. Designed by Mexican architect Enrique Norten (who is profiled in a Slate slideshow), the clean lines of the VPA would be an interesting contrast to the expressionist jumble of Gehry’s fantasyland.

Of course, no one can be sure that any of this stuff will actually get built. But I do expect the landscape of Downtown Brooklyn to look decidedly different ten years from now, and it could do worse than to become a showcase for innovative contemporary architecture.