The thread explores two ideas I’d like to say a little more about:

1. Microaggression and microinequity – that is, the constant little events that underline someone is different or of a lower status – fuel bad feelings and inequality and have a corrosive effect on the person on the receiving end, even if the person on the giving end has no intention to hurt.

Microaggression is a really common talking point in the English-speaking expat community in Japan. Here’s one example.

I’ve had friends tell me they couldn’t stay in Japan or Taiwan anymore because they couldn’t handle never being fully accepted. It took me way longer than it should have to connect this frustration with the feelings American minorities have in their own communities. Then the little things that happened here felt really small. In fact, it became clear that Western foreigners in the East are a privileged minority.

James Baldwin describes the way the disrespect of others can poison one’s spirit in his essay “Native Son”, which I also happened to read this week:

This isn’t just a macro (societal) issue, though. Little differences in treatment are in my opinion a major cause of family rifts. Anyone who feels looks down upon (say, for having less “success”) resents it and things quietly get worse and worse.

2. We need to be more aware of how systemic inequalities created the world we have today and how we ourselves contribute to the perpetuation of suffering.

This sort of thing also happens in home life, too. Say you have an overweight family member, and everyone’s always telling him he needs to lose weight…and yet when there’s food left over after dinner, everyone shovels it onto his plates. The people complaining about the problem are themselves perpetuating it!

Likewise, social ostracism fuels antisocial behavior. For example, yakuza membership is largely made up of (1) children of yakuza (2) graduates of teenage biker gangs, who mostly come from broken homes (3) the burakumin, or untouchables (4) ethnic Koreans and other ostracized Asian groups. People that society rejected find their best opportunities are in crime.

One thing I’ve learned this month is that “the ghetto” is the result of public policy. From The Warmth of Other Suns: “The story played out in virtually every northern city – migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century. These were the original colored quarters – the abandoned and identifiable no-man’s-lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.”

Black neighborhoods got the worst of everything from city hall in infrastructure and services. (Hello, broken window theory.) No one was allowed to move out, and government housing authorities redlined/hugely undervalued their holdings as owners even as they paid out the nose as renters – which meant their wealth was being constantly devalued.

More Ta-Nehisi on how ghettos were created by elite discrimination:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-ghetto-is-public-policy/273554/

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-ghetto-public-policy-and-the-jewish-exception/273592/

Since inequitable urban policy reaped so much destruction, couldn’t equity go a long way to solving problems? Couldn’t city halls take a much more active role in identifying addressing inequalities?

I’m wondering now why the demographic differences between Indy’s Marion and Hamilton counties have always been so stark and thinking my own hometown is a place where there is much legitimate urban renewal to be done.

There’s much to do here, as well. Immigrants from Southeast Asian countries in particular deserve more equitable treatment. Personally, I’m resolved to never look down on anyone. I admit I’m not there yet. To never feel contempt, I’ll have to examine my conscience daily.

Keiji Nakazawa
Asahi Shimbun Obituary

When Keiji Nakazawa was 6 years old, the Hiroshima atomic bomb vaporized nearly his entire family.

He portrayed this experience in a comic book.

As far as I know, Barefoot Gen is the most famous anti-war work in Japanese history. Search for it in Google Images and it will imprint itself in your mind as well. The art style, typical of fun adventures, makes what is depicted inside feel even worse. Perhaps if a book like this were required reading in American junior high schools, we would not declare another war of choice. Irrespective of America, Nakazawa’s work has doubtless been monumental in Japanese culture. My junior high school there had a student performance of it every few years.

Beate Gordon

Read the New York Times’ obituary. It’s one of those that’s so astonishing you wonder why you’ve never heard of this person before.

Beate Sirota Gordon introduced women’s rights to postwar Japan, writing the clauses specifically guaranteeing them into the Japanese Constitution, emancipating 40 million people, when she was 22 years old.

Gordon studied other nations’ constitutions and drew on her childhood experiences in Tokyo and wrote the articles in a week. A sleepless week. Imagine all your learning and moral training and ethical thought suddenly being put to the test, now, and you have to lay out the future legal status of millions of historically marginalized people.

And then she kept her role a secret for decades.

All she did in the meantime was introduce the West to every kind of traditional Japanese art and every style of Asian performance art she could find. It’s amazing to think of how little even Americans in the highest reaches of power understood of Japan when they began ruling the country after the war. And pre-WWII cultural globalization mostly meant Westernization. Ms. Gordon was very important to turning on the East-to-West cultural flows and contributing to the cultural relations between Japanese and Americans today.

With her parents and Kosaku Yamada in Tokyo in 1928 (source: http://www.shinyawatanabe.net/atomicsunshine/ny/beateintroduction.html)

Mr. Nakazawa, Ms. Gordon, rest in peace. May our generation, too, have people as amazing as you.

The last time this happened, many people asked me what it is about America. Generalizations are never Gospel truth, but my opinion is we have a widespread Mental Health epidemic, abetted by unnatural medication and environmental and dietary contamination but ultimately caused by family and community breakdown.

I believe only a one-man island, someone without any healthy people close to him, caring for him and knowing his activities and state of mind, could do a thing like this. And almost every town in America, from Newtown, CT to Carmel, Indiana, is full of one-man islands.

Even those who never attack another person suffer alone daily. They fall and no one hears the sound.

This story, and the additional detail that Lanza’s own brother hadn’t been in contact with him since 2010, following a 2009 divorce splitting the family in half, tells the tale of Adam Lanza in very broad strokes:

“A relative told ABC News that Adam was `obviously not well.` Family friends in Newtown also described the young man as troubled and described Nancy as very rigid. `[Adam] was not connected with the other kids,` said one friend.”

Lanza’s brother called him autistic. In reality, due to the explosion of home entertainment and the Internet in recent decades, all of us are more autistic than ever. We interact with other people face-to-face less frequently, and it’s easier than ever to avoid other people for a long period of time. Independence is part of the American ethos, which is why we’ve gone this direction faster than other countries, but we’ve also seen troubled, isolated killers crop up in more communitarian societies like China and Japan.

Here’s what we can do to make things better.

1. More love, more connections, more community organizations. This is what we can all do personally, do passionately, and do right now. We should reach out especially to estranged family members and people we find disgusting or troubling and bring everyone into the fold and into positive lifestyles. We should try to ensure no one falls through the cracks.

Let’s try to be as heroic as Donnie Andrews, the original Omar, was:

2. Most people on my wall are discussing gun control. That’s fair. But prior to a total ban, I’d like to look into how these weapons are sold. The killers aren’t going to the corner store to a vendor who knows them and their families well and can use discretion; they’re buying weapons by mail from people who couldn’t care less. A criminal background check tells you much less than enough about a person.

If we want to ban assault weapons, then we also have to disarm our police departments, because they are weaponizing to a terrifying degree. Otherwise, we will make the paranoid more paranoid. Almost every country suffered a mass police or military slaughter of civilians at some point in the 20th century. People don’t buy assault rifles to blow bigger holes in burglars’ heads; they do it to head off a future 228 Incident.

3. As I alluded to earlier, America is physically contaminated, and we need to clean it up. So is the rest of the industrialized world on a lesser scale. Besides unhealthy food and water there are even clothing problems – look up “Greenpeace and Zara and Levi’s” – and ATM contamination – look up bisphenol A. I could go on forever. My parents are part of the vaccine-reform crowd; they say US vaccines are made using tissue from aborted fetuses and some kids react to that. Environmental and consumer protection should be mass movements, not niche ones.

America is also by far the most medicated place in the world. Which makes everything worse. I mentioned our prescription pill plague two weeks ago. Besides that, we’re the Ritalin generation. You must know of others who suffered from this.  When I taught in Japan, the number of students on medication for mental health issues was practically zero…and by and large the kids were doing fine.

All these chemicals and tampering are making us sick. And physical and mental health are connected.

Every generation sees evil and suffering. The proper response is not despair but positive reform. Thank you for reading, and God bless you as you move forward tomorrow.

As of 2010, the proportions of Japanese men and women who had never been married at age 50 were 20.1% and 10.6%, respectively, it was announced today. This is the first time that the 20% and 10% barriers have been broken.

This information is to be included in “Children and Child-Rearing” white paper which will be confirmed by the Cabinet in the beginning of June.

In 1980, the proportions of the single-for-life were 2.6% for men and 4.5% for women. Now, more than 8 times more men are lifelong bachelors, and more than twice as many women are lifelong bachelorettes. The numbers of the unmarried have surged since the 1990s.

By age group: 71.8% of men and 60.3% of women age 25-29 have never been married. 47.3% of men and 34.5% of women age 30-34 have never been married. And 35.6% of men and 23.1% of women age 35-39 have never been married.

The Silent Triumph of Linux
Cell phones, businesses, critical environments, and the infrastructure of the Web all function with this system
El País: Linux, el triunfo silencioso
Laia Reventós reporting from Barcelona April 22, 2012

When you navigate the Internet, you use Linux. When you search on Google, gossip on Facebook, or play with your Android phone (850,000 of those are activated each day), you also use this operating system. When you see a movie on an airplane, take money from a teller, or make a long-distance phone call…yes, Linux is at the heart of multiple daily activities, even though you aren’t conscious of it.

The most installed open source operating system in the world and the motor of free software still is not massively installed in desktop computers, where Windows reigns with 92% of the market. That is the same share it had in the 90s, when Linus Torvalds (born in Helsinki in 1969) developed Linux. On Friday, Technology Academy Finland recognized its compatriot for creating a system which has had “a great impact on the development of open source programs, work on the Internet, and the opening of the Web to make it accessible to millions of people.”

Torvalds was a 21-year old student of computer engineering at the University of Helsinki in 1991. In his room, he began “a small project. It was something fun to help my learning, but it ended up having everything an operating system is supposed to have.”

The youth released the first version of Linux on the Internet, and word of mouth did the rest for a system protected by the General Public License (GPL), which permits its use, copying, modification, and free distribution. As opposed to other systems, Linux has improved thanks to collaboration. Close to 8000 developers and 800 companies have contributed to its 15 million lines of code since 2005. The Iliad had 15,000 lines. Every three months, a new version of the core system is released under Torvalds’s supervision.

“Linux was the first modifiable operating system that could be installed and used by anyone,” explains Miguel Jaque, director of Spain’s National Open Source Technology Center (CENATIC). “You could find out how its code worked. The secret was out. And that allowed the peak of free software to begin.”

Twenty years later, the system still has not gatecrashed domestic computing (it has a 0.98% worldwide market share according to Netmarketshare), but it rules mobile phones, businesses, data centers, critical environments, and the infrastructure of the web. 80% of stock transactions have the penguin symbol beneath them. Even televisions and cars use it. 25% of their costs are for software, and in four years the proportion will be 75%. For that reason, giants like General Motors, BMW, Hyundai, PSA Peugeot Citroën, and Renault-Nissan have constructed an open platform for entertainment and information systems (the GENIVI Alliance).

In Spain, the management and education communities have led Linux’s advance. 83% of public organizations have some kind of open software installed for them. Don’t forget that Extremadura took the lead in providing computers for its students with its Linex system in 2003; it just don’t preach about it much. This tide has swept to seven other Autonomous Communities, including Andalusia and Catalonia (Lincat). The Andalusian system Guadalinex now serves 1.8 million students in 5882 schools with a network of 640,000 PCs and 4200 servers.

What are the advantages? “It reduces costs because the license is free; you can change providers without problems, and you can personalize all the components,” says Jaque. Munich City Hall has saved a third of its technological budget (€4 million) thanks to Linux, and now, in a time of crisis, it could save more if its civil services “save and reuse their computing resources.” In 2011, according to CENATIC, 46% of civil services created their own programs, but only 18% set them free.

Those affected by the theft of children spent the night in front of the Sisters of Charity’s school where the accused nun lives holding yellow candles and cards with their petitions.

Nun Accused of Stealing Babies Declines to Testify in Court
Sister María Gómez Valbuena is still charged with illegal custody
Tomorrow, the judge will call for testimony from the adoptive parents of the daughter who was supposedly robbed
El País: La monja acusada del robo de bebés se niega a declarar ante el juez
Natalia Junquera reporting from Madrid April 12, 2012

Sister María Gómez Valbuena declined to testify before a judge about her supposed involvement in a case of baby theft.  She is still charged with illegal custody, the charge about which she was called to testify today. Judge Adolfo Carretero said he will call the adoptive parents to testify tomorrow about their supposedly stolen daughter. The nun is the first person to be directly accused after 1500 denouncements were made all around Spain by mothers who believe their children were stolen after birth.

Gómez Valbuena, wearing the habit of the Daughters of Charity, arrived at Madrid Trial Court 47 a little after eight, an hour and a half before her appointed time, accompanied by another religious from her congregation. She attempted – successfully, when she entered – to avoid the multitude of media members waiting for her, many of them from abroad. After availing her right to not testify before the judge, she left through a side entrance, the one used for night court, escorted by several members of the municipal police, but she could not avoid the media then.

Nor could she avoid the other mothers accusing her of robbing their babies; when they saw her, they shouted, “Shameless!” and “We want to see your face!” while Sister María entered a black all-terrain Mercedes Benz with tinted windows in order to depart the judicial premises.

The nun, who is 80 years old, has contracted the services of José María Calero Martínez, the lawyer for the parents of murdered minor Marta del Castillo. The Madrid District Attorney’s Office called her to testify after she was accused, and she declined to speak then, as well. Dozens of mothers who are seeking their children and who have seen their cases put in the archives of DA’s Offices around the country for lack of evidence have put all their hopes on Sister María telling the judge what she did and what she knows.

The case for which the judge called the nun forward as defendant is that of María Luisa Torres, who gave birth to a daughter, Pilar, in the Saint Cristina of Madrid clinic in 1982. She claimed that Sister María seized the child and threatened she would take the mother’s other daughter, as well, “because of your adultery”. Thanks to the help of Pilar’s adoptive father, the mother and daughter were able to reunite last year, 29 years after the birth. Last week, both testified to the same judge that interrogated Sister María today. “If she doesn’t pay in this life, she will pay in the next one,” Pilar said about the religious before she entered the court. “She deserves the highest punishment,” Pilar’s mother added.

Urdangarin’s Ex-Business Partner Implicates the King of Negotiating in Favor of his Son-in-Law
Diego Torres remitted three emails with documents to the court
The Duke says, “He has told Cristina that in principle, there won’t be any problems.”

Duke Iñaki Urdangarin affirmed in three 2007 emails that the king acted as a mediator so his son-in-law could participate in a new yachting team for the 33rd America’s Cup. The documents were remitted by Urdangarin’s ex-business partner, Diego Torres, to the Palma court which is investigating the activities of Instituto Nóos. The Ayre Project, which still has not found prosperity after that fiasco of a sporting event, was managed by Pedro Perelló and Jorge Forteza – regattists, businessmen, and friends of the princes and princesses – with the support of the Duke of Palma.

In one of these communications, dated September 30, 2007, Torres asks the duke about his “experience” in seminars about urban planning in Philadelphia and informs him that Perelló has spent “a good while on the telephone every day” to intensify his contacts with the public administrations of the Valencian Community. The following day, Urdangarin answered him form Washington, “I bring a message on behalf of the king, and it is that he has commented to Cristina, so that she could pass the message on to me, that he will get [Francisco] Camps in touch with Pedro in order to tell him about the theme of the base of the Prada. And that in principle, there will not be any problems, and they will help us get it,” said Urdangarin in allusion to the necessary installations in the port of Valencia to hold Project Ayre’s future boat.

In this same email, Urdangarin informed Torres that “there could be a little something for the foundation” and lamented that the entity’s website was not in English. “It would give a more international touch,” the Duke said, and he added that Agustín Zulueta, leader of the Desafío Español (Spanish Challenge) crew – the team that participated in the 2007 America’s Cup – “had asked Cristina to coffee to talk about something that couldn’t be discussed over the phone.” “It was mysterious, but it seemed serious and important,” he averred.

The messages about the ambitious sailing project which Torres’s lawyer, Manuel González Peeters, handed to the judge, piled up on August 9, 2007. Urdangarin then revealed a supposed encounter between King Juan Carlos and Perelló. “We arranged a meeting between the king and Pedro in order to present the project. It went very well, and apart from seeming very well put together, the king has offered all his help in finding financial assistance,” he said to Torres, to whom he added, “Enjoy the cruise.”

Later, on September 10, the husband of Princess Cristina wrote a message to Perelló which again lead with the supposed actions the king had taken to make sure the project arrived safely in harbor. “The king commented to me that one of his friends had done the negotiating we requested with Miguel Fluxa,” in allusion to the owner and president of the Iberostar group, Miguel Fluxá. “From my end, I’ve given [Fluxá] the ear of BBVA so he can give a push to Paco González,” Urdangarin explained to Perelló.

The messages also reveal certain differences over the (failed) presence of a second Spanish team at the America’s Cup. Zulueta affirmed in an October 2007 conversation that he felt “more peaceful” after speaking with “Cristina” and that he believed Perelló “will not continue sending surprising documents to our sponsors.” The tone, despite it all, is conciliatory, and he informed Urdangarin that “the Desafío Español has nothing against another Spanish team taking part, and if course, it has not acquired any right to be the only team.” This relieved “a worry on our end.”

The message sent by another of those implicated in the Nóos case, Antonio Ballabriga, chief of the corporate affairs of BBVA and friend of the Duke, confirms that Urdangarin went forward with his activity in Nóos and his business with public entities. This, despite his formal renunciation in March 2006 and after the king’s emissary, José Manuel Romero Moreno, advised him that spring to disassociate himself with the business. “As we’ve established, we’ll meet at 10 in Nóos to talk about meetings for the European Games project.”

After the 2009 America’s Cup
J.G. reporting from Barcelona and A.M. reporting from Palma

The Mallorcan regattists Pedro Perelló and Jorge Forteza conceived of a project to give Spain a second representative in the 2009 America’s Cup in Valencia. They wanted a team capable of competing to win, and for that they needed to raise at least 100 million euros. Despite their efforts, and despite the Ayre project being enrolled as a challenger by America’s Cup Management (ACM), the project did not prosper.

In 2007, Perelló won the King’s Cup for sailing with a boat named Siemens in which Prince Elena was a navegator. It was then that the regattist and shipowner tried to put together a great team in order to participate in the America’s Cup. Perelló never hid who the project’s godparents were, and he affirmed that the project counted on the active participation of Urdangarin (who was to take charge of the “social and cultural” area of the project) and the blessing of the king, as well. Duke Urdangarin retired after the project. Three years later, one of his businesses dedicated to “sports patronage” (Promorace, FL) was condemned to pay 34,000 euros for abandoning a sailing ship in the installations of the Royal Nautical Club of Palma. The judge obligated the business to “vacate the installations.”

Perelló paired up with a person who could provide more economic muscle for the project, businessman Jorge Forteza, duke of the real estate company Nova. Forteza was tthe “fourth player” that participated in the table tennis game in the palace of Marivent Urdangarin, along with regattist and ex-Director General of Sports Pepote Ballester and ex-President of the Balearic Islands Jaume Matas, who were also imputed in the Nóos case. There, Urdangarin confirmed his patronage of the Illes Balears cycling team. Nóos bought to apartments in Novaen Palma. In addition, Forteza was an intermediary for buying and selling terrain for Mallorca’s territorial program, which was investigated by the attorney general. The BMW Oracle team took the plan for the 33rd America’s Cup to court, where the project was paralyzed more than a year and a half before it was finally cleared.

Saudi Businessman Paid for Spanish King’s Hunting Trip in Botswana
Mohamed Eyad Kayali resides in Spain, where he represents the Royal House of Saud
El País: Un empresario saudí pagó la cacería del Rey en Botsuana
Mábel Galaz reporting from Madrid April 18, 2012

The King went on his controversial hunting trip to Botswana on invitation from Saudi businessman Mohamed Eyad Kayali, who has lived in Spain for years, as reported by El Mundo and confirmed by sources with knowledge of the expedition. Kayali, who has properties in Madrid and Marbella, usually acts as a representative of the Royal House of Saud in Spain, defending and driving their business. This lobbyist of Syrian origin was one of the people who accompanied the king on his safari.

In other news, whether it is coincidence or not, Queen Sofía decided to spend two anda half hours in the Hospital USP San José yesterday, where Don Juan Carlos is recuperating from a hip operation which began at dawn Saturday. This long visit was ten times longer than her first, on Monday, which was reduced to 15 minutes.

The royal family knows that its place in the public square is important and should be untainted by personal problems, which are private business. So the king and his children have decided to close ranks. All have gathered around Don Juan Carlos, the visible head of the Crown, who has never been in the eye of such a hurricane.

Doña Sofía arrived at the hospital at 1:30 PM. The Royal Family reported that the two had decided to have lunch together. They even gave details abot the menu. They both had greens for their first course. After that, the king requested a sirloin steak and the queen a hake; she no longer eats meat. Their private date was different from the visit on the first day, when they were surrounded for those few minutes by doctors and retainers.

The queen left the lunch smiling and relaxed and approached the press to inform them her spouse is “phenomenal”, “has an appetite”, and “is doing very well”. She only added, “I’ll say nothing more because there is nothing more to say.” As Doña Sofía approached her automobile, she heard a voice asking, “What’s your opinion of the trip to Botswana?” She did not respond. No one really expected her to.

The stage of closing the family ranks was completed yesterday with the visit of the Prince of Asturias, who has continued representing his father at public functions, yesterday in Valencia and today in Murcia. And with the presence of Doña Elena, who left her convalescing son for a while in order to be with her father, with whom she is especially close. She said about criticism of the king, “I haven’t heard anything; I’ve been working.”

Everything indicates that the king will be able to leave today. The director of USP San José, Javier de Joz, read the new medical report at noon on Tuesday and assured that the king is “showing great progress”. He explained that they had practiced new remedies and had intensified his rehabilitation, with several sessions per day.