The decline of an imperial symbol

MEXICO CITY (AP) — North Korea announced on July 28 that it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, and the reaction from the United States and its two Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, was one of panic. The North Korean dictator has announced — and we assume that U.S. BroadCast Unitedligence sources have confirmed this — that his country has managed to reduce its nuclear warheads to fit on ballistic missiles. On the 30th, two B1 Lancer supersonic bombers, capable of carrying 48 nuclear devices and hundreds of projectiles of various purposes, once again flew over the Korean Peninsula, which they have been using for a decade to threaten Kim Jong-un’s regime with mass destruction. This time the message was clearer. One of the bombers launched a ballistic missile that was intercepted by the THAAD defense system installed by U.S. forces in South Korea. South Korean and Japanese aircraft took part in the exercise. At present, in the midst of paranoid fantasies that have replaced the rational thinking of those concerned about military escalation in the East, it is impossible not to wonder what the Chinese and South Koreans will think of the revival of the Imperial Japanese Air Force. True, World War II still lingers in the attic of obsolete symbols, but people’s memories have not changed at the pace of negotiations by pragmatic politicians. Currently, the country that led the penultimate shock of economic globalization is waiting for the law, approved in June, that will allow Emperor Akihito to abdicate. At the same time, the country has been on high alert for decades due to the acceleration of arms escalation. Many of its characteristics are determined by the shadow of this giant: China. Moreover, since the Japanese economy is a white economy, Japan unconditionally cooperates with the United States against the yellow economic threat. These symbols are difficult to eliminate with a few films and annual statements. On the contrary, they are revitalized every time they appear. In 2005, as part of the celebration of the victory of “Russia” (no longer the Soviet Union) over Nazi Germany, toy tanks were given to children on Red Square, and the Ministry of Defense sponsored a dramatic reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin. . The German ambassador to Russia, Rüdiger von Fritsch, witnessed this dramatic event and said that he was “concerned” about the conduct of the official performance, “forgetting that the Reichstag is today the place where the democratic parliament meets”. But let’s go back to the Imperial Japanese Air Force, whose commander is likely to answer: “People forget that today our aviation is in the service of the setting empire.”
Empire of the senses
Electronic media played up a strange-sounding news for Sunday, June 7: Last April 10, one of the favorite commercial snacks of the Japanese, Calbee’s pizza-flavored potato chips, which cost between 130 and 200 yen, depending on the size of the pack, were sold at an online auction for 1,250 yen per pack, so a pack of 12 cost about 15,000 yen, equivalent to 2,530 Mexican pesos. The company controls 75% of the potato chip market and 53% of the packaged snack market in the Asian country, and has formed strategic alliances with other export giants such as PepsiCo and Kikkoman to expand its junk food to 14 countries, including Spain, South Korea and Australia. Other products include snap peas and onion rings, low-salt varieties and soy sauce. As of the above date, Calbee announced that it would temporarily stop sales due to a lack of main inputs. Hokkaido Island, where 80% of the potatoes used for frying (excluding those used for cooking) are produced, was hit by a typhoon last August and the tuber harvest was very bad.The company is not the only one affected. Koike-Ya Inc. also announced that it will stop producing 16 products. In addition, the financial information company Bloomberg warned that the impact of the shortage may soon spread to the restaurant and catering industry, as there is no interest in promoting the export of American potatoes. The obvious solution to this problem is to immediately import a large amount of cheap potatoes from American producers who have been knocking on the door of the Japanese market for many years, or to buy emergency goods from other countries, but in the international market configured by developed countries, this is not so easy. First, in order to strengthen the domestic market, ensure the price of Hokkaido’s precious products and maintain the distribution plan that is actively conquered by companies such as Calbee, Japan has established strong protectionist measures against the demands of monopolies and imposed income standards on foreign agricultural producers that are almost unattainable. , even for agribusiness giants. One of the regulations is the strict cleaning of potatoes, because when they are planted in the ground, they may introduce bacteria and pests into the country, and another is to limit the amount of imports. These laws, which in ideographies protect the health of the Japanese people and leave them at the mercy of the country’s junk food, have now become the stars of corporate folklore.This situation makes international investors nervous and shows once again the weakness of the economic model that we have been taught to admire, which is seen as one of the so-called “miracles” of the post-war period. For decades, there has been a fierce debate in Japan about the social aspects of this development, especially education, but the size and dynamism of the economy quickly quelled opposition until a situation emerged, which the specialized newspaper Nikkei Shimbun called the “potato crisis.” Interestingly, as the debate progressed, the same points made on the occasion of another crisis, which entered its sixth year a few weeks ago and spread in other parts of the news media: the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which is still being studied in some countries’ laboratories. The lack of pizza-flavored potato chips and the release of the nuclear monster on March 11, 2011 (which has deep roots in the Japanese imagination) have common roots and causes. One of them is the impossibility of expanding “living space”, which, as in previous centuries, forced Japan to optimize its few natural resources; it is the main prerequisite for the industrial use of nuclear energy and super-specialty crops. This reality also directs economic management to priority goals, such as the search for technological and financial leadership.In the last century, this goal was achieved, but at a social cost that seems unacceptable to the Japanese BroadCast Unitedlectual community. In the last few weeks, between the economic balance of the nuclear accident, the statistics of losses and the review of the Japanese government’s decision on the recovery of cities around the nuclear power plant, the description that appeared in our language in the media was given by the RT en Español portal based on an original article from New Scientist. A team of researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, led by Nikolaos Evangeliou, concluded that “more than 80% of the radiation released in Fukushima went to the oceans and the poles”, so “the world population received less radiation.” To reassure the reader, he compared this exposure to a more common one: “Everyone received an additional X-ray.” The researchers refer to the average radiation of the two cesium isotopes that reaches every inhabitant of the planet, but it is clear that its distribution is not so uniform and if these results are conclusive, the effects of radiation are cumulative at the poles, especially considering global warming. Regarding the ecological impact, the institute links the increase in radiation levels in the region to the decrease of birds, insects and “some mammals” between 2011 and 2014. Is anyone more calm?Six years after the disaster—they still call it an accident, but it was the second-worst radioactive leak after Chernobyl—TEPCO, the company that operated the nuclear power plant, admitted that 2.5 times more radiation had been released than initially estimated, and that 99 percent of it had been emitted in the first three weeks. In 2013, TEPCO reported that it was dumping nearly 80,000 gallons of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean every day after the “accident.” The extent of the contamination was measured the following year: a groundwater source near the Daiichi plant, 80 feet from the Pacific Ocean, contained 20 million becquerels of strontium-90 per gallon, while international standards allow a maximum of 120 units per gallon. In February 2015, new radioactive liquid was reported to have leaked from a reactor drain into the sea. A week before the sixth anniversary of the disaster, radiation levels in the area suddenly increased due to a two-meter-diameter hole in the No. 2 reactor. Fed up with the recurring nuclear spectre of Fukushima, residents of cities near Fukushima, such as Namie, are reluctant to return, despite the government declaring them habitable. No wonder: the same type of government that ignored warnings about the complex management of nuclear energy as it replaced the limited capacity of fossil fuel and hydroelectric plants. The same type of government, with a strange Godzilla complex, that thought the country could live on the energy that had so devastated it in August 1945. A government that had integrated unreservedly into the European and American economic models, knowing that most other countries were doomed to sink while the industrialized nations could get rich. Of course, Japan had other energy, food and business alternatives, as did almost all countries. No one is saying there are easy solutions, but progress would be made if more sectors were involved in the formulation of basic policies, apart from those that ended up in a monopoly of almost absolute power. They can’t abdicate: the new legal provisions apply only to the Emperor. ______________________ carista@process.com.mx