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AMC showed The Horror Of Frankenstein (1970) the other day. It was a terrible movie by most measures, but also rather charming because of its political conscience and occasionally witty dialogue. Hippy influence is strong in this film as we see by Victor’s severed arm experiment at college that flashes a peace sign.

By far, the most entertaining quotes are when Victor Frankenstein is talking with The Graverobber to arrange to purchase corpses. Victor wants only the freshest bodies for his gruesome experiments, to which The Graverobber replies, “Times are hard. People just aren’t dying off so quick. Yes, it’s the welfare state, that’s what it is.”

A moment later Victor reminds him about the corpses, “But fresh mind you, nothing more than three days old.” The Graverobber responds, “Oh don’t worry yourself, anything I bring you will be so fresh it will get past the government meat inspector.”

Later that night The Graverobber makes his pregnant wife dig up corpses while he eats sausages. He, but Victor especially, are completely amoral and very entertaining. Victor can be charming or cold-blooded. He is not afraid to murder man or beast. When Victor’s school chum tells him to stop his heinous experiments or he will inform the authorities, Victor agrees and says, “Tomorrow we initiate a new series of experiments. Something harmless like splitting the atom perhaps,” and then promptly proceeds to murder his friend.

Victor the true monster in this movie, especially considering how boring the monster he creates is.

In Dogs and Demons, Alex Kerr identifies tourism as one of the great failures of modern Japan. He mentions that it was by no accident either, but a “deliberate national policy” that Japan chose to follow. Instead of becoming a service-based economy, national policy was that Japan would shun all industries that didn’t contribute to building things. “Tourism…merely supports menial low-paid jobs, unlike manufacturing, which creates high-tech, high-salaried jobs.”

This article from The Asahi Shinbun talks about Japanese hot spring resorts trying to target South Korean and Taiwanese customers. First they’ve identified the problem.

What attracts foreign travelers to Japan? In short, what sells?

The tourism industry has tried many approaches, yet Japan-despite its rich cultural history-continues to lag as a top-notch world destination.

Ask Kerr this question and he would probably mention that in Japan’s rapid industrialization they have managed to destroy most of what is “authentic” about Japan. For example, the destruction of many of the old wooden buildings in Kyoto.

This question leads us to an even more important question though. Why do we travel at all? I think we travel because we are searching for an “authentic” experience. What that means can depend on where you are going and why. People going to New York want to experience authentic New York, the big city, impressive skyline, Broadway and museums. People go to France for the food, for Paris, for the quaint countryside, or castles, or history, or beaches, for the Louvre, for romance, the list goes on and on.

So why visit Japan? What is the authentic Japanese experience? The answer to that question is worth millions of dollars in tourism revenue. All we can say right now is that Japan is failing as a tourist attraction. This article in the Yomiuri Shinbun reports that 6.13 million tourists visited Japan in 2004, an increase of 17.8%, according to the Japan National Tourist Organization. That might not seem so bad at first, until you consider that the number one worldwide tourist destination, France, attracted 77 million people in 2002. Japan isn’t even a top 25 world tourist destination. It’s been beaten out by such places as China, Hong Kong, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and even Croatia. More people visited South Korea from 1995-2002 than Japan. Japan also has the lowest percentage of international tourist receipts in the North-East Asia region. These figures can all be found at the World Tourism Organization, a U.N. organization.

To put that 6.13 million person figure in a different perspective, according to an article in the April 10 2005 edition of The Oregonian, 3.4 million people visit the Woodburn Company Stores each year. This makes it the number one tourist attraction in Oregon. The next biggest draw is the Spirit Mountain Casino, with 3 million visitors a year. That means a mall and a casino in Oregon, combined, attract more tourists than the entire nation of Japan.

Let’s look back to the Asahi article about hot spring resorts. The article mentions that because of outbreaks of disease and scandals involving the quality of water at Japanese hot spring resorts, “The spas were not living up to their reputation and Japanese began avoiding them.” I think it’s very telling that, “Inn operators said their only hope for survival was to try to lure Asian visitors and introduce them to the customary habit of a long, soap-free soak at the end of a busy day.”

So, because of the quality problems at the hot spring resorts, Japanese customers have decided to stay away. Instead of fixing the problems with quality and restoring their reputations in the eyes of the Japanese customer, they’ve instead decided to lure Asian customers to the hot spring resorts. The issue to me looks like this, “If Japanese tourists know what makes a real authentic hot spring experience, and we can’t live up to that, then let’s attract other tourists who don’t know better.” Quality and a lack of authenticity, these are just some of the problems that affect Japanese tourism.

Many of the problems in Japan that Alex Kerr mentions in Dogs and Demons have come up in the news this week.

Kerr mentions how the Forest Agency engaged in a program to clear-cut natural Japanese forests and replace them with mostly cedar trees, which was thought to be much more profitable to industry. It has had a damaging effect on the wildlife of the forest, increased erosion, and nearly single-handedly created the annual cedar pollen problem. Incidentally, this year’s cedar pollen season is supposedly one of the worst on record. The Mainichi Daily News reports, “The pollen count this year is tens of times higher than last year’s levels in many regions.” My girlfriend mentioned that the hills near her home are completely white from the blowing pollen. As a result she suffers constantly from cold-like symptoms and has even been forced to wear a mask to work. The Mainichi article quotes a pollen allergy expert as saying, “Unless a specific medicine such as a hay fever vaccine is produced, there is fundamentally no way to prevent hay fever.” As a radical idea, why not just cut down the cedar forests and replant the natural forests? You could easily prevent hay fever by changing the source of the problem.

In this interview at The Asahi Shinbum, environmentalist C.W. Nicol mentions the same problems. The conifer plantations that have replaced Japan’s natural forests are sick. There is a lack of diversity in the forest which drives animals, in this case bears, out of the forest to search for food. Nicol also identifies the bureaucracy as the problem. It is a very interesting full of common sense ideas that fly in the face of the bureaucracy. For example:

…we are discouraged from teaching our students field work. When we set up the college, bureaucrats said: Why are you having your students live in tents? Any essential field work was questioned. They said “just teach them biology.” But how do you teach them field biology if you don’t go into the field?

I think it is better to have three or four people working on a local forest than it is having 10 people working in an office in Tokyo. You can’t manage a forest from Tokyo.

I think Nicol is correct. You can’t manage the forest from Tokyo in the same way you would manage the steel industry. The result of that management is the mess that the Japanese forests are currently in.

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan
By Alex Kerr
Hill and Wang, 2001, 432 pages.

Dogs and Demons more accurately describes the Japan I know and lived in better than any book I’ve read. The Japan I know is a very ugly place, with concrete rivers and beaches, ugly dilapidated buildings, and mysterious concrete flood control devices in the hills. The point of the book is that Japan has made a mistake in modernizing. They were very successful up to a point, around the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, at which time little further progress has been made. Among the examples that Alex Kerr uses are the unsophisticated methods of cleaning up hazardous waste and Japanese brokerages that completely missed out on modern financial dealings. This really fits in with some of the things we talked about in a Japanese economics class last term. The structures in the Japanese economy that created rapid growth are now obsolete and dragging the entire economy down. This process has been continuing on for 15 years now, the “lost decade” of recession keeps on growing and growing.

Alex Kerr puts the blame on these problems squarely on out-of-control bureaucracies that answer to no one and must constantly spend their ever increasing budgets on increasingly pointless public works projects. His favorite example of this is the concreting over of Japan in the name of flood control by erecting pointless dams and encasing rivers in concrete “U”s. He also mentions the Isahaya bay reclamation project as an example of pointless development that destroyed precious tidal wetlands. Both of these examples are close to my heart since I lived in Isahaya for a year. I would often walk along the concrete banks of the river that cut through town, and saw first hand the flood gates that blocked off the sea to reclaim land. Ugly and pointless always came to mind. The destruction of the bay resulted in problems in the entire sea, especially for the nori farmers in Saga and Fukuoka.

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The Financial Times for Friday, April 1 2005 reports in the article Bank warns of ‘1970s’ oil prices that Goldman Sachs has forecast oil prices reaching $105 a barrel. They believe that the world has entered into a period of “super spikes” because of increased demand for oil and a lack of excess supply.

With the lack of investment in oil infrastructure, the rapid modernization of countries such as China and India, the terror/war premiums now included in every barrel of oil, and reluctance of Americans to reduce demand, there is little reason to expect the price of oil to fall in the near future.

With a rough doubling of oil prices we could expect to see gas go up to $4, or even $5, per gallon. At those prices it would cost me nearly $50 to fill up my small, old car with gas. For the nation it could mean serious economic and political damage, while at the same time providing impetuous for change.

In the same Financial Times, the article IEA to call for an emergency oil plan stresses the need to reduce demand for oil, and proposes these energy saving recommendations: carpooling, driving bans, lowering speed limits, expanded use of public transportation, telecommuting, and introducing a compressed work week.