The Definition of Human Selfishness

Representatives of the human race have voted and decided to liquidate another species in the name of Mammon and short-term economic gain.

Delegates from 175 countries, representing the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, voted on a series of measures to eliminate international trade on the Bluefin Tuna and a variety of other animals that are posed for extinction.  According to the Washington Post,

The adult population of eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna has declined 74 percent over the past half-century, much of it in the past decade, and the population has dropped 82 percent in 40 years in the western Atlantic.

The proposal originally initiated by Monaco and agreed upon by the USA and several EU states, failed to achieve a majority position at the Doha, Qatar conference; with 20 nations in favor, 68 against and 30 cowards abstaining. 

Japan the greatest consumer of worldwide Tuna, imports nearly 80 percent of commercially traded Atlantic bluefin.  Similar to its extensive campaign to dissuade any international body from preventing it from harvesting whales, Japan has used its considerable economic clout to prevent limitations on any trade embargo or harvesting constraints in international waters.  Few deny that the motivations behind their stance are purely commercial.  As Susan Lieberman, director of international policy at the Pew Environment Group said, "This was a case of just plain ignoring the science for short-term economic gain."

Japan is not alone in its posturing; however.  Canada, a country that has made itself into an environmental pariah by its fealty to dirty oil-sands production and the persistent refusal by its conservative government to acknowledge and address climate change, has actively sided with the Japanese on the tuna issue.  Canada's Minster of Fisheries, Gail Shea, applauding the defeat of the trade ban and touting Canada's own policies, which have permitted over the decades the devastation of Atlantic fisheries and the current collapse of Pacific Sockeye Salmon.  So when Canadians say they have a plan to manage fishery stocks, you can be certain that that species will be decimated.

To highlight the absurdity of the entire trade system, consider how Bluefin Tuna is cultured in Spanish waters; as relayed by the BBC.  The fish are initially kept alive in off-shore pens, where they are fed vast amounts of expensively caught fish (around 10-kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1-kg of body weight).  They are then harvested by hand using divers, packaged at a purpose-built factory, and flown -on the same day- to Asian markets.  All this so some silly twit can eat sushi with his/her choice of dipping sauce.

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Additional background stories and commentary on this subject can be found here, here, and here.

Another Japanese First: A Comic Book Library

According to France24,

"In a move to promote serious study of Japanese manga, a university in Tokyo plans to open a library with two million comic books, animation drawings, video games and other cartoon industry artifacts. Tentatively named the Tokyo International Manga Library, it would open by early 2015 on the campus of the private Meiji University, and be available to researchers and fans from Japan and abroad."

To those of the wider public who have never read or watched Japanese animation, although your children definitely have, it is an ornate and bizarre world (somewhat like Japan culture itself) that includes a broad range of subjects: action-adventure, romance, sports and games, historical drama, comedy, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, horror, sexuality, and business and commerce, among others. Unlike the uber-geek "Comic Book-Guy," who peddles his wares to children in the television cartoon The Simpson's, the manga genre is embraced by people of all ages in Japan.

Manga itself is a hybrid art that combines historical Japanese motifs and modern Western styles of animation. These highly stylized comic-book novels and their televised adaptions, have over the decades depicted the continuous cultural development of the Japanese people and its larger society since the Second World War. The gekiga style of drawing (emotionally dark, realistic, and sometimes violent) focuses on the day-in, day-out grim realities of life, and is often drawn in a fashion that has been described as 'gritty'.

Unlike a number of Japanese re-inventions that have failed to find a foot-hold outside of Japan, Anime or Japanese Animation has produced a significant following around the world. As an example, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies were based on a 1972-3 manga released in Japan called Lady Snowblood. In North America over the past few decades, a variety of children's television programing have highlighted Anime. These westernized adaptions include shows like Sailor Moon, which has been exported to more than 23 countries, and Pokemon, which has spawned a dozen movies and a worldwide audience.

As odd as it may seem, a serious academic exploration of the cultural roots and influence of Japanese animation on modernist artwork and global pop-culture is warranted.

Arigatou gozaimasu.

All the Lonely People...

Japanese society never fails to amaze me. In an example of the land of the rising sun's strangeness, is a report that a large proportion of the nation's emerging petty criminals are originating from retired persons. According to Reuters, the elderly, in an attempt to invigorate their existence have begun to furtively swarm shopping centers across the nation and shoplift their miseries away.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't say what the most common items stolen are, but if I was to guess, I would predict that bobble-headed figurines of former Emperor Hirohito, stuffed animals that transform into giant pill dispensing robots, and quite possibly, trendy hari kari knives with extra cute Hello Kitty logos would be some of the more desirable items.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Tokyo police will try to rein in a wave of shoplifting by lonely elderly people by involving them in community service, a police spokesman said Thursday.

One out of four elderly shoplifters in the capital blamed their crime on loneliness, Japanese media quoted a police survey as saying. Another 8 percent said it was because they had "no reason to live."

More than half the elderly shoplifters said they had no friends and 40 percent of them lived alone, media said.

"Making shoplifters do volunteer work in the community is effective," the Tokyo Shimbun quoted J.F. Oberlin University professor Akihiro Sakai, head of a police research panel set up to tackle shoplifting, as saying.

"Instead of increased punishment, I hope we can rehabilitate shoplifters with special care." A police spokesman declined to confirm the details of the survey but said it would be released to the public soon.

Elderly shoplifting cases in Tokyo reached all-time highs last year, nearly catching up with the number of cases involving young offenders.

People 65 years or older accounted for 23 percent of the 17,800 known shoplifting cases in 2008, more than doubling in the past five years, media said.

An example cited in the Ministry of Justice's annual report on crime describes a 76-year-old woman who turned to shoplifting several years ago as a way to battle loneliness after her parents died.

Over 20 percent of Japan's population is aged 65 or over, with that figure set to double by 2050.

Tuna: you can almost taste the extinction in each bite!

Tuna fish, (not to be confused with actual “chicken” or ‘chicken of the sea’ as in Jessica Simpson’s case) is one of the great marvels of the oceans. It is considered one of the most evolved fish in the world. Bluefin tuna, for example, can reach speeds of up to 88 km per hour. Along with Mako sharks and Great Whites, the bluefin tuna are homoeotherms; animals that are capable of internally regulating their body temperatures. They are capable of elevating their body temperatures by as much as 25 degrees above the water they swim in, thus making them particularly effective as predators. Bluefin Tuna can migrate across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, then turn around and do it again.

The bluefin tuna, and to a lesser extent, the yellowfin, are among the most sought-after of big-game fishes. Tuna is the most popular food fish in the world. It is eaten raw, cooked, in sandwiches, in salads, and in cat food. The total worldwide tuna harvest is four million tons. Commercial over fishing, almost exclusively to feed the insatiable Japanese sashimi market, has endangered all populations of bluefin tuna.

The WWF (not the wrestlers you idiot) are predicting that Mediterranean Bluefin Tuna will be extinct by 2012. They have stated that, "The population of tunas that are capable of reproducing – fish aged 4 years or over and weighing more than 35kg – is being wiped out." Ransom Myers, a marine biologist from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has pointed out the fact that industrial fishing took no more than 10-15 years to virtually liquidate and imperil any new fish community it encountered to a tenth of its previous size. "From giant blue marlin to mighty bluefin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean”. In fact, scientists predict that the collapse of all ocean fish stocks by 2048.

In a 2003, Dr. Myers published an article in the journal Nature and stated,

Most people also don't know how bad it is for us to be eating so much fish, not only because of the destruction of an ecosystem vital to survival but also because the big predatory fish are full of the toxins and other pollutants that we cast into the oceans. It's not as healthy to eat fish as most people believe.

Due to the ferocious demand for bluefin tuna from Japan where bluefin tuna are considered a delicacy and are used in sushi and sashimi, overfishing is posed to drive the species into extinction. The Economist magazine has an article stating that Monaco, with support from European allies France and Britain, along with the USA are pushing forward in 2010 to have an international ban on the sale of bluefin tuna.

As Prince Albert, Monaco’s ruler, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month, “The forces of selfishness and stupidity that wiped out the great whales and the northern cod in the last century are steaming ahead at full speed... The bluefin tuna is as endangered as the giant panda and the white rhino.”

Once the oceans have been systematically deprived of life and ecosystem after ecosystem begins to fail, terrestrial environs will also collapse and human civilization too will cease due to our own greed.