Where The Boys Are

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Today the competition begins between final eight (besuto eito) teams remaining from the 32 teams invited to the spring high school single-elimination baseball tournament.

The Besuto Eito are

Kanto Dai'ichi (Tokyo Metropolitan District)
Yokohama (Kanagawa Prefecture)
Osaka Toin (Osaka Prefecture)
Aikodai Meiden (Aichi Prefecture)
Urawa Gakuen (Saitama Prefecture)
Naruto (Tokushima Prefecture)
Kendai Takasaki (Gunma Prefecture)
Kosei Gakuin (Aomori Prefecture)

Population ranking of the 8 prefectures represented among the 47 prefectures

Tokyo Metropolitan District (#1)
Kanagawa Prefecture (#2)
Osaka Prefecture (#3)
Aichi Prefecture (#4)
Saitama Prefecture (#5)
Tokushima Prefecture (#18)
Gunma Prefecture (#19)
Aomori Prefecture (#31)

Yes, I know a number of the surviving schools are magnet schools recruiting from all over the country. However, so are a number of the schools in the least populous prefectures.

The general gist remains: the rich get richer and the poor go home.


Later - Gunma Prefecture had an advantage in that it had two teams entered in the tournament. Then again, so did Hokkaido (#8) and Nara (#29). Both the entrants from those two prefectures were eliminated.

Fewer Than Two

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,

This is for all the lonely people
Thinking that life has passed them by
Don't give up
Until you drink from the silver cup
And ride that highway in the sky

This is for all the single people
Thinking that life has left them dry
Don't give up
Until you drink from the silver cup
You never know until you try

- America, "Lonely People" (1974)*

If you are in the Tokyo Metropolitan district, and you are alone, you are not alone. Indeed, you are in the whopping majority.

The TMD released the results of its survey of households yesterday. As of January 1 of this year, Tokyo had 12,686,067 residents living in 6,368,485 households, an average of 1.99 residents per household. Considering the number of families with children in the TMD, the balancing number of persons registered as living alone is simply immense -- over 60% of all households registered.

The Mainichi Shimbun provides a nice graph of the crash in the number of persons per registered household since 1957, the first year the survey was conducted.

TMD Governor Ishihara Shintaro, ever the one to come up with the conservate morality play view of a situation, remarked, "I am shocked. It a matter of grave concern. It's truly unhealthy. I feel as though the family unit has fallen to pieces."

If so, then our dear governor (How is it possible that he has won election four times?) should be worried about our neighbors to the north, with all their cows, corn and sunflowers, for the next in line is Hokkaido, with 2.06 residents per household. (J)

The TMD being the great vampire squid of Japan's prefectures, it still managed to eke out a 0.31% increase in its population, the 16th straight year of population growth, despite its shrinking household size (J). It also has remained relatively youthful, with persons in their 30s being the largest age cohort and the percentage of those over 65 years of age still a low (for Japan) 21% of the population. (J)

So all the ongoing creative destruction, with old neighborhoods and commercial properties being demolished and being replaced by high-rise and low-rise condominium and rental units is not necessarily cheap financing leading developers to run amok.

* Yes, I know that the song is an appeal to rebith through faith in Jesus Christ. However, it was either this or "Eleanor Rigby."

Photo credit: MTC

Damned Damn Dams Damn Damn Japan

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Let me see if I get this straight. After restoring, under the sponsorship of the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), funding for the completion of the egregious Yamba Dam – an immense political liability for an administration for whom the Yamba dam cancellation was seemingly the only campaign promise it had not repudiated or altered beyond all recognition and a tumor that lurks within the budget passed by the House of Representatives last Thursday (J) – the Cabinet has just approved a further bill, again authored by the MLIT minister, providing funding for offsets and new economic revitalization plans for local communites that have been disrupted by the cancellation of dams. (J)

Who the hell is thinking up these bills? OK, the MLIT bureaucrats, given. But who in his or her right mind thinks that these bills will do anything but hurt the standing of the Democratic Party of Japan among non-aligned voters, who at 48.7% of the electorate are the prizes up for grabs in the next House of Representatives election? (J - with background in E)

These communities have already been pigs at the trough in the development phase of these cancelled projects. Now we are going to be giving them seconds?

Who the heck is in charge of this mess?


Later - Many thanks to reader PM for pointing out the broken links.