Gambling by athletes is undoubtedly a problem. Given that it is illegal, it necessarily involves them with unsavory characters (in Japan, that means the yakuza), and it opens up the potential of players falling deeply in debt and throwing matches in return for clearing the slate. The lifetime ban of Pete Rose in American baseball for betting on the sport in which he played a central role was entirely appropriate, even if no evidence emerged that he attempted to rig the outcomes of games.

On this basis, some of the wrestlers named in current media reports deserve punishment, perhaps even banning. But a witch-hunt atmosphere of hysteria has now set in, and even wrestlers who occasionally bet in private hanafuda card games between wrestlers are being singled out for media pillorying. The Nagoya tournament is supposed to get underway in a couple of weeks, but now that is up in the air. Will it be canceled? If it goes forward, will NHK broadcast it? Will ozeki Kotomitsuki be banned for life from the sport?

There’s an old adage: be careful what you wish for. For years, cranky sumo observers in Japan upset with foreign dominance yearned for the sport to be “cleaned up.” Congratulations, folks: your wish has come true. I only hope the sport survives it.

Ntsoelengoe sadly passed away from a heart attack in 2006. How much he would have enjoyed watching his own national team knocking off the French yesterday! Sigh.

Forgive my bout of wistful nostalgia, please, and return with me now to 1978 and Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a fine late summer’s night dream.

And yet, and yet…. This afternoon in my office on campus, I took a break from stultifying end-of-the-year administrative work to watch the second half of the Uruguay-France World Cup match being streamed live by ESPN. A so-so game (Uruguay’s defense was the highlight, and you know how exciting defensive soccer can be), I was still thrilled to be watching it in my office, thanks to the Internet.

The first World Cup I followed was in 1978, well before the rise of the Internet or even cable television. As I recall, that year only the final championship game was shown on American television–and at a taped delay, at that. During the 1982 tournament, I was luckier: I was doing the backpack-through-Europe thing and watched games at pubs, youth hostels and train stations across the continent. I was in Frankfort staying with cousins for the final match between Italy and West Germany, and I remember all the Gastarbeiter waiters and janitors from Italy exploding onto the streets of Frankfort to celebrate their team’s win–and to rub it in the faces of their employers.

In subsequent tournaments, cable television kicked in, giving us futbol-ignorant Americans better and better access each time around. Now we get it streamed live over the Internet so that we can watch it in the office, on trains, in coffee shops.

Perhaps not all change is completely bad. Maybe stupidity and alienation are a small price to pay. I’ll have to mull on those thoughts a while longer, if my Internet-addled brain can hold the problem in focus long enough. In the meanwhile, I’ll be setting my alarm clock to get up early tomorrow morning to watch South Korea play Greece, followed by the U.S. taking on England for the first time since the great 1950 upset match, still the greatest moment in American soccer history.

Sad news from Los Angeles re the passing of legendary basketball coach John Wooden. One of the pleasures of teaching at UCLA in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that every once in a while you would walk past the great man on campus, still quite spry in his 90s. “Don’t give up on your dreams,” he once said, “or your dreams will give up on you.”

Kan Naoto, the new Prime Minister of Japan, was actually our local Diet representative when we lived in Fuchu-shi in western Tokyo from 2005-2007. We used to see posters of his face all around the neighborhood at election times. And now I live just a few blocks from the residence of the current President of the U.S. Apparently, I am fated to haunt the neighborhoods of power….

Finally, here’s a lovely new feature on one of the last Kinks’ music videos, “Lost and Found” (1987). A rarely seen clip based largely on Ray Davies’ cinemaphilia, it takes up a lovely, melancholic tune, and the folks at the Kast Off Kinks website have tracked down several people involved in filming the video. Be sure to check out the video and the interviews there, but for now let me leave you with another video of the Kinks ‘performing’ the song ‘live’ in a late 1980s television appearance:

It’s a terrible decision–bad, of course, for the people of Okinawa, which comprises less than 1% of the territory of Japan yet hosts two-thirds of the American troops stationed in the nation. Bases take up 11% of the prefecture’s land, and after a half century of actual and virtual military occupation, people there are completely fed up and just want the bases shut down. But it’s also a terrible decision for Japan and the U.S. The attempt to continue the untenable status of Japan as an American client state will lead to a huge drain on the Japanese budget (Japan pays most of the cost of the U.S. bases located on its soil), to resurgent right-wing nationalism in Japan, and to further U.S. entanglement in neo-imperial imbroglios across East Asia. In the long term, this decision weakens the U .S.-Japan alliance, and it bolsters anti-American sentiment in Okinawa, Japan, and elsewhere.

The whole fiasco reminds me of the 1994-96 Murayama cabinet. After decades of conservative LDP rule, the Japan Socialist Party finally took over the reins of power–and its only significant accomplishment was to implement the regressive national sales tax proposal that the LDP had been unable to push through on its own. Hatoyama’s DJP cabinet seems to have repeated the favor, finishing up the dirty work to implement the unpopular relocation plan originally foisted by the LDP.

There are perhaps two silver linings in this dark cloud. First, the Social Democratic Party (the molehill that’s left of the JSP after that Murayama fiasco) has actually stood up for its principles and may perhaps start rebuilidng itself as a progressive voice in Japanese politics (provided, that is, it carries through with its threat to withdraw from the cabinet). Second, it should be increasingly clear to all now that what is needed is a long-term plan to close all U.S. bases in Okinawa. WWII is over, the Cold War is over, and the end of the American occupation of Okinawa is long overdue.

[Updated on 30 May 2010: At Japan Focus, Gavan McCormack has just published an important three-part article on the past fifty years of the U.S./Japan security relationship. You can read part one, including links to the remaining installments, here.)

She is apparently smart, deft and friendly. She was a superb teacher. She has the ability to process many points of view and to mediate between different factions.

Yet she also is apparently prudential, deliberate and cautious. She does not seem to be one who leaps into a fray when the consequences might be unpredictable.

After years of belly-aching about radical judicial activism, the right now wants to demonize cautious, middle-of-the-road pragmatism?

My favorite response to the nomination so far comes from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, who asks the burning question, “Who’s more likely to be gay? Unmarried, middle-aged woman or televangelist/family values pol?”

Full story here (Japanese-language only).

Then again, I’ve just discovered that Wikipedia has a length entry on “Mongolia-North Korea Relations.” I quote:

Unofficially, North Korean visitors show significant interest in studying Mongolia’s economic reforms; according to the Mongolian side, North Koreans see them as non-threatening because they are a fellow non-Western country and went through similar experiences under communism. Mongolia’s efforts to introduce free-market capitalism to North Korea also have a component of self-interest. The Trans-Siberian Railway, an essential link in the potential continuous rail transit route from South Korea to Europe, passes through Mongolia; North Korean economic liberalisation which allowed South Korean shipping to pass through its borders would remove the major stumbling block to such a route, providing economic benefits for Mongolia.

You learn something new everyday….

[Updated on May 16, 2010 to replace broken links]

“A lot of people have to thank him. We made a lot of money because this guy had the guts to cross the barrier and do what he did.”

Minnesota Twins’ second baseman Orlando Hudson has stirred up a hornets’ nest (well, more accurately, he made a fairly mild statement which the media did its best to use as a stick to prod a swarm of angry hornets) by pointing to the continuing relevance of race in Major League hiring decisions. It’s not the superstars that are the issue here: they get contracts no matter what their skin color. It’s the marginal players, the bench-warming pinch hitters and bottom-of-the-bullpen pitchers, where you can most clearly see this.

The most intelligent response I’ve seen to Hudson’s remarks so far comes from the terrific blogger “Twins Geek” (John Bonnes), who writes:

It’s legitimate to debate the degree which race bias might play when predominantly white front offices evaluate free agents like [Jeremy] Dye and [Gary] Sheffield. It may be significant, or maybe it isn’t. But before that conversation takes place, we need to welcome people, ballplayers included, that raise the issue. We need to recognize that biases exist, and not construct straw dogs that can be easily torn down. We may not get to the truth, but we’ll at least raise some awareness, and on this day, sports fans should be all about awareness.

Check out Bonnes’ whole post here — it’s well worth your while.

This all brings back to mind the best thing I’ve ever read on the subject: former major leaguer John Poff’s remarkable essay, “Donnie Moore: A Racial Memoir.” Originally published in 1995 in Elysian Fields Quarterly (Vol. 14, No. 1; ordering information here), Poff’s memoir provides a remarkably frank, self-reflective account of how for a ballplayer in the 1970s “the consciousness of race pervaded everything in a baseball locker room.”

If you played with or against black ballplayers, you became friends possibly and you might share concerns, values, dope, and yet in all your conversations there was the ongoing subliminal buzz–you’re black, you’re black, you’re black.

Written in the wake of Donnie Moore’s tragic death in 1989 (Moore shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself), Poff gives us a powerful, honest reflection, including of the ways that players of all ethnicities use racism as a tool for acquiring a competitive edge. The impact of racial stereotypes in sports is in fact incredibly complicated and, as both Bonnes and Poff note, we won’t get anywhere in understanding it if people aren’t allowed to raise the issue.

The newspapers here are reporting the death of the great novelist and playwright Inoue Hisashi. He was 75 and had been battling cancer for some time. Raised in an orphanage in Sendai, Inoue first attracted attention in the early 1970s with his brilliant, often funny and often sharply critical, fiction. He liked to employ nonstandard forms of writing: he invented, for example, a fictional language for his 1981 masterpiece Kirikirijin. From the 1980s his focus shifted to writing primarily for the stage. Just last year he staged a successful dramatization of the life and work of proletarian literature writer Kobayashi Takiji.

Inoue was also a prominent public intellectual. He lent his voice and pen to a number of worthy causes–most notably the efforts to save Article 9, the no-war clause of the Japanese constitution. On that note, the Yomiuri newspaper is by coincidence also reporting on one of Inoue’s most important legacies. Given the newspaper’s strong bias toward changing Article 9, its coverage of the issue has to be taken with a grain or two of salt. But today’s Daily Yomiuri describes what seems to be a significant change over the past year in Japanese public opinion on the issue:

Thirty-two percent of people surveyed felt Article 9–the constitutional clause renouncing the right to wage war–should be amended as it hampers the country’s ability to deal with related issues because of how the article is interpreted. This number, too, was lower than 38 percent in last year’s survey.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents said related issues–such as the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces on international peacekeeping operations–should be dealt with through the conventional interpretation of Article 9. In the previous survey, 33 percent felt this way.

The big story, in other words, is a large shift in public sentiment toward keeping Article 9 in its present form. Last year 52% supported and 36% opposed constitutional revision, while this year the figures were 43% and 42% respectively. Of course, the headline to the Daily Yomiuri story chooses a different angle: “Poll: Public split over amending Constitution / Over 70% think govt should discuss issue.” (The headline on the original Japanese-language version of the article does a better job of conveying the story, I think).

Of the nine prominent intellectuals who in 2004 launched the citizens’ movement to save Article 9, only six are still with us today. But as the story above shows, their efforts are bearing fruit. I’ll resist the temptation here to use the cherry blossom metaphor, although it seems quite apt.

In his lecture at the University of Chicago last month, Oe Kenzaburo noted that there are now more than 700 local chapters affiliated with the movement across Japan. To paraphrase another playwright, the good Inoue Hisashi did lives on after him. Rest in peace.

Some interesting science and technology news that’s caught my eye lately:

The lunatic notion that genetic codes found in nature can be patented is finally facing skeptical court scrutiny, the New York Times reported last week. For the sake of culture and scholarship, we really need to curb the voracious appetite for infinitely expanding intellectual property claims, and this seems a modest step in the right direction.

Are the problems faced by scientists trying to gear up the Large Haldron Collider actually the work of a Terminator sent from the future in a desperate attempt to head off an unwelcome scientific development? The possibility has been suggested in a series of recent scientific papers, Time magazine reports.

Finally, a whole slew of new technological devices and digital scientific analytical techniques are being applied to baseball. The conclusion from statistical crunching of multi-angle digitized tracking of pitches over the course of an entire season? That good pitchers paint the corners, while bad ones hang it over the plate. Now they’re turning their attention to batters and defenders and will not doubt reach many revolutionary hypotheses, such as declaring that batters should try to hit the ball with the sweet spot of the bat and that fielders should try to catch the ball with both hands. Ah, the marvels of science.

In the meanwhile, play ball! The Twins kick off their season tonight in Anaheim.