Bob of Unfogged, whose handle is strangely neithed unf nor ogged, blogs about okonomiyaki.

If you aren't eating okonomiyaki every day, you should be. Sadly, here in Pittsburgh we don't have such delicacies.

One funny thing about Japan that most Americans may not realize is that Japanese restaurants are mostly divided up by the type of cuisine in which they specialize. So the very idea of a "Japanese restaurant" is kind of foreign to Japanese, because they have separate sushi joints, udon joints, tempura joints, etc. I'm sure our more nihonophilic MC_Masterchef can expand on the finer points here.

When I was in Tokyo I was even taken to a "garlic restaurant," which I had viewed in advance with some trepidation. It turns out that my hosts were simply talking about an Italian place, however, which was a big relief.

From the Asia Times Online's Sergei Blagov (under, ironically enough, a blinking banner ad for $250 gas cards..)

MOSCOW - The Kremlin's decision to approve the East Siberia-Pacific oil pipeline and pump its Siberian crude toward Japan has come as a blow to China's hopes of securing its own slice of Russia's hydrocarbon riches. And Moscow's energy overtures toward Beijing as a consolation prize are not much by which to set store.

On New Year's Eve, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov approved the Taishet-Nakhodka oil pipeline blueprint, the government said in a statement. The annual capacity of the East Siberia-Pacific pipeline system would eventually reach 80 million tons, the statement said. ...

Russia's decision to build a Siberian oil pipeline to the Pacific port of Nakhodka will please Tokyo, but upset Beijing. Japan backed the Nakhodka route, while Beijing favored an alternative pipeline that would have brought the oil to Daqing in northwest China. Russia has been toying with both options, but in March 2004 indicated that it could favor the Japanese-backed project.

Tokyo has been lobbying for an oil pipeline route to the Pacific. To back up its lobbying, Japan reportedly promised up to $14 billion funding of the pipeline as well as $8 billion in investments in the Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 oil and gas projects, according to Russian media reports. The estimated cost of the oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to Nakhodka could reach $11-12 billion. The Taishet-Nakhodka route is seen as a strategic asset for Russia, allowing it to funnel crude not only to Japan but to Korea, Indonesia, Australia and the US west coast as well.

I suppose it's probably too much to hope that all this new oil will mean a new look at the wonders of central heating on the part of the Japanese (I spent about half my time there on a visit last winter scorching my leg hair off under one of these things), but this is still good news for Japan all the same. China, which has its own energy needs to feed, is probably not going to be so happy:

Russia had been discussing a China-bound oil pipeline for nearly a decade. In June 2002, Russian officials pledged to invest $2 billion to fund the construction of the 2,247 kilometer pipeline from the Russian city of Angarsk in the Irkutsk region to Daqing in northeastern China, which was scheduled to begin in 2003 and commissioned by 2005. ...

In the past, Russian and Chinese officials have raised the possibility that a branch of Russia's Pacific pipeline could eventually be diverted to China. However, the December 31 announcement mentioned no China-bound branches of the proposed pipeline. As consolation, on December 30, Russia said it would offer China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) up to a 20% stake in a new state-owned entity that would control Yuganskneftegaz, the main asset of the collapsing Russian oil company Yukos.

I haven't studied Chinese energy and resource consumption as a topic in itself, so I can't offer much speculation on how this particular development will impact it in concrete terms. You never know — maybe all those tens of thousands of Chinese engineering students being trained in their university system will end up devoting themselves towards coming up with some of the clean energy alternatives Matt's looking for.

Edit: China better find something to keep the lights going soon, though. As the UN Population Fund's China representative warns, "China will get old before it gets rich." The one-child policy, while still not enough to prevent China's population from increasing by 8 million per year, is now firmly entrenched within the urban population, presenting China with a looming demographic crunch.

The desire for a son has also so skewed the gender balance that there are now 117 males for every 100 females. To round off the China articles for this evening, we learn that in this corner of China, though, daughters are seen as a valuable commodity for sale in the Southeast Asian sex trade. Those that find success "working outside" bring great wealth to their impoverished homesteads, but also, inevitably, further exacerbate China's HIV and AIDs problem. As a solution to prostitution within China:

the government has set up "re-education centres" in every province. Much emphasis in these centres is put on educating women on the "social evils" of prostitution but they usually only provide limited information about sexual health and how the prostitutes can protect themselves. A study amongst prostitutes in China found that only a few knew that condoms could be protective (14-30%). They all mentioned abstinence as much more protective. Very few (2-30%) perceived themselves at risk of contracting HIV.

Sadly, that's exactly the style of sex education that George W. Bush and his supporters like to see, so I don't suppose there's much hope of the US pressuring the Chinese to get their act together on this front any time soon.

Enclosed is my term paper on postwar Japanese military policy. While considerably more academic and probably less general-interest than my Uyghur piece, it is still somewhat relevant today. This paper mainly sprang out of my frankly flabbergasted disbelief at the kinds of operational restrictions the Japanese government puts on their Self Defense Forces. After reading more on the subject in an effort to understand, I've constructed an argument for why that might be. I lost this paper once when my computer crashed and died, so this version didn't have as much cumulative effort devoted to it as the Uyghur one just on the basis of time constraints; to some extent I think this may have lead me to overstate my case (that of a realist leadership calculating costs and benefits of a particular national strategy), and I don't believe that it alone is the sole explanation by any means. Nonetheless, it's one explanation, and hopefully one that's sufficient for my professor, whose views on the matter I happen to arguing against.

In any case, it's done, and now I can move on to my even more obscure study of the Chinese danwei work units, which I expect to spend the entire weekend frantically trying to finish by Monday!   more »

I'm taking four classes this semester, and thought I might as well post my collected reading lists for them in lieu of more detailed commentary at this time since it's getting on rather late. If there's an Amazon account you'd like me to link through, I'll go back and edit this entry tomorrow with the appropriate links, but for now here's the list...   more »