You heard her voice in the introduction to Seijigiri #3 and a song mocking her close Seijigiri #4, you’ve heard the pseudonym she never used, and that no one ever used for that matter, you’ve probably even heard some stories. Hell, you probably even know or have met someone who claims to have heard her nonexistent alter ego. You may not have heard her name, though, which is a shame because what happened to her should be a lesson to us all on both sides of the Pacific.

Her name was Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino, born in Los Angeles on the Fourth of July in 1916, she visited a sick aunt in Japan in the summer of 1941, was still here when Pearl Harbor was bombed, got stuck in Japan, where she barely spoke the language, and wound up on Radio Tokyo, from which she broadcasted as “Orphan Ann” in a show filled with double-meanings and sarcasm. (”We’re ready now for a vicious assault on your morale.” Come on! Who does propaganda like that? Someone who doesn’t believe in what she’s doing, that’s who.) (Read on …)

It’s been a great week for news and a busy, but good week in other respects as well. Unfortunately, the latter has made it difficult to put out a podcast on the former in as timely a fashion as we would have liked. We have recorded Seijigiri for September 27, 2006, though, and need only finish up the post-production to release it. Bear with us, it’s coming.

To tide you over, we have posted the news, some errata, and, most important, some big thank yous in these show notes.

(Read on …)

When we started TPR, we created Uragawa as an outlet for interesting stories on or from Japan that just wouldn’t fit into Seijigiri, which is a podcast on news and politics, and which we wanted to keep as such. Our goal in producing Seijigiri was and is to let our listeners know what’s going on in Japan, that there’s more to it than unusual pop culture and more to its politics than Prime Minister Koizumi singing Elvis tunes.

With that said, it would be naive of us to pretend that things outside of politics weren’t there and disingenuous of us to pretend that those things never caught our attention.

We’ve noticed as well that understanding what’s going on outside of high politics is also very important to developing an understanding of a country and its culture. Hence, Uragawa. We’ll podcast here when possible and blog here otherwise, but we hope you’ll find the same attention to fact and reason you’ve come to expect from TPR in other areas and will find it entertaining.

If Uragawa seems a little more opinionated or personal than Seijigiri, that’s by design. There are many ways one can check objectivity when dealing with politics, fewer when dealing with the Far Side of the River.

We hope you enjoy it.

- Garrett De Orio and Ken Worsley

At least today.

In the climax to a two-year legal and constitutional battle over Japan’s national anthem, Kimigayo, and national flag, the Hinomaru, the Tokyo District Court decided yesterday that the Tokyo board of education (and our good friend Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro) acted unconstitutionally and illegally when it issued a notice in October 2003 requiring teachers to stand, face the flag, and sing Kimigayo at school ceremonies and punishing those who refused.

Several teachers in Tokyo had been punished for offenses ranging from refusing to play the piano to accompany the national anthem to explaining their disagreement with the government’s 1999 official establishment of what had been, since the end of WWII, de facto national symbols. Both the Hinomaru and Kimigayo were used by Japan’s pre-War and wartime militaristic government.

Oddly, the board of education plans to challenge the decision on the grounds that the teachers’ rights were not at issue, thus meaning the Court lacked standing to hear the case.

(Read on …)

This is a quick update recorded live this afternoon with just Ken. He’s there to give us the vote count as Shinzo Abe is elected the next party president of the Liberal Democratic Party. Listen to the election results as they happened and a quick word from Ken on the second and third place finishers. Under four minutes and under 1 megabyte!
Thank you for listening!

Official announcement from the LDP’s website: Shinzo Abe wins Party Presidential Election

Listen Now:

 Seijigiri 5 - LDP Election Special: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The day has finally come - it’s Wednesday, September 20th and the LDP elections are today. As the Daily Yomiuri points out, the race is essentially between Taro Aso and Sadakazu Tanigaki for second place. Yesterday, as the two campaigned, Abe made the announcement that Japan would ban cash transfers from its financial institutions to 15 North Korean-linked financial institutions and trading firms. Of course, China is unhappy with this move.

We’ll be using our brand new del.icio.us account to keep track of these, and many more links. If you’d like to suggest a story to us, you can always do that as well. Have a great election day!

Edit: Abe has been elected!

Ken and Garrett continue their discussion with Albrecht Stahmer on the issues attendant to Yasukuni Shrine after discussing the week’s news - recent events surrounding Abe Shinzo, Tanigaki Sadakazu, Kanzaki Takenori and the New Komeito’s new leadership. With another nod to Tokyo Rose.

Thank you ever so much for listening. (Read on …)

Listen Now:

 Seijigiri #4 - September 17, 2006: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

More Albrecht! More Ken! More Garrett, whether you like it or not. With so many brilliant ideas flying around, we know you’ll want to catch every one. To this end, we’ve slaved away to produce these here show notes.

(Read on …)

I set out with a grand goal: to make verbatim transcriptions of every edition of Seijigiri to help people who listen to our podcasts as a way of brushing up on their English, who want the info, but don’t have mp3 players, who are hearing impaired, whatever the case may be. It was fun at first, but there’s no way Ken and I will have the time to do it, so Seijigiri’s Inaugural Release will, for now, be the only podcast, other than the Wallace Stevens series, to have a verbatim transcript. I’ll write detailed show notes for every edition from the September 2nd release on.

That is, of course, unless one of our dedicated listeners, a fan, a Seijigiri otaku, wanted to take it upon himself to type it all up for us. We’d give you all of our Sailor Moon stuff.

Anybody?

Keep checking the site; Seijigiri #4 is due out soon as are detailed show notes, if not full transcripts, for every podcast.

Thanks for listening.

- Garrett

On August 26th, we put out our first release, the inaugural edition of Seijigiri. In the two and a half weeks since, we’ve managed to put out two more editions of Seijigiri as well as the first two releases of the ongoing Wallace Stevens series in our Sonota section.

More importantly, we’ve seen our site traffic increase and this afternoon, we reached something of a small milestone: our first gigabyte of data has been transferred from the site. That’s right: 1007.21 Megabytes have been downloaded or streamed by our listeners. Since we didn’t set out with any clear goals on how much content we wanted to get out there within the first month, it’s encouraging to see that we won’t fall short of our goals.

We just want to say thanks to everyone for listening and promise that everything will keep improving. We’re looking at using new, more powerful software and we’re planning some interesting upcoming releases. Stay tuned!

Ken and Garrett