Bracing for brexit

So, the Govt has decided to splash £100m of our money on telling us to do what it has signally failed to do for the last 3 years - get ready for brexit. Of course the main aim of this marketing campaign is really to soften up the population for the supposed inevitability of brexit at the end of October, and hoodwink them into thinking that if it "happens" then that would be the end of the matter, rather than the start of decades of negotiation, argument and recrimination over the subsequent arrangements.

I had a look at the govt site, and for a small and simple company such as BlueSkiesResearch, there are pages and pages of vague verbiage that mostly miss the point and nothing that explains whether or not we would be able to travel to the rest of the EU to work there as we did in Hamburg and Stockholm over the last few years. Probably the best strategy will be to just lie and pretend it's a holiday. Of course there's no guidance for that either but we can be fairly confident that this would be sorted out in time for our next trip (probably the EGU meeting in Vienna if any Austrian immigration officials are reading).

More consequentially, I've also applied for - and received - Estonian e-residency (jules has also applied, but a bit later so hers has not come through yet). This will enable us to establish a business over there within the EU and hopefully allow easy participation in such things as Horizon2020 and its successor funding programmes. I know the govt had promised to support existing grants but the point is to be able to apply in the future.

Of course an inevitable consequence of this - on top of the time and money wasted, which will amount to a few hundred pounds by the time it's done and dusted - is that our company will be paying corporation tax in Estonia rather than the UK. Just one more bit of pointless self-harm by the idealogues.

I've still got to go to London to pick up the id card, that's more time and money down the drain. Perhaps after visiting the Estonian Embassy I'll take a stroll along Downing Street and chuck a few petrol bombs at No 10. Only joking, I'll probably take a milkshake.

Of course the most likely outcome - as I have said consistently for over three years now - is that we actually remain in the EU after all, when this colossally stupid act of self-humiliation collapses under its own dishonesty and idiocy. In the meantime, the damage mounts up and whatever happens now, the harm will take decades to recover from.

Everything you never wanted to know about Japanese pensions and never thought to ask.

So, this is going to be a long and boring post which delves into one of the reasons why we wanted to keep up our permanent residency (though not the only one). But I’ll start with the tl;dr summary for any Japanese residents who might have found this post in a google search, which is that the forthcoming change to a 10y qualifying period (from the previous 25y) for the Japanese national pension scheme should help to cut down on one of the particularly unfair ways in which foreigners have long been treated in Japan. Now for the longer version...

I had never really looked into the pension system here in any detail, not because I was one of these silly people who preferred to stick their heads into the sand, but rather because I knew there was nothing I could do about it anyway, and we had made our choices to stay here even on the assumption that we wouldn't get a pension out of it. A common complaint about the Japanese national pension scheme is that is rips off foreigners who stay for between 3 and 25 years. The basic problem is that, in order to get any pension at all, you have to pay in to the system for 25 years. 24 years 11 months gets you nothing. Foreigners who join the scheme for between 6 months and 3 years can get a reasonable lump sum payout when they leave (at least a large proportion of what they paid in, though not all). However, the lump sum is capped at the level of the 3y payout, so anyone who leaves after say 10y, or even 24y, gets very little back in proportion to what they contributed. Obviously this is grossly unfair, but the number of people affected is small, and they can't vote anyway, so who cares. At least, I assume this is the logic behind the JGovt's policy.

However, throughout our time here, we'd not only got statements from the national pension scheme, but also a JAMSTEC-related scheme (it seems to be called the Science and Technology Pension Fund, so presumably has a broader remit than just JAMSTEC). These leaflets had always been in Japanese, and no-one had ever volunteered any information about how it all worked, so I'd never gone looking for answers. So I basically knew nothing. That all changed a couple of weeks ago, when suddenly someone from admin came along to explain my options prior to us leaving. She was encouraging me to take the minuscule lump sums, but I think I managed to persuade her it was not a great move in our case.

It turns out we have been paying in to no fewer than 3 pension schemes. First (and least) there is the Japanese national pension scheme (kokumin nenkin), roughly equivalent to the UK state pension. It's not a lot of money - a little under ¥20,000 per year, for every year you have contributed, up to a max of 40y contributions (making ~¥770,000 max per year). Contributions are a flat rate of about ¥14,000 per month. But if you don't pay in for 25y, you get nothing. We are also participating in the national employees' pension scheme, kousei nenkin. This is perhaps comparable to the UK SERPS - however in the UK, it is common to be "contracted out" of this, as we were when we lived and worked there. Contributions, and resulting pension, are earnings-related, but it has the same 25y threshold below which you get nothing. Based on the lump sum refund we were offered, this could potentially be rather a lot more money than the state pension (maybe 5x or so?), but I don't know how the payout is calculated and don't have a clear figure. Finally, the Japanese Science and Technology Pension Fund. This is already going to give us a pension, even based on 12y of contributions, and has no 25y qualifying period! So that was a nice surprise. The amount is projected to be rather less than the modest amount I am due based on 7y as a NERC employee. But still better than a slap in the face with a bit of sashimi.

Now, on to the (mildly) interesting bit. One reason I'd been interested in getting and keeping PR, is a few articles that I'd read about kara kikan (empty record) which were written by Steve van Dresser [1, 2, 3]. The term relates to a scheme whereby "missing" years in the pension record could possibly be included towards the 25y threshold, specifically (in my case) years prior to my even coming to Japan. Sounds silly, but that was apparently what happened in Steve's case. The underlying logic is to not exclude people (primarily Japanese of course) who fail to pay in under circumstances where they are not supposed to pay in, e.g. through living abroad, or due to various other things. It turns out that this is probably not possible, at least not for me. The only place I could find PR mentioned on the nenkin.go.jp web site was on this page here, which specifically says that PR holders can claim years up to 1981, but also that only years between the ages of 20-65 count. I wasn't old enough in 1981 for this to help me (but maybe Steve was, which could explain his positive outcome. Or possibly the rules changed, or something else).

So, that looked a bit sad.

Until...I found this page, which says something interesting about an impending reduction in the nenkin qualifying threshold from 25y to 10y! This proposal seems to be linked to recent plans for increases in consumption tax, and I think the law is basically in place, though perhaps not quite formally approved or implemented. It is expected to come into effect in October 2015. At that point, our 12y of contributions will qualify us for the kokumin nenkin (albeit only 30% of the full amount) - and hopefully the rather larger kousei nenkin, since they are both Govt-run and seem to use the same rules.

So this is why I want to keep the PR, because while I retain PR, I will be considered temporarily absent, rather than having fully left the schemes. If it all goes according to plan, in a couple of year's I'll qualify with no further contributions.

(Incidentally, one thing that does seem clear is that there is no difficulty in either keeping, or getting paid, the pension while living in the UK, even if we have lost PR in the meantime, so long as we qualify for the pension first.) Whether the Yen will be worth anything in 20 years is anyone's guess, of course.

In-visa-ble man (and woman)

Jules and I are supposed to be en route for the PAGES Open Science Meeting in Goa, but due to the situation turning out not necessarily to our advantage, we aren't. So I suppose I might as well write this blog post instead.

We knew from ages back that we needed visas for India, even for a conference visit, but we didn't expect it would be a particularly onerous or lengthy procedure. Everywhere else we've ever gone, conference trips are considered as innocuous as tourism, which means they have been covered under the tourist visa waiver schemes that developed countries commonly have. India, however, doesn't seem to have this sort of arrangement. So back in November, the organisers sent us some official documents that they said we needed for visa applications. But we had trips to San Francisco and then Hawaii to come, and the web site for visa applications suggested a time scale of about 8 days.

So, we came back from Hawaii, with the usual backlog of stuff to catch up on. I had a meeting in Tokyo on that Friday morning, and was going to go in to the visa application centre on the afternoon...but I checked on Thursday night and the web site said: "Manual Visa Application System is ceased from January 2013. Hereby, all the Applicants should apply for Indian Visa using Online Visa Application System only." Clicking through took me to a big form full of lots of tedious questions. So I left it for the weekend.

After struggling and failing to find out over the weekend how to actually apply on-line, we decided that we had better just go in on the Monday and wave the forms at them. It turned out that this is the correct course of action - the Indian interpretation of "Online Visa Application System" is actually "fill in a form on a web page, then print it out and take it to Tokyo".

Then came the real bombshell: "Sorry Sir, the visa process now takes 2 or 3 weeks, we cannot guarantee it will be ready in time for your trip. But we'll take the fat application fee anyway". They didn't actually say the second sentence.

So, the Thursday before our Sunday night flight rolls up, and I phoned up to see if there was any chance of the visa being ready by the next - last - day. "Sorry Sir, we are just an outsourcing company, we have conveyed the urgent request to the Embassy, but do not know anything about your visa. You must check the website, it will tell you when your visa is ready". Friday came and went, and there was still no news, so at the end of the day, we cancelled everything. After getting home on Friday night, I checked the website again...and it said our visas were now ready and awaiting collection. But with the office shut until Tuesday, there was no way to get our passports back.

I was slightly relieved to see that Gavin tweeted yesterday that he had also failed to get his visa - not that I wish anyone the same frustrating waste of time and money on anyone, but it's a bit less embarrassing than if we'd been the only ones. But we only had a grand total of 14 working days between jules returning from Hawaii, and our departure to India, so although we might possibly have got our visas if we'd really be on the ball from the moment she arrived home with 10h of jetlag, even then it could not have been guaranteed. And there is no way we could have known that the visa application might take 3 weeks, as even now the only time scale mentioned on the web site is still the old estimate of 8 days (albeit with a footnote to say it is wrong). "All the applicants are requested to make their schedule to visit India accordingly." "When hell freezes over" sounds like a good time right now.

Woody Guthrie award

Well, I've held on to this prestigious award for long enough, and it's time to pass on the heavy mantle of responsibility to someone else. I'm not sure I have really lived up to the expectations of my reader for a Woody Guthrie-worthy level of contribution, but it's been tough finding time and energy for intelligent blogging between all our recent holidays hard work. It's been a quiet time for climate science round these parts, in part due to the massive hiatus in funding/management/organisation around the end of one set of projects and the start of the new. We did have an amusing 5 minutes on return from our recent trip, actually, when we found new contracts in our pigeonholes, which stated that we had been transferred onto the new project as of 1 Oct (just prior to our return) and that our annual salaries had been slashed in half. It soon transpired that some administrative goon didn't know the difference between "annual salary" and "salary to be received over the remaining 6 months of the year". Now the first goal of the project (after fixing the contracts), it seems, is to work out what the project is supposed to be about. But I digress - this post is not supposed to be about Japan's democratic, or even financial, deficit.

While there are a lot of thoughtful bloggers around, the choice for whom to pass it on to seemed a pretty straightforward one, actually. Michael Tobis is prolifically thoughtful and interesting in his blog posts, and has been over a number of years and range of fora. Even those who don't agree with everything he writes (I could probably count myself in that number) can hardly deny the thought that goes into his writings. Whenever he has taken on someone like Curry or Pielke (either generation) on anything technical, he's generally had the better of the argument, as far as I can recall. He's been particularly clear on the "costs of uncertainty" argument, that the higher our uncertainty is regarding climate change, the higher justification this is for mitigation - precisely the reverse of the attitude that many on the denialist side seem to espouse. (That post of mine refers to a fairly recent article by Lewandowsky, but here's one example of an older post from Michael).

His own blog seems a bit quiet these days, actually. Most of his writing is on the main planet3.0 site. In the unlikely event that you aren't already a reader, have a look!

On the money

"I don’t think this government has ever had the same philosophy as the U.S. that administrative functions should be halted if there’s no funding”

What remains to be seen is whether they just expect people to keep on working for free (or on a nugatory ¥1000 per hour, as is already the case here for a lucky few at JAMSTEC) or whether they actually manage to make ends meet somehow.

Just as we head off on holiday, it's all getting interesting...

Off the cliff

Politics pushes Japan towards fiscal cliff as money runs out:

without fresh borrowing the government will run out of money by October.

We have the somewhat embarrassing situation here presently where a handful of research scientists have already been laid off and re-employed on casual contracts of about ¥1000/h (minimum wage is ¥800), with the supposed promise of a proper job if and when the money comes through. But recruitment for these proper jobs (which are themselves only short term contracts, naturally) has been frozen. (Let's not even mention that under the new "formal" procedures, all recruitment has to take place via open competition.)

Various managers seem to be running round in a panic. Jules and I have been "warned" that JAMSTEC HQ has only actually guaranteed our salaries to the end of September, at which point (back in April when this budget-shuffling was organised) a tranche of soft money had been expected to appear. However, our contracts clearly run for a full fiscal year, so I am interested to see if they will actually try to renege on them. Given the parlous state of employee rights here, it wouldn't entirely surprise me. I don't think that JAMSTEC is actually out of money, it is just that the bureaucrats would have to agree to change their budget plans, which usually takes several months of discussions. They might consider it simpler to break the contracts.

We are off on holiday in the middle of September, and I wonder what we will return to in October...of course the most likely outcome is that the Govt will cobble together a budget, on a promise of an early election. But even so, the money probably won't percolate as far as JAMSTEC in time. I suppose if I actually cared, it would be quite stressful, but at the moment I can't seem to make myself feel particularly bothered either way. For the future of climate science in Japan, it might be better if this entire field was taken over by an institute that had more of a commitment to it.

(FWIW, the position we are currently recruiting for seems entirely unaffected, as that is coming from a different fund.)

What's wrong with being number two?

Hopefully, not too much - since Japan's K (京きょう) computer, named for the Japanese character for 10¹⁶ (flops), had a rather brief stay at the top and has now been deposed to second. The Earth Simulator was number 1 for a remarkable 2 full years a decade ago.

The DPJ swept into power a few years ago with promises of scything through wasteful Govt spending, and an MP (now cabinet minister, but I don't think she was at the time) called Renho alarmed many scientists when she said (with direct reference to the massive cost of the K computer): "What's wrong with being the world's number two?"

Of course, after much huffing and puffing, the spending cuts - where they happened at all - were pretty minimal. In response to the ignominy of being overtaken, there are of course plans afoot for the next, even bigger, computer.

Meanwhile one of the Bayesians last week was talking about running massively parallel computations on graphics processors, available for about 50¢ per CPU, ie $250 for a board with 500 on. These aren't really much use for highly parallel high resolution numerical models, but there are a lot of things they can do.

Bureaucrats place the blame on scientists for tsunami and meltdown : Nature News Blog

From Nature News this week:

Japan’s ministry of science and education was supposed to be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first annual White Paper on Science and Technology with the 2011 edition. Instead of a long spread of great achievements by Japanese scientists over the past five decades, however, the document, which was approved by the government yesterday, became the latest mea culpa for the poor handling of last March’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. The document puts the spotlight on the responsibility of the countries’ scientists and engineers. [...] scientists lacked “fundamental knowledge about the mechanism of ocean trench earthquakes” and didn’t predict the possibility of a mega-earthquake. They underestimated the height of the tsunami and produced a hazard map with a large gap between estimated and actual inundation. Risk-communication efforts failed to prepare citizens for the unexpected.

I think it's amazing chutzpah for the ministry to pretend it's the fault of the scientists for failing to predict the earthquake and tsunami, rather than the inadequate management and governance (particularly in the case of TEPCO and Fukushima, but the tsunami issue goes wider than that).

To give credit where it's due, NN does raise this point lower down:

And the greater scientific community can hardly be called upon to bear the responsibility for the most egregious errors with regards to the nuclear disaster, such as Tokyo Electric Power Company’s failure to ensure that its generators could withstand a tsunami and the government’s withholding of available information about the path of radiation fallout.

Quite.

Busy doing nothing

Interesting to see the outrage and hostility provoked by this story about an underemployed civil servant in Germany.

Over here, it's a way of life for many. And though that article looks pretty tabloid, the phenomenon certainly isn't entirely made up - there is even a wikipedia page about it.



Any similarity to the 50% of team leaders at RIGC who have between themselves not managed to publish a single paper of relevance to climate change over the past 5 years is of course entirely coincidental.

Must get on, things to do...

Gone bananas

Well this is published on 2nd April, but I wonder if it's a late April Fool?

New safety standards for radioactive cesium in food products go into effect.

The new standard is going to be set at 100Bq/kg for most food such as fruit and veg. "The average radioactivity of bananas is 130 Bq/kg, or about 19.2 Bq per 150 gram banana". So no more sourdough banana bread for us.

(More realistically, I expect they simply won't test foods that they don't want to ban. No change there then.)

NOC NOC Who's there? Not as many as you thought....

Sad but generally unsurprising news from the UK, where it seems that the latest installment of austerity means another round of scientists losing their jobs, including up to 15 (out of 45) at the small lab where we used to work.

Mind you, I wonder what on earth NOC was doing with a 35-strong (or more?) "Directorate of Science and Technology" in the first place! Sounds like someone might have been building themselves a little empire there...which brings back memories of our time there.

Over here, the approach is one of salary cuts all round, which from our point of view seems preferable, though it may not be so good for those on a tight budget. Although we are not officially civil servants, I think this is going to apply to us, on top of JAMSTEC's recent disgraceful behaviour. But this additional cut is not actually JAMSTEC's doing and given events of the past year, it would be difficult to complain too bitterly. It's not like they are cutting our pay down to UK levels :-)

No good deed goes unpunished

As a follow-up to the parenthetical comment I made in a previous post, I thought I would consider the question of IPCC citations more thoroughly. I should start off with a disclaimer, that I consider this sort of bibliometric analysis in general to be a rather limited and blunt tool. For example, I've criticised the h-index in the past, since it rewards co-authorship rather than actual contribution, but on the other hand, it cannot be denied that someone with an h-index of 30 (say) has surely contributed to a large volume of useful research, whereas someone with an h-index of 3 almost certainly has not (yet).

So, I counted up the number of co-authored papers that are cited in the current (first-order) IPCC AR5 drafts. I hope no IPCC authors think this is too naughty, given the semi-private status of these documents, but it's not like I am really giving much away. Also, my totals may be a little bit off, due to the difficulty of identifying "et al" for long author lists, but then again, someone who is nth out of many probably didn't make a huge contribution anyway. I didn't attempt to count the actual citations themselves, because it would have been far too much work, but simply counted up the number of papers that were cited. While of course not all citations represent work of equal importance, it would probably be fair to say that papers which are uncited have not had a great deal of impact, and papers that have not even been written, even less so. Of course, contributing to the IPCC is not necessarily top priority for everyone, but it's a fairly obvious benchmark to indicate the science that people actually care about.

Author	# Papers cited / 1st author
Hargreaves	16 / 3
IPCC LAs
Abe-Ouchi	17 / 1
Kitoh	14 / 5
Emori	9 / 1
Kimoto	8 / 0
Nakajima	6 / 1
Takemura	5 / 2
Kondo	4 / 1
Aoki	3 / 2
RIGC TLs
TL1	9 / 0
TL2	5 / 4
TL3	3 / 0
TL4	2 / 2
TL5	2 / 0
TL6	2 / 0
...	0 or 1

According to my counting, jules has co-authored 16 cited papers (I missed one before) and actually wrote 3 of them herself. Below her, I've listed equivalent values for the Japanese IPCC Lead Authors. These include several of the most productive and eminent active climate scientists in the country. (There is a another whole cadre of emeritus and super-senior types above them, but they don't actually write much, and it's mostly this "younger" generation - where "younger" is 40s-50s - who are leading the research.) Anyone working in climate science is likely to know of most of the top few of this group, but the bottom ones...well, even after 10 years here I had to look them up. To be fair, these guys are mostly genuinely young(er than me :-)) and are presumably considered up-and-coming rather than leading figures.

I also checked on most of the Team Leaders in RIGC - these are the ones whose management positions are effectively protected in a way that jules was not, according to the arbitrary decree of JAMSTEC - and have put a bunch of the best scores I obtained in the table. I don't want to embarrass these guys by identifing them here publicly (though they are all available on this page), I think that at least some of them do good and interesting work and have no real complaint with them holding their positions. The top person on this section has a full-time faculty position at Tokyo University as well as a bit of an army at RIGC, but I don't need to bother with too much special pleading to explain away his score, as despite the huge disparity in resources and position he only scraped to just over half as many papers cited as jules does. I suppose I could have potentially included Abe-san and Emori-san in this section of the list too, due to their RIGC positions - as I have mentioned before, JAMSTEC's short-term contract ideology lead to a highly unsatisfactory absentee management culture that still remains here to a significant degree. I didn't bother to list individually the many TLs who score only 1 or less. Some of these may have the excuse that their main focus just isn't that IPCC-relevant, but that certainly won't wash for all of them, or at least it shouldn't - the clue is in the name, "Research Institute for Global Change"! The fact that the TL results are rather lower than those of the IPCC Lead Authors, seems to broadly support my use of the metric as a rough guide to impact.

Some of our colleagues and collaborators in non-management positions are quite productive, and have several cited papers - for those I looked up, their scores are anything from 1-9 in total papers, with up to 5 as first author for the best of the bunch. Interestingly, the highest values here are all for people outside of RIGC. It's not that RIGC people are particularly stupid or lazy, but for the most part there is an absence of any meaningful mentoring or leadership, such that many people just waste their time going down irrelevant rabbit-holes that no-one outside of their cubicle walls actually cares about. FWIW, my values are 13/4, but as a sort of part-manager in collaboration with jules, that comparison may be a little flattering.

As a reality check, I also looked up a bunch of people who I expected to have made a really significant impact - in no particular order, Gavin Schmidt, Mat Collins, Mike Mann, Hugues Goosse. And sure enough, they all have more (or many more) papers cited, as befits the substantial contributions they have made across a wide range of topics. I haven't actually calculated their numbers as I got bored of counting (and checking duplicates) at about 20! If you haven't heard of Hugues, he was the EGU's young scientist of the year back in 2005 and has remained amazingly productive since then. Mat Collins was Head of something-or-other at the Hadley Centre before moving to a professorship at Exeter Uni. The other two certainly need no introduction. So I don't want anyone to think we are claiming to be really important on the cosmic (or even global) scale. But in the context of what more normal people seem to have achieved, certainly within the small fishpond that is Japan, or the tiny puddle that is RIGC, I think it would be a challenge to argue that our contribution has been so piss-poor as to actually merit demotion and a disbanding of the research group. Nevertheless, this is JAMSTEC, and that is what they have done.

New Jobs

So as you may have gathered, jules and I have got shiny spanking brand new jobs. From April Fool's Day we will be working in climate change research at an institute called RIGC, located in Yokohama. Conveniently, we will not have to move too far away from our current jobs in climate change research at RIGC in Yokohama. It must be emphasised, however, that any similarity with our current positions is entirely coincidental. Furthermore, our work on predicting climate change is merely a sideshow, a bolt-on optional extra, which is of minor significance to the core strategy of RIGC (founding motto: "Towards the prediction of global change"). It's important to be clear about all this, because under no circumstances should anyone (least of all us) suffer under the illusion that we've been employed for more than 10 years on core research that has been central to the mission of the institute right from its inception. Oh no. That might imply some expectation of continuous future employment, too, and that simply would not do. The core funding has to be reserved for the middle managers and an assorted bag of researchers whose work is sufficiently irrelevant and useless that they can't actually raise any focussed external funding for it. It is important to get the priorities right.

As a reward for her recent efforts in managing and organising a small but relatively successful research group(*), jules has been demoted and awarded a substantial pay cut. I have merely had a pay freeze, after a rather productive year that would normally have resulted in a moderate rise. But we can consider ourselves relatively lucky. Others were summarily sacked - this seems to be principally "pour encourager les autres", since there is plenty of money and in fact further recruitment is planned over the coming months. There is no hint that the sacked staff were actually substandard - they were even invited for interviews, only to find out with less than a month's notice that they would not get their contracts renewed. It is horribly reminiscent of a previous experience in the UK, when a newly-arrived lab director decided we all needed shaken up, which meant the contract staff would be rigorously evaluated (according to his newly-invented criteria, not the performance measures they had actually been operating under) and preferably fired. Jules happened to be first in the queue and was initially told she did not meet his new standards, at which point all the senior staff revolted, and in fact a reasonably sane system (3 year contract followed by tenure evaluation) was designed as a result. The director went on to lay waste to the institute in other ways before hopping off to his next rung on the career ladder and is still one of NERC's darlings. But I digress.

The repeated short-term contract system is of course the same idea that was tried, and found to fail, in the UK around 15-20 years ago. The official ideology behind it is that you can motivate young (and not-so-young...) scientists and encourage their independence through perpetual job insecurity and threat of the sack. Of course the mere act of writing this idea down exposes quite how ridiculous it is, but the middle management simply wring their hands and say "it's the JAMSTEC rule" and the bureaucrats who designed it are sufficiently insulated from the results that they honestly don't seem to see any problems. It was criticised by the institute's external reviews as long ago as 2001, but JAMSTEC has simply ignored those. Across the EU, the perennial contract system was basically outlawed some time ago, of course (there are some very limited exceptions).

I don't expect too much sympathy - when all the dust has settled, it appears that we have 5 years of solid funding, on perfectly adequate salaries - a position that many people might be quite envious of. Even better, we have a substantial additional chunk of funding via long-standing collaboration outside of the institute, which will pay for a post-doc and all the travel etc we can handle. If history is a guide, we will be allowed to do pretty much whatever we want, so long as it contributes to the understanding of climate change. That's just as well, with the next project focussing on "tipping points", as I already mentioned. It's amusing to see how everyone overseas who we've mentioned this to recoils in horror at the phrase, whereas it has just arrived in Japan as the big buzzword of the moment. 5 years ago at the start of the previous project they claimed they were going to do 30-year predictions, and we told them straight away that was idiotic, too. I wonder if they will ever learn how to design these things rationally? First, I suppose they would have to care, and they clearly do not.

One unfortunate casualty of all this is our planned trip to the EGU in April, which we decided that we couldn't arrange and commit to in time. It's a shame as Michel Crucifix had been kind enough to invite me to speak at his Climate Sensitivity session. Luckily that Hansen guy stepped in as a replacement :-) We'll be over to the UK shortly afterwards anyway, for the PMIP conference and a bit of a holiday. As for the longer term, we will see how things go. Spring had sprung and Kamakura is very pretty, even if the atmosphere is currently a bit poisonous at work.

[* As part of a larger project which is primarily charged with "contributing to the IPCC", 15 of her recent (co-authored) papers are cited across 7 chapters of the first draft of the AR5. To put that into perspective, our glorious project leader, who is protected as one of the special people with a core position, has the grand total of two citations.]

Much ado about nothing: Chris Johnson admits his "denial of entry" story was all based on lies

Japanese immigration is not reputed to be the most welcoming and friendly of departments, though we have never had any problems (indeed travelling though Narita airport in either direction is a positive pleasure compared to the typical experience we have had in other international airports around the world). But it was a little concerning when journalist Chris Johnson popped up with a sob story about how he was arbitrarily denied re-entry after a brief trip abroad. However, he was a bit vague about his visa status, and many people smelt a bit of a rat.

He has now come clean about it - contrary to what he had originally claimed, he didn't have any visa at all, and had been coming and going for some time on a tourist "visa" (actually visa waiver) while he was applying for a new work visa as a freelance - he was keen to emphasise that he had previously held a work visa, but that is hardly relevant since he had let it lapse without attempting a renewal. You won't be surprised to learn that tourists aren't really supposed to work while in Japan. In fact there is a certain amount of quasi-official blind-eye-turning to this, especially while someone with a genuine application is waiting for another visa to come through (as it happens I know of someone in this situation right now, not at my workplace though) but some people seem to survive more-or-less indefinitely with this status. The tourist visa is only valid for 90 days, so you have to leave the country for a few days every quarter, which in practice typically means a weekend in South Korea before returning for a new 90 day tour of duty. After a few trips, though, it must start to look suspicious, and there are many cautionary tales around the internet of people whose luck has run out.

I'm guessing immigration was particularly suspicious this time round because his last trip actually was a quick jaunt to South Korea - even though I have no reason not to believe that in his case it was actually a genuine work-related trip. He still had no visa and no fundamental right to come and work in Japan.

Of course one could legitimately question why Japan makes it so hard for a freelancer to get a visa. The bureaucracy has somewhat arbitrary rules - including typically the need for a single employer who promises an adequate salary - and someone who picks up bits and pieces from a number of sources might find it hard to satisfy this requirement. But the bottom line is, he had no visa, and no right to come and work here just because he had done so at some time in the past. As a claimed long-term resident fluent in the local language and culture, he should have realised the importance of keeping his paperwork up to date. And those of us who do make sure to keep our papers up to date certainly don't need to start worrying that some random functionary is suddenly going to stop us at the border and tell us we can't come home.

Lots of people are speculating that his dishonesty will harm his career prospects: my view of the press is sufficiently jaundiced that I suspect that the attention he has garnered will outweigh that. (More links via JP)

Yes, that's really going to happen

Some quango is aiming to triple the number of foreign tourists to 18 million by 2016. The previous target of 10 million by 2010 was missed by miles, and followed by a large decline last year for obvious reasons. It is vaguely reminiscent of the way that the UK realised its feeble short-term GHG emissions target were going to be missed by a mile, so it made up a ridiculous long-term one instead. The recipe to achieve this is to "disseminate accurate information on natural and other disasters" and invest in tourist attractions outside of the main honeypot areas.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't subscribe to the "build it and they will come" mentality quite as slavishly as seems to be the case here. I'm sure the construction kickbacks will make it all worthwhile though.

Maybe they are planning to engineer a crash in the value of the yen, but otherwise, Japan is extremely expensive at the moment. Of course it's not a problem for us being paid in yen (quite the reverse) but a bit shocking when you compare prices to what they would be in $ or £ right now. A ¥1000 glass of beer (admittedly, that's for good beer) is not unusual, that's $13 or £8 these days. And our stay in the top-notch Westin on Union Square in San Francisco was massively cheaper than the mediocre business hotel that visitors to Tsukuba have to suffer (as if simply coming to Tsukuba itself wasn't bad enough).

Our bodies are merging

So says Nature. Actually, this is one occasion where we actually found out first through internal channels, a couple of weeks ago.

It seems a bit random to me. I would say that anything that has the potential to replace JAMSTEC's bureaucracy could only be a good thing, but given the scale of this proposed merger, it may be more likely to just add another layer at the top of the pyramid.

The quote about "slashing wasteful spending" is either hamming it up for the public, or shows a minister rather out of touch with reality. After working here for a decade, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that our primary purpose is simply to disburse Govt spending into the wider economy. They half-heartedly dress it up with the pretence of accountable and competitive bidding for research funds, but that is mostly for the sake of appearances.

It is notable in the above table that the cost per person is markedly higher at JAMSTEC than anywhere else - presumably, this is the effect of having a fleet of hugely expensive boats to maintain. There is another one on its way, in fact - the "austerity" budget having limited this investment to a single ship (and it certainly won't be a dingy or sailboard), when they were hoping for 2.

At this point, it seems like nothing more than a vague plan, and a few of them have come and gone in the past few years anyway (like cutting back on the new "K" supercomputer). So this one might also come to naught. Well, it all makes work for the working bureaucrat to do. How would we cope without them?

The "Gaijin Gulag" at Narita

A bit of a bizarre story has been doing the rounds. Initially on Debito, I assumed it would soon fade, but it was picked up by an Economist-hosted blog, which apparently means it is important and worthy of discussion just about everywhere. What happened is that some "Tokyo-based" freelance Canadian journalist was barred from (re-)entry into Japan late last year - he insinuates it was on the strength of some critical Fukushima-related articles - then bullied and threatened by some shady security forces in the bowels of Narita Airport, and finally forced at gunpoint (his words) into buying an overpriced one-way ticked to Canada, leaving home, girlfriend and pet dog in Tokyo. This was all described in extraordinary hyperbole on his own blog (which incidentally has been repeatedly altered in various materially important ways), then highlighted on Debito, and it went downhill from there.

It all sounded a bit odd, and people started asking of the author...so what was your actual visa status? This was met with volleys of vitriolic abuse and evasion. "I first had a work visa for Japan in 1989, and my last renewal began in 2008", he claimed, "I have never overstayed". But work visas only last three years (at most). Eventually, he wrote on his blog that it was in the process of renewal, but then he deleted that bit again. If (and it seems like a big if at this point) he actually did have a viable renewal application underway (not a trivial matter for a freelance journalist, work visas typically require a Japanese sponsor, and are rather specific as to the nature of the work), and had also been told it would be ok to travel with this status, then he would seem to have a leg to stand on, but his repeated evasion and misleading statements make it hard to take his story at face value. At any rate, his subsequent treatment is the responsibility of the (Korean) airline he flew in on, not Japanese immigration. Not that this would justify the treatment, but it does suggest that it may not be such an imminent threat to those of us who are actually living here with proper visas which authorise us to work in our jobs. That's not to say everything is great in Japanese immigration. It's pretty horrible everywhere, though.

His various blogging and commenting on Twitter, Debito and elsewhere gives the impression that he's a bit of a Walter Mitty fantasist, full of stories of his war experience and name-dropping his more famous "colleagues". He boasted about what a great contribution he made to Japan after the Fukushima accident (er, though it was also apparently this coverage that marked him out for expulsion): "But I didn’t flee Japan like thousands of foreigners after the March 11 disasters. I made personal sacrifices to tell the world about the plight of disaster victims, to generate sympathy for Japan. I earned income from sources outside Japan, and spent it inside Japan."

Google tells a different story, that he bravely filed his first-hand reports from Shizuoka, stoking the foreign media hype that many of us were so critical of at the time:

"I'm one of the last people I know to leave Tokyo," Johnson told CTV's Canada AM. Well, it seems like he has gone for good now.

Parmesan cheese

There's a lovely fusion of mad scientists and bonkers bureaucrats in the Torygraph today:

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration: A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.

I wonder if it's actually true?

No we can't!

We are off to Tohoku again shortly for more volunteering with Peaceboat. Partly because we enjoyed it last time and partly with the thought that if our jobs do end next year (which to be honest is starting to look less likely now), then I can't imagine wishing I had spent a few more weeks in the office over the summer! We were planning to travel up by train+bike and follow the volunteering with a bit of a holiday in the area, inspired in part by articles such as this, and partly by another volunteer on our previous week who did exactly the same. The volunteer campsite is far enough out of town that having a bike to get around would be really handy, especially for the two weeks we were planning to stay, for which laundry and shopping trips would be essential. I even booked a room at the hotel mentioned in that article for our trip up (having looked around and finding that many others in the area are actually shut).

We mentioned this plan to one of the organisers at the weekend at the pre-departure meeting, and were amazed to be met with a flat refusal. No, it is absolutely impossible to turn up on a bicycle. Either get the bus from Tokyo with us, she said, or don't come at all. She also told us that the previous person who did this (ie the person on our week) had caused a lot of disruption, because she had appeared *the night before* every one else on the overnight buses. The resulting attack of severe panic resulted in three heart attacks, a case of heatstroke and four pregnancies. OK, I made up the pregnancies. Well, two of them. Just imagine, she said, the confusion if everyone did that. Oh, the humanity. Um...someone help me out here, I'm having a failure of imagination. It's a campsite. That's what people usually do. We hardly need to march in in formation. We even offered to turn up on Saturday morning at the same time as the bus (which would be easy, there is an open campsite at the other end of the same field, where we could stay on the Friday night). She remained, however, completely intransigent. It was their way or no way. Incidentally, there was no residual evidence of this confusion when we all previously turned up on the bus on the Saturday morning. I suspect that the story has grown in the retelling, which also happened to us in a different context a couple of months ago. [Got a email from the admin at work, in a panic because our landlady was complaining about the damage we were causing with the plants growing up the walls of our house. The reality was that there are no plants growing up the walls of our house, and our landlady was not at all upset but did want to trim the hedge a few feet away!] With a language where so much is left unsaid, it is easy to imagine problems into existence. I've long since learnt that there is, however, no reasoning with people when they get in this sort of mood.

We did briefly ponder cancelling the volunteering completely - partly in protest at the overall stupidity, and partly because spending a significant amount of money on a holiday is probably more beneficial than doing a bit more beach cleaning at this stage in the proceedings. However, we have compromised on a single week of volunteering, followed by a week back at home and then back up for the holiday much as originally planned. It will actually be better to not have to haul around our volunteering kit (including heavy boots) on the bike. And the forecast for Thursday/Friday (when we would have been cycling up) looks grim right now with a typhoon on course for a fly-past. It means a week less of volunteering but hey, there are rules to be obeyed here, we can't let practical and useful results get in the way of that.

It's especially disappointing to see this sort of attitude in the younger generation, who one might naively have hoped to be a bit more flexible in their outlook. But I think at this stage in their lives they have only learnt the importance of obeying rules and hammering down sticking out nails, and not yet come to understand the "case-by-case basis" approach by which the more effective administrators (and yes, there are a few of them) learn to deal with reality.

I suppose I should be relieved, that such intransigent rule-mongering and panic at the thought of anything remotely out of the ordinary can still take me by surprise after 10 years here. The time to be worried would be if it felt normal! It certainly reinforces the extent to which it is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, but it never occurred to us that either would actually be required in this case. If we hadn't taken the trouble to make completely certain where we were staying, we would just have turned up (having made sure that our team leader knew what we were doing, of course) and everything would have been absolutely fine.

Broke

As you may have heard, the Japanese Govt is broke: "We've got our backs against the wall and need to do our best to avoid that situation."

This is of rather more than academic interest for your humble correspondent. As things stand, our institute has no budget for next year. Bad as that sounds, our (jules' and my) situation is actually rather worse. The institute budget will be sorted out somehow, there is little doubt about that (albeit it could be cut a bit). However, we aren't paid directly from the core budget, but have been carefully manoeuvred onto the contract research end of things, supported by the Kakushin project. This is a 5-year project that winds up next March, and it won't be directly continued as such. There are ambitions to set up a new 5-year project that follows along somewhat similar lines, but it has to be proposed anew, and it seems we need to justify it as more urgent and vital than rehousing tsunami victims, which is a rather tough sell to say the least. Moreover, during the current Governmental meltdown, no-one is signing anything anyway, it seems...

Interesting times.