Osaka: Utsubo Park

"Osaka is notorious for its lack of green, quiet spaces."

Osaka’s west side story by Eric Johnston, Japan Times, 2004

Indeed, Osaka is a pretty gritty city.  Think commerce and industry.  Think working-class.  Walk down almost any street here and count the small warehouses and mom and pop businesses.  Go for a run or walk in the early morning and expect to share the sidewalk with people headed to work.  Drive a friend to the international airport KIX and pass by industrial scenes worthy of a Mad Max movie.

In Paris I orient myself around the metro stations.  In Osaka I use the canals.  This map of my neighborhood is from the Meiji period and, yes, the canals are still there as are many others around the city.

1877 (Meiji 10) Map of Osaka: 1. Nagahori; 2. Shinsaibashi; 3. Dotonbori; 4. Ebisubashi from http://www.oldphotosjapan.com/photos/82/dotonbori-ebisubashi#.WUMH6GjyjIU

Is Osaka a beautiful city?  Not if you're looking for old architecture. Old Osaka and her inhabitants were heavily bombed by the United States (my country of origin) in 1945 and once they put out the fires and buried the dead, this is what was left:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardement_d%27Osaka

But they rebuilt and the result is an interesting city.  I run and walk the streets here at all hours and I am never ever bored.  People nod and say "Good morning."  They seem amused by this middle-aged American out running in the heat (or the cold). And I in turn watch them.  The very attractive and well-muscled young Japanese man bidding farewell and bowing to a a lithe and lovely lady of the evening.

And then there are green spaces which are all the more magnificent for being relatively rare.  There is Osaka Castle, Nagai and Nakonoshima parks and there is not a week that goes by where I don't walk one of them.  And, finally, there is Utsubo Park which is a jewel with trees and paths and a rose garden so beautiful that it breaks my heart. Here, too, its existence owes something to an earlier, deadlier time:  it was constructed on the site of a former U.S. army airfield.  Today, it is quiet and green and has fountains and streams. 

I will leave you today with a few pictures of my last visit.  Bon weekend, everyone.

RBT Call Storm

I almost forgot to mention this one.

On June 15 (tomorrow for me) some Americans abroad are planning a mass call to Congress in support of Residency-Based Taxation (as opposed to the system we have now called Citizenship-Based Taxation aka the reason you must file a tax return in the US even if you live and work abroad .)

If you are unclear about RBT versus CBT have a look at this really nifty summary published by American Citizens Abroad (ACA)

Residency-Based Taxation 

Side-By-Side Analysis: Citizenship-Based Taxation (Current Law) 

ACA’s Residency-Based Taxation Proposal

So the idea behind a "Call Storm" is that you and other Americans abroad give your elected representatives in Washington, D.C. a call tomorrow and tell them what you think about CBT versus RBT (and while you're at it you can throw some FATCA fat on the fire).  If enough people call then, yes, they sit up and pay attention.

You can find the contact info for your reps here and your senators here.

I am going to keep this post strictly non-partisan and not mention either political party.  Certainly you don't have to be affiliated with one or the other to participate.

However, if anyone from either party happens to pass by the Flophouse  with helpful information and encouraging words, feel free to post them in the comments section.

Play Poker Not Privilege

The word "privilege" is one that I use with extreme caution in any context but especially when talking about migration. C. Lundström wrote an entire book about White Migration in which she argues that race is part of that Invisible Knapsack and it travels well. 

My thinking about "privilege" is evolving and by that I mean that I haven't come to any conclusions that satisfy me and I'm open to more information.  I'm also very wary of my own feelings and visceral reactions.  A part of me would very much like to be seen as "privileged" and bask in the notion that I am a special snowflake. Behold the wonderfulness of me! The saner part of me says, "Hey, kiddo, get real."  (And I can't tell you how many AA meetings it took to get that one straight in my head.)  

I'd say that "privilege" has so many negative connotations, is so relative, and so muddy that I prefer to reframe it and use Bourdieu's idea of "social capital" instead.  This terms captures what people are getting at when they use "privilege" but without evoking knee-jerk reactions.  To make it even clearer in my head I think of it as a poker hand.  Some people are born in a particular cultural, social and economic context with a lot of good cards (inherited social capital) which enables them to more easily accumulate other cards.  Some folks start with really bad ones and they struggle.  In between the two is a continuum where people hold mixed hands.

A good example of a card is citizenship.  In The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality by Ayelet Schachar she argues that birthright citizenship in a developed country is an inherited privilege  that is undemocratic and unfair.  It persists, however, because it's a privilege of birth that benefits just about everyone within an affluent nation-state.  The poorest factory worker in France is automatically part of an exclusive club just by virtue of being born in France and having parents who were born or naturalized in France. He/she will automatically transfer that membership to her children. 

It is, as Schachar says, "The quintessential inherited entitlement of our time."  This matters she says because there are wide disparities in income, health, education and opportunity between the citizens of a developed country versus a developing one.  So it's definitely better to be born a French citizen as opposed to being born as a citizen of Mali.  In fact it may determine whether you live or die as an infant.  France has an infant mortality rate of 3.3 deaths/1,000 live births versus Mali which has 100 deaths/1,000 live births.  (All figures are from the CIA Factbook.)  And let's be clear about this - none of us had any choice about where we were born and the laws under which our citizenship was ascribed to us.  

But that's just one card, albeit a pretty important one.  We are born into families, We are born into groups.  We are born into hierarchies.  Our social capital or lack thereof is always a matter of context and I would argue that it's a combination of cards (inherited or accumulated) that determines our relative position within a particular society. And it would be idiotic of me to argue that these things don't make a difference in terms of opportunities.   However, I would be extremely cautious about taking a national conversation about things like race, class, educational attainment, language, or sex and making broader claims about other societies or all societies.  

Because I would contend that the cards a migrant brings to a new country can't be played in the same way in a new context.    Not only does the migrant not have the same rights as a citizen but he will be inserted into at least two hierarchies:  one that positions the migrant relative to other migrants (more desirable versus less desirable) and another that places her below the native-born citizen who has an inherited position in society.   

But other cards come into play here like education, skills, language, finances, race and gender.  But they don't necessarily have the same meaning in the new country.  Polytechnique is a big name in France and it confers enormous social capital.  Outside of France?  Not so much. But the degree itself may count for a lot.  Money may buy a very nice standard of living in one country but go to London or Vancouver and learn how little one has in a place with a very high cost of living. Or conversely, one can move to a country where even a small amount of money means a much better standard of living. English-speakers may believe the hype about it being a highly-valued "global language" and arrive in a country to find very few jobs for the monolingual.  And yet, they may find one and be very content.

As for race there are enormous variations in how it is defined locally.  People who are considered to be  (and consider themselves) "black" in the US , might not be in parts of South America.  I don't see that Poles in the UK get to be "white" in the same way as British "whites".  I have read arguments that say that being "white" is a always a good card wherever you are in the world.  Honestly, I think this one collapses under the impossibility of defining racial categories when there is no globally agreed upon definition of any of them.

What I am arguing for here is that if we are going to look at people's poker hands (social capital) when they migrate, I do not think it is sufficient to look at one card and pronounce a verdict of "privileged" or "underprivileged."  That's just laziness.  It's simply too easy to say "these people all have at least a BA, therefore they are privileged" or "those people migrated, therefore they are privileged (or underprivileged)." (The latter can go either way.)  I think that you need a lot more than that to support an argument for or against.  And if this is a serious exercise you have to be open to contradictory information and willing to dig into the context,.  

Perhapsa better response to someone who shouts "privilege" in your face is for both of you to gently place all your cards on the table and start asking and taking questions.  What it is about my cards that makes you think that I have an unfair advantage over you?  What is it about your cards that leads you to think that the deck is stacked against you?  And then no cross talk, no interrupting.  This is called a conversation and it can be quite enlightening when both parties are active listeners.      

John Oliver and Brexit

I don't know about you but I sure needed a laugh this morning.  This video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about Brexit was the delicious cream in my coffee, replacing my usual reduced-fat milk (The New York Times/Le Monde aka Al-Jazeera sur Seine).  Hat tip to Curtis for the link.

There are so many quotations and commentary from Mencken that are appropriate to all elections and particularly timely when applied to the shipwrecks looking for coastlines in the US and UK today.   But I will go with this one since it beautifully captures my sentiments after watching Oliver.

"Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic — a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook — the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? ...

But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops."

In Defense of Costco

One of two Costcos in Osaka http://www.costco.co.jp/p/?lang=ja

Ellen put up a very thought-provoking post the other day about Costco, that huge warehouse/store where one can buy all manner of things cheap and in bulk.  Costco is about to open its first store in France and that has evoked strong reactions from some Americans living in the Hexagon.


Costco is an export from my homeland - the Pacific Northwest of the United States - along with Microsoft, Amazon, RealAudio, and Starbucks.  Yes, the land of sea, salmon, and cedar also produces a healthy crop of capitalists.

That is one reason I can not pretend to be neutral on the subject of their products on distant shores.  There are good jobs in Seattle because of the success of these enterprises.  In 2017 the unemployment rate in the city hovers around 3%.

But there are other reasons I simply can't get too worked up about the arrival of Costco in France.  Frankly, I would have loved to have had one around when the Frenchlings were young.  We were a dual-income family with kids living in Suresnes at the time and we usually shopped for the week on Saturday morning at a French chain called Champion. But more often then we both liked,  we would run out of something during the week and one of us would have to make a run after picking up the Frenchlings from after-school care.   It was a cauchemar. A tired adult with two tired, cranky kids who just wanted to go home pushing the cart through crowded aisles, waiting at the checkout, and then having to bag the groceries herself.  Now there was a market in the center of town in addition to the chain stores but neither of us could frequent the market during the week and, in any case, whether we shopped at one or both, we had to carry our purchases back to the apartment.   We tried to buy staples in bulk (milk, for example) but we were limited to what was available and what we could carry.  (This was years before I took up weight-lifting.)

There was nothing particularly romantic about this aspect of French life.  It was "métro boulot dodo" like all the other families, French or foreign (or both), in our community.  My neighbor who had Wednesdays off took her children to McDonald's that day.  They liked it and she could relax and not have to cook on her day off.  I completely understood where she was coming from. And, in fact, when the Frenchlings began to spend their Wednesdays (no school that day) with my mother-in-law in Paris, she would often take them to McDonald's as well.

To those who find the presence of these things disturbing because, as Ellen says, "they see the arrival of Costco as importation of the worst of American consumerism, American products and so on. ."  I sympathize.  If these things bothered them in the US, than, yes, I'm sure they don't care for them in their adopted country. As for those of you reading this who do not live in France, perhaps you are feeling a bit disappointed at what I've written so far because that doesn't fit your image of a bucolic, unspoiled country and its "we work to live, we don't live to work" people.  However pleasant my French management was, no one was going to give me a morning off to hit the farmers' market.

Is it really so difficult to acknowledge that today an "authentic" French life includes things like chain stores and a struggle with issues like childcare and dual-income families?  The more traditional French life where the children came home for lunch every day, someone was available to shop in the market in the morning, and few families needed daycare was predicated on the fact that many women didn't work.  That has changed and I think this is a good thing.  No, my neighbor didn't have to take her children to McDonald's  but consider that four days a week she pulled a double shift and that we all had to get up early on Saturday to take the children to school. I'd say that anything that made her life (and mine) was greatly appreciated.  Would it have been better if she had taken them to Quick (A French hamburger-fries-shake chain)?

And what really is the difference between a Champion and a store like Costco?  The answer is simple:  the possibility of buying staples in bulk at low prices.  If Costco (or another chain) had existed we would still have bought the bricks of milk but in large quantities so that no one had to shop during the week.  And the threat of the cheaper stores like Costco (and other from the UK, Spain or Germany) has meant that the French supermarket chains offer more services like home delivery at reasonable prices and shopping via Internet - all of which would have been a godsend for me and my spouse when the Frenchlings were little.

As for "American consumerism"  I'm not sure such a thing really exists as a national export.  Can one country, however powerful it purports to be, force another nation to change its habits and mores against its will?  There is something in that accusation that implies that the French themselves are too foolish (or too cowed) to resist.  And that is simply not true.  The French show great powers of resistance and are not be riled because they will protest in ways that make Americans with all their guns look like petits joueurs (small players).  Perhaps even more threatening to Americans are the Japanese who take in a product, flip it around, make it better, and then sell a better version to American markets.

And lastly let's consider that the French are gifted capitalists inside and outside of France.  As Ellen notes in her post: "The fact that there are so many "hypermarkets" in France is a purely French phenomenon, not imported from anywhere else, and they have drained the life out of many town centers."

 I would add that there was a Paul's (a French bakery chain) here in Osaka right next to my spouse's office.  When I went to Shanghai I toured a Carrefour (French supermarket chain) and listened to a presentation on how they intended to conquer the market in China.  All over the world one will find French businessmen and women selling software, carbonated beverages, chain bakeries and supermarkets and even garbage pickup, all ably supported by the French Chambers of Commerce and Business France.  I should know because I worked for French companies that did those things and exported them quite successfully.

For consistency's sake, those who dislike the idea of a Costco in France should surely be equally aghast at a Carrefour in China.  I echo Ellen's question, "Anyone complaining about the imperialism?"  If you happy to be one of the complainers about "imperialism," then please explain the difference between the French and American versions and why you are not writing to Business France to tell them to cut it out.

Societies change for reasons that has something to do with the importation of foreign ideas, good, and services, but that's not the whole story.  Foreign companies don't succeed in a market unless they have something local people want.  Fundamentally, I think deeper societal changes make societies more receptive to imported things that solve genuine problems.  Costco will please them or it won't and it is up to the French to decide that.

But I will not cry for Carrefour or Champion any more than I will shed tears for a more traditional era when women were told to stay home whether they liked it or not.  And anything that makes life easier for working families has my vote.

Flophouse Policy on Comments (Help Needed)

When I set up the Flophouse, I had decisions to make about comments.  That's one I had to think about  very seriously because while I'm not into control and I love it when people speak their mind, sometimes people comment not because they want to join a discussion, but for other reasons. I'm talking about the trolls and the salesmen/women.  

I derive no income from this blog.  I've turned down all advertising.  I don't even use the Amazon widgets anymore.  The blog is not even meant to kick start a book or anything like that.  It is pure fun for me and I hope for you too.

A Troll is someone who stops by and leaves comments that aren't meant to further a discussion, they are just meant to piss people off to no purpose whatsoever except the amusement of the person doing the trolling.  That violates my rule about this blog being fun and/or interesting.  Trolls are neither.  They are boring and I don't see why any of us should have to suffer through that kind of nonsense.

The second category of "problem child" is the salesmen.  Since I write a lot about immigration, I get comments that have no content other than to steer people to some website that offers immigration/emigration services.  I don't know these people, I've never used their services and have no idea if they are reputable or not.  I'm not selling anything on this blog and I don't see why I should let anyone else do so either.

After a few years of moderating and approving the comments before they could be published, I stopped.  There wasn't any need for it.  I am one of the luckiest bloggers around because Flophouse readers are polite, interested, and often a lot smarter than I am. And to be clear a person who is passionate or very direct in his/her comments is not a troll, even if I or others have an equally passionate response to her point of view.  

I will never take down a post because I or others don't like what you have to say.  I don't have a problem with being wrong.  I do my best to check my sources but I'm not perfect and I don't mind anyone pointing that out.  

As for opinions, I'm not and never will be the last word on anything.  I say what I think and do my best to come up an argument that makes sense.  Anyone who comes here is free to disagree and to say so in no uncertain terms.

I stopped comment approval but I still read and try to answer each and every comment.  You take the time to pen something in response to a post (and I am deeply grateful every day that you do) and I try to show my respect for that by reading and engaging with what you had to say.

The issues (and they are big ones to me) is that sometimes readers post comments to older posts and I miss them.  The other is that Blogger seems to be randomly dumping some posts in the spam filter and I only see them after a few days.

This will not do.   

On my side I commit to checking that spam box at least once a day.  I should have started doing that earlier and I apologize.  I also commit to paying closer attention to older posts.

On your side, I would ask two things:

The first is I would like to know if it would be better if I posted every other day instead of every day.  That gives you more time to read, reflect, and then comment if you wish.    I sense that the posting rhythm isn't conducive to your participation here.  Please let me know.

The second is that if you don't get a response from me within a couple of days either mention it in a comment to a more recent post or email me at v_ferauge@yahoo.com. 

In fact, feel free to email me in any case.  Perhaps you have something to say that you would prefer not to have published on an open forum.  Or maybe you'd just like to introduce yourself and start a conversation.  I also like to hear suggestions for future blog posts - some of the material I use here comes from people like Tim who pass along links or who recommend books.   

The sun is shining here in Osaka.  Time to stop tickling the keys and get out of the house.

Bon weekend, everyone.

Victoria

Macron Makes a Move to Attract Talent to France

https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/870407981044834304/photo/1

Tim Smith sent me a link today to a new website meant to attract highly-skilled migrants to France. The title of the website is a riff off the US President's slogan "Make America Great Again" and it implies that Trump is a provincial person who doesn't care about the rest of the world and who has abdicated any claims to US leadership in this international fight against global warming. Very deft. Here's the link (and after reading the home page who wouldn't click on it if only out of curiosity).

Make Our Planet Great Again

It's well done.  Very VERY well done.  What makes it so in my eyes?  The first is the impeccable timing.  This is the right moment to strike when Americans are reeling over the US withdrawal from the Paris accord.  I'm amazed that they got it up so fast and coordinated it so well with a social media campaign which says to me that Macron has a very competent and well-organized communication staff.  The personal pitch itself is inspiring:  "We are ONE planet and Together, we can make a difference."  And it extols the virtues of France and positions her as a leader in a winnable fight for the planet. "France has always led fights for human rights. Today, more than ever, we are determined to lead (and win!) this battle on climate change."   And then at the bottom of the page is a big clickable field entitled "I want to make the planet great again."

After  Macron's pitch the site gently guides the potential migrant/expatriate interested in working on climate change though a series of open and closed questions.  I use the word "gentle" because none of the questions are complicated or require detailed information.  They don't ask about degrees or experience.  There's just a drop-down menu on the first page that asks if you are a researcher/teacher, entrepreneur, student, NGO worker, or other. And then a second field that asks what country (and in the case of the US, what state) you come from.

This is followed by open fields where you answer questions like "I'm fighting climate change because...," "I currently work on....," and "My dream is to..."  That's a rare chance for a potential migrant to make his/her pitch in his own words.   Nice.  And the final page takes you straight back to Macron's pitch for France, "Your new Homeland." And finally there is a big clickable button on the bottom of the page that says, "I'm coming to France."

Wow.  Talk about casting a wide net.  Talk about mad communication skills.  The other countries competing for the highly-skilled should take note.  I think it's better than 5 Reasons to Work in Sweden which I already thought was pretty good.

Have a look and tell me what you think.