Before and after . . .

ABC NEWS FROM OZ has a report organized by Andrew Kesper, that shows Google satellite pics, with a slider to see the before-and-after. Wow.

Japan 1 Bluefin 0

THE NEW YORK TIMES has a sad report, "U.N. Rejects Export Ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna", by David Jolly and John Broder. If you're a polar bear, it's also a bummer, too.

Delegates at a United Nations conference on endangered species in Doha, Qatar, soundly defeated American-supported proposals on Thursday to ban international trade in bluefin tuna and to protect polar bears.

Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks of bluefin, a fish prized especially by Japanese sushi lovers for its fatty belly flesh, have been severely depleted by years of heavy commercial fishing, while polar bears are considered threatened by hunting and the loss of sea ice because of global warming. The United States tried unsuccessfully to persuade delegates to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or Cites, to provide strong international protection for the two species.

“It wasn’t a very good day for conservation,” said Juan Carlos Vásquez, a spokesman for the United Nations organization. “It shows the governments are not ready to adopt trade bans as a way to protect species.”

Then there's Japanese whale hunting, aka "research". I hope all those shiny, happy people in their Toyotas, Hondas and Nissans feel warm and fuzzy. Then there's dolphins, and "The Cove". A pox on all their keiretsu. Like Republicans, the only thing they respect is money — so I don't buy Japanese.

The Fat Lady practices the Mikado

THE TELEGRAPH IN THE UK has an article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, titled "It is Japan we should be worrying about, not America", that is worthy of your consideration.

Japan is drifting helplessly towards a dramatic fiscal crisis. For 20 years the world's second-largest economy has been able to borrow cheaply from a captive bond market, feeding its addiction to Keynesian deficit spending – and allowing it to push public debt beyond the point of no return.
• • • • •
Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the US Congress last week that the debt path was out of control and raised "a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default".
• • • • •
The savings rate has crashed from 15pc in 1990 to near 2pc today, half America's rate. Japan's $1.5 trillion state pension fund (the world's biggest) has become a net seller of government bonds this year, as it must to meet pay-out obligations. The demographic crunch has hit. The workforce been contracting since 2005.

Like Count Floyd used to say, "Scary stuff, kids"

the obligatory Japanese election post

Okay, this post is late and for that I apologize, but I've been busy down at the Ministry of Truthoffice rewriting the translations of what all the conservative movers and shakers think of the Japanese election. The consesus is that they are against it.

Doom and gloom is widely predicted by the right and less than 24 hours after the centerist Democratic Party of Japan signed a coalition with the leftish Social Democratic Party and the quasi-populist centerist/conservative People's New Party, headlines in the conservative press were announcing that cracks were already appearing in the tripartate alliance.

On the left, there is a bit more diversity of opinion. Some want to know when the bread and circuses will be arriving and others, realizing the economic fix the country is in, are being a bit more pragmatic and scaling back their expectations.

The new cabinet will be sworn in next week, so let's get cracking.

First, you need to know some things:
Japanese political history 101

Japanese media 101

Some decent political blogging on Japanese politics can be found at Tobais Harris' Observing Japan

Why the Liberal Democratic Party lost
As the old saw goes, the Liberal Democratic Party is neither, but that not really relevant here. The party lost the election for a variety of reasons

1. The economy sucks
2. Prime Minister Taro Aso brought a George W. Bush sort of eloquence to public speaking and was widely considered a bit of an embarrassment
3. The economy really sucks
4. People were sick and tired of the LDP after more than 50 years of them running the country. People have been sick and tired of the LDP for many years, but its never made much difference until now. Why? See reasons 1 thru 3.
5. The economy suuuuuuucks
6. The last elected Prime Minister in Japan was the very popular Junichro Koizumi, who was re-elected in a landslide snap election in 2005. Japan has had three unelected prime ministers since then.
7.Could it have been this kind of populist approach?

Education, Science and Technology Minister Ryu Shionoya also figuratively rose from the dead in a proportional representation bloc after losing in his single-seat constituency.
Shionoya said one cause of the LDP's defeat was "the people's lack of understanding of politics."
"I think the details of our policies haven't been conveyed to the public. I wonder how much ordinary citizens understand these things, including law-related points," he said.
"People need to make decisions based not solely on the lure of immediate gains. They need to think about what kind of society to build in the future," he said.
-Sept. 2 Daily Yomiuri

Mind you, that kind of elitism is rampant in Japan, but especially among the upper echelons of the LDP.
Japan is, in some ways still a feudal country at heart. People still go into the family business and follow in dad's footsteps professionally to much larger extent than in the west and parents still run their children's lives to a ripe old age.
And the aristocracy still rules. The vast majority of Diet members are graduates of one of about four elite universities - they go into the executive ranks of corporate Japan or the civil service and come out at age 50 to enter politics. That or they take over the seat from dear old dad, or granddad or uncle. Dynastic politics - children of politicians running for their parents and often grandparents old seat - is very common in Japan at all levels. Most of Taro Aso's Cabinet have a Cabinet Minister in their family tree somewhere and a full third of the LDP's elected Diet members in the last parliament were people who had effectively inherited their seats from family members.

Aso's paternal grandfather was prime minister and so was his father-in-law. His father ran a massive mining and cement company and his sister married into the Imperial family.

But the LDP hasn't cornered the market bluebloods either - the new prime minister Yukio Hatoyama is also a blueblood whose family has been called Japan's answer to the Kennedy clan.

Will the DPJ be any different?

Yes, at first. But while some of the old guard of the DPJ are the more centerist holdovers from the old Japan Socialist Party, a lot more of them are former LDP members or rookies whose main complaint about the old regime, aside from a few foreign and security policy points, is that it has denied them their turn at the trough. Power corrupts and we will eventually see the DPJ members getting their snouts in and the same cycle of corruption repeating.

What cycle is that? Well, the reason the LDP stayed in power for more than 50 years is that they managed to fulfill a vital role in post war Japan. It goes like this: To survive, a political party needs to get votes. To get those votes its needs money to campaign and money to reward areas that support it.

The LDP spent tax money like a drunken sailor on public works projects across the country - something very much needed to rebuild and modernize the nation in the 50s,but by the 70s, the government was building six-lane highways to nowhere, multi-million dollar bridges to tiny islands and spending tons of money on "anti-erosion" work - pouring concrete along the coast.

This brings jobs and money to rural areas and get the party votes. The construction industry in Japan is very much dominated by the Yakuza, so the contract bidding for all these projects were and still are, usually fixed. Companies collude to share the work and keep the price high, it's the Japanese way - the companies make money, the mob makes money and what the taxpayers don't know won't hurt them.

The mobsters then take their cut and launder it by donating it to the ultrarightist organizations they very often control, which in turn donate a slice of the cash to right wing politicians in the LDP and "spends" the rest at mob front businesses . The LDP also gets fat contributions from the construction companies and virtually anyone doing business with the government, which is just about everyone. The longer they stayed in power, the longer the reach of their fundraising tentacles. Whether the DPJ can or will step into the LDP's shoes in this cycle in the long run is an open question - I think they will try, but won't be as successful at it - but in the short run, the machine has been jammed by the change in government.

The LDP also promulgated a policy of agricultural self-sufficiency - the idea that Japan should be growing its own food, no matter the cost. This meant lots and lots of farm subsidies, which meant lots and lots of rural votes. And when you control the drawing of electoral districts, you can make sure that the rural votes you control count more heavily than those cast by big-city liberals and communists. It is reckoned that the vote of a farmer in out of the way Fukushima or Akita carries nearly three times the weight of a vote cast in Tokyo or Osaka, where the constituencies have far more voters.

Globalization of the economy has begun to put paid to that pillar of strength too, as Japan has been forced, grudgingly, to open up its agricultural markets to cheap food from China and the rest of Asia, a trend that will continue. The DPJ is offering a new and possibly more lucrative subsidy system to farmers in an attempt to bleed off some of the LDP's strength and has been somewhat successful, although voters in the countryside are still more likely to back the LDP than those in the city.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

The biggest change promised by the DPJ and the one least likely to be noticed aboard is their promise to move Japan toward "politician-centered government" -- I know anywhere else that would sound a tad redundant and ridiculous, but here's the dirty little secret about Japanese democracy -- its really the bureaucracy that runs the country. For the last 50 years it has been the deputy ministers and and other senior bureaucrats that have made all of the real domestic policy decisions, to the extent the average Japanese probably wouldn't get the joke underlying"Yes, Minister" and would feel that the domineering civil servant played by Nigel Hawthorne is a bit of a pushover if anything. The DPJ has promised to replace a lot of the senior civil servants with elected political appointees. I'm not sure how well this will work out -- there is a lot to be said for having competent professionals running government departments rather than amateurs -- but it is good to see the bureaucracy challenged and the will of the people's elected officials take the precedence over bureaucratic precedent.

The DPJ have also promised to take a new look at Japan's alliance with the US with an eye toward being less subservient - not a task given the nature of the relationship over the last 50 years. This change will probably amount to the Japanese government waiting a decent interval before saying "how high, sir?" when America says "jump"ns on security matters, but even that would be a stunning display of spine. One of the junior coalition partners, the SDP, favors kicking the Yankees out of Okinawa. Luckily, they are already accustomed to disappointment.

Much has also been made about the likelihood of the DPJ bringing Japan closer to China. While this would be a good thing and may happen, I sincerely doubt that they will ever be best pals. Too many Chinese remember or have been taught what Japan did to China in the 30s and 40s and too many Japanese forget or have not been taught the same.

The real change that is liable to come about will be in security policy. The DPJ gives every appearence of taking Article 9 seriously and the SDP definitely does, so the likelihood of things like Japan's ridiculous "participation" in the Iraq occupation being repeated are considerably lower than under the closet militant nationalist in the LDP. I would expect the current mission by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force to refuel other nation's warships in the waters off Pakistan that are supposed to be on some kind of blockade of Afghanistan will not continue past next year.

What does the future hold?

Mostly, financial turmoil for the government as they try to live up to their promises of a generous baby bonus (about $250 a month per kid) amohanng other pledges of government largess for the common citizenry and some serious ructions as they try to wean the construction industry off the government teat u end the collusive practices in bidding on government contracts. I'm not convinced either of these coming to pass as I think that over time, the DPJ will come more and more to resemble the LDP of old and get stuck in at the trough. However, if they do manage to face down the bureaucracy and put the decision making power in the hands of elected officials, that will be it enough to earn them at least a second, if not a third term.

The LDP faces an interesting future. No one wants to lead the party right now and given the nature of Japanese consensus-based decision making, I won't be surprised to see a few members, or even entire factions of the party, cross the aisle. The LDP needs a strong leader to keep the various diverse faction united in opposition, but anyone coming forward to lead the y party now is unlikely to be around for the next election in four years, so the list of people willing to be leader of the opposition but never prime minister gets pretty short indeed.

The only caveat to this is the chance (about even odds) that the DPJ melts down on its own due to scandal or simple ineptitude as a party with no governing experience, and is forced to call a quick election. If that happens this year or next, the LDP could slither back into power. If the DPJ get three years at the helm without having to switch leaders more than once, they have a good chance at a second term if the economy revives and the North Koreans don't invade.

If nothing else, the entire exercise has taught the Japanese voter one thing - that they can change the party in power, that democracy does exist here, at least to some extent.

(crossposted, at considerable length, from the Woodshed)

But can they handle Godzilla?

There a general election at the end of the month here in Japan so the parties are busy running around trying to show how on top of things they are and how they have every possible contingency covered in their little policy books. Naturally, the papers have been full of policy stuff for weeks, much of it pretty vague and dry, but I did find this little nugget of awesome at the bottom of a very long article on defense policy in today's Daily Yomiuri:

One of the major policies proposed by New Party Nippon is to reorganize the SDF and launch a study to establish an organization--tentatively called "The Thunderbird Squad"--geared toward international assistance.

Sadly, the article did not elaborate or reveal whether New Party Nippon is favor of granting the Tracy family Japanese citizenship.

Sure, they are good at international rescue, but can they handle Godzilla?

Maybe they would be better off following the example of the last elected Japanese Prime Minister Junichro Koizumi and Calling Elvis.

(crossposted from The Woodshed)

There but for the grace of God go I...

The scene: The moat of the Imperial Palace, Tokyo at 11 A.M. today.



It's not me, but I work a block away and a few more of those 45 degree-85 percent humidity August days and I wouldn't necessarily rule it out for next year.

Update: Now you know (none of) the rest of the story

crossposted from the Woodshed

A shitty way to learn a language

When I first came to Japan, I came to teach English at a chain of school that was to linguistics what Mickey D's is to haute cuisine. Nova talked a good game, but their real selling point was that they had the lowest prices if you bought enough lessons at once and had schools at every station, which means they are thicker on the ground in a city like Tokyo or Osaka than Tim Horton's in Toronto. They were the biggest employers of foreigners in the country with hundreds of schools and thousands of employees.

It was very much a place ruled by moronic policy manuals and systems designed to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible and there is little good to be said about it. At least I wore a necktie instead of a hairnet, but if you weren't in the glass-walled closet classroom kissing ass flirting entertaining teaching a group of one to three Johns suckers students, or trying to get toddlers to stop punching you in the nuts crying for their mommy being scared of the big pale-skinned blue-eyed giant learn English, you were expected to be in the parlour Voice room kissing ass flirting sarcastically abusing shaking your moneymaker entertaining facilitating English communication among the waiting psychopaths, suckers, random strangers and mental patients off the the street and no I'm not exaggerating students.

Too make an already too long story shorter, NOVA corkscrewed in for a landing last fall thanks to the sleazy, grasping fuckery of its president and owner, throwing thousands of young foreign teachers out of work after not paying them for a month or more. Suffice to say if this man were to walk into the wrong bar today, he'd get his ass kicked until his nose bled, but I digress.

This week I finally found out what happened to all the lame textbooks the schools had been using since the early 1980s

For those who can't make out the label, this is Let's study English! toilet paper.

crossposted from the Woodshed

Because nothing says "delicious" like an intelligent endangered species

Coming soon to a dinner plate near me, the latest bit of Japanese "research" on whales. They really are conducting whaling as research. They are killing humpbacks to determine if they taste better baked, fried, stewed in a curry or done up as "whale nuggets" -- all in the name of science.
Click here for more on how you can enjoy tasty endangered species! Coming soon, Panda sushi with California Condor eggs fried on a fire of teak harvested from the rainforest.

cross posted from the Woodshed

The Man

The Economist has an interesting of profile of what I'm up against on a daily basis. I'm not sure how long they will be occupying space upstairs from my office.

"The building boasts canteens, a phalanx of white-coated medical staff, a dormitory and even a proper bathhouse (for men only). The group has its own army of security guards, whose main job seems to be to stop you using the lift reserved for the chairman, 81-year-old Darth Tsuneo Watanabe. His imperious arrival is heralded by bows and salutes.

The main difference between this building and a government ministry, however, is that Mr Watanabe is more powerful than almost any government minister in Japan could ever hope to be. Privately, Yomiuri journalists tell you that they have no choice but to follow the editorial line Mr Watanabe lays down. They are nowhere near as forthcoming to their readers."

cross posted from the Woodshed

Listen and repeat: Karma's a bitch, ain't it?

Branch closings dim Nova's future
The Yomiuri Shimbun
English-conversation school operator Nova Corp.'s planned closure of about 50 branches at the end of this month is indicative of the severe business climate the company faces, following a number of student contract cancellations and an order from the government in June to partially suspend its operations.
The firm, the largest of its kind in the nation, has delayed paying some foreign teachers' salaries.
Nova plans to reduce costs by cutting personnel after the branch closures are completed. However, Nova's prospects remain uncertain.
According to the company, Nova had 418,000 students as of March 31, a more than 10 percent drop from the same time last year, due to former students filing a series of high-profile suits demanding the firm refund their tuition fees after they canceled lesson contracts.
Nova has also been hampered by a decline in the number of new students, following the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry's order in June to partially suspend its operations.
Nova listed revenues of 9.2 billion yen from April to June in fiscal
2007, a 31.9 percent drop from the same period last year. The firm had an after-tax deficit during the same period of 2.4 billion yen.
The firm's delay in salary payments to some foreign teachers has caused a great deal of anxiety. "I'm worried about what's going on," a foreign Nova teacher in Osaka said.

Lesson plan for level four advanced students
Target Language: Use of tags for emphasis and as interogatives.
Intro: Discuss students' past experience with renewing lesson packages and using all point before contract expiration. (Alternative: Speculation "What would you do if this school closed?" "What would you do if your company failed to pay your salary?"
Drills: Listen and repeat - Nova has had some problems lately, haven't they?
Nova has been cheating its students, haven't they?
Nova hasn't paid its teachers this month, have they?
Substitution drill: This school is in a fiery tailspin/up shit creek without a paddle/ neck deep in the big muddy, isn't it? (explain idioms as needed, get students to speculate on possible meanings or supply own metaphors)
This was only a matter of time/bound to happen/simple karma wasn't it?
This school is run by thieves/wankers/the yakuza, isn' t it?
Role play: A Nova teacher has not been paid and has no money. They are complaining to a Nova manager and demanding their money. The manager must come up with excuses not to pay (ie: the ministry of consumer affairs ate our account books, didn't they? The corporate jet needed repairs, didn't it?) and the teacher must come up with examples of what will happen to them or to the manager if they aren't paid. (ie: I'll be thrown out of my apartment, won't I? You don't think you'll get away with this, do you?)

(see if you can guess where I used to work and how I liked it)

"We didn't do it, nobody saw us, and when we apologized for it, we didn't really mean it"

Some days I think I either need to get a new job, have my conscience sugically removed or simply have my jaw wired shut.

Get facts straight on comfort women
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has adopted a resolution demanding an apology from Japan over the so-called comfort women. But the resolution was produced based on an erroneous perception of the facts.
The Japanese government should try to unravel the U.S. side's misinterpretation of history in order to remove a source of future trouble, while in the meantime working to block passage of the resolution by the full House of Representatives.
The resolution calls for the government to accept historical responsibility and apologize for "its Imperial Armed Forces' coercion of young women into sexual slavery." It describes "the comfort women system" as "one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century."
The resolution was made without verifying the facts and smacks of cheap rhetoric. It makes us doubt the intelligence of U.S. lawmakers.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed "sympathy from the bottom of my heart" and said he "felt sorry" during his meetings with U.S. President George W. Bush and congressional leaders during his visit to Washington in April. The prime minister also said that the 20th century was a century of human rights violations and Japan was not totally blameless.
Abe's remarks did not postpone adoption of the resolution by the lower house committee.
The resolution is merely one of many adopted at the U.S. Congress. It does not have any legal binding force. Thus, some observers say Japan does not have to take it seriously.

Govt must dispute false charges
But this is the wrong conclusion to draw. If Japan refrains from making counterarguments, this erroneous historical view will become accepted as established fact.
Before World War II, there were many women who were put to work as comfort women against their will by parents and brokers. But this does not mean the Japanese military coerced the women.
In past studies, no evidence has been found showing "coercive recruitment of comfort women by military personnel or government officials." The government explicitly presented this observation in March in response to a question by an opposition lawmaker.
On what is the resolution based? Reportedly the 1993 statement by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono played a significant part.
The statement said that Japanese military and officials were "directly or indirectly involved in...the transfer of comfort women." Such wording apparently led to the misapprehension that there was coercive recruitment.

Kono apology politically driven
The 1993 statement was motivated by a political desire to deflect pressure from South Korea on the comfort women issue. And it has helped broaden the misunderstanding.
Apparently out of diplomatic consideration, Abe has said he stands by the Kono statement. But as long as the prime minister takes this position, the misunderstanding of coercive recruitment will never disappear. If the statement is found to be erroneous, it should be rewritten without hesitation.
In March, Foreign Minister Taro Aso referred to the lobbying in support of the resolution as an "operation to estrange Japan and the United States." Anti-Japan forces in the United States linked with Chinese and South Koreans have exercised their influence behind the scenes on behalf of the resolution.
If the matter is left unaddressed, further demands for apologies will be repeated. The government must methodically elucidate the historical truths involved in the issue.
(from The Yomiuri Shimbun, June 28)


If anyone is looking for me, I'll be in the shower for a few days

Like a hibachi, only bigger

Another weekend, another barbecue
Dave said I could post weird stuff, so I thought I'd blog about my weekend, most just so I could post an odd photo. I took the curvaceous and emminently capable Ms. Rev. Paperboy and the youngin' up into the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture this weekend to camp out on a mountain top at The Northlands campground with 50 of our closest friends from my old watering hole in Kawasaki, Moby Dick, (named for the drum solo, not the whale) the friendliest bar in Japan, if not the world.

To paraphrase the master (and this is the real list): "We had 5 cases of Heineken, 2 bottles of Captain Morgan's dark rum, 2 bottles of Blanton's Single Barrel bourbon, a bottle of Black Bush, 2 bottles of Beefeater, 2 bottles of Jose Cuervo Gold, a bottle of Bacardi white rum, 5 litres of red wine, 5 litres of white wine, a bottle of Glenlivet, a bottle of Kalua, a bottle of Amaretto, a bottle of cassis, ten litres of assorted sake, a half dozen different kinds of sho-chu, 5 kilos of Rev. Paperboy's homemade spicy Italian sausage, 3 kilos of chicken, 4 kilos of assorted beef, 2 tuna heads, a dozen baguettes, a broad assortment of salads, pickles, olives, cheeses, chocolates, 'smores and 6 litres of Take-san's fabulous vegetable-chicken-sausage soup.
The only thing that worried me was the tuna heads. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man drunk on sake in the depths of a tuna binge."





I'm not claiming we drank all the aforementioned booze - though I think I had the last beer the next morning - but we certainly put a dent in it. I know we went through about half of the Irish whisky just er...toasting my sausage -- which isn't nearly as dirty as it sounds.

(further details at the Woodshed)

Where is Japan going?

The present government of Japan is attempting to change some of the events of the past. In August 1993, chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a statement of apology from the government of Japan to the victims of the 2nd World War, the women and young girls, some as young as 14, who were coerced into filling the ranks of Japanese military 'Comfort Stations'.

The Kono Statement on the issue of "the military sex slavery" was made public by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on August 4, 1993. In the Statement, he officially acknowledged the involvement of the then Japanese Military authorities in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transportation of comfort women. He also admitted that many girls and women were recruited against their own will, through coaxing coercion, etc., and that they lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere. On behalf of the Japanese Government, he offered sincere apologies to all the victims and declared the firm determination never to repeat the same mistake by forever engraving such issues in the memories of Japanese people. The statement has been respected as the official statement of the Japanese Government by all the Prime Ministers since that time including the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who made it clear before the Diet in October 2006 that he would adhere to the views of previous administrations on the issue as Prime Minister as well as an individual.

Suddenly, some influential groups in Japan want to rethink not only the apology but the conditions under which the forced sex slavery was performed.

There's more. Japan has changed their "fundamental law of education" to include the wording "patriotism and tradition", things that were left out of the law in 1947.

Japan was pressured by George W Bush to commit to the first foreign deployment of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces since the end of the 2nd World War in order to build his "Coalition of the Willing". In doing so, Japan, although making a minimal commitment, had, for the first time since 1945, undertaken an expeditionary deployment of armed forces.

Japan seems to be drifting from the course it established for itself after its defeat in 1945. They seem to dislike their own history.

The Rev. Paperboy has a series of links to stories which show Japan is reaching beyond their past.

And, it isn't good.

Another crappy day in the Strait of Hormuz

MAJOR UPDATE

Commander Matt Weingart, United States Navy, had a very, very bad day on Monday. You see, Cdr Weingart is the Commanding Officer of the 366 foot, 6,300 ton Los Angeles class, fast attack submarine USS Newport News.

The submarine is a part of the the US Navy's Carrier Strike Group 8, which is built around the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. They had been dispatched to the Indian Ocean in support of US operations in Somalia.

When the USS Newport News was transiting the 34 mile wide Strait of Hormuz something clearly went wrong. There are conflicting reports as to exactly what the state of the boat was at the time. Some say it was surfacing, others say it was trimmed-down on the surface, with only its sail visible.

In any case, it hit the 300,000 ton Japanese very large crude carrier (VLCC) Mogamigawa. (It's HUGE). There were no injuries and both ships managed to proceed under their own power. There were no reported oil spills or serious damage.

I've lost count of the number of times I've passed through the Strait of Hormuz. It's a busy place with 40 percent of the world's oil moving through it in some of the worlds largest ships. You have to be really careful in there.

In September 2005 another Los Angeles class submarine, USS Philadelphia, was involved in a collision, in the Strait of Hormuz, with the 54,000 ton M/V Yaso Aysen, a Turkish merchant ship. (It's BIG).

I only have one question: Why are US nuclear attack submarines, operating either in direct support of a carrier group or in any other capacity allowing any ship to get that close to them? The US Navy submarine force ethos is that, regardless of what rules may apply at the time, a submarine is required to turn away from a possible collision 10,000 yards (5 miles) prior to falling into a situation which puts the vessels in extremis.

Trivia note: A prior Mogamigawa Maru sailing under a Japanese flag also had an encounter with a US submarine. The ship was an aircraft transport in World War II and was sunk 19 March, 1943 by the USS Whale, a Gato class submarine.

Important Update: Since my job in the navy involved locating and killing submarines, how to drive them was always a tertiary concern. That said it was great to receive some information in comments from a retired US Navy submarine officer who runs a blog on the subject of... The World of Submarines. Bubblehead, (Hey! It's a term of endearment, and he'll be calling me a "skimmer"), has some excellent detail surrounding this accident and, if you're interested, it's worth making regular visits to get some reasoned assessment of what actually happened.

It looks like USS Newport News may have been zoofed. That is a slang term for having a surface ship pass directly over your dived position. The US Navy is explaining the accident as possibly having been the result of venturi effect. That may sound a little odd to the uninitiated but several things do point directly at that possibility. I've handled a VLCC tanker. They leave a huge hole in the water, particularly when loaded to the marks and up to a typical service speed of 17 knots. That hole gets filled with water rushing into the cavity created at the stern of the ship. In simple terms the water filling the cavity rushes down from three sides and creates a force which moves in the same direction of the ship and operates like a swirling vortex, sucking everything from both sides of the ship down, once it reaches the stern and up and towards from the water column below. At the risk of over-simplifying a description, it's very much like effect of a vacuum cleaner nozzle.

A submarine too close to that vortex, with little warning, would be sucked into the filling cavity and propelled in the direction of the stern of the surface ship. The thing about it is, I've actually seen it happen.

Back in the day when we couldn't paint our ships without a Soviet trawler watching we were in mid-Pacific on a major allied naval exercise. We were plane-guard 1/2 mile astern of US aircraft carrier while she was launching and recovering aircraft. The speed was in excess of 26 knots and the weather was a little rough. There was known Soviet submarine in the area. Suddenly, out of the stern of the carrier, a Soviet Victor Class submarine broached and popped to the surface between us and the aircraft carrier. We were surprized, but that was nothing compared to the shock experienced by the submarine. They were right where they didn't want to be - on the surface, exposed.

That incident occured before the episode in which another (might have been the same boat?) Victor class submarine had a collision with the USS Kitty Hawk in the Sea of Japan. Although we may never know exactly what happened, it would appear the Soviet boats, (in both cases) were either under the carrier or making a close approach and were either sucked into the stern vortex or were close enough to the ship's bottom to have been dragged into the accelerated water near the keel.

In any case, it's worth checking out Bubblehead's blog for some good information.