PeterRS

Sadly I cannot see either the Philippines or Vietnam being a position where they either stand up to China - or want to, if push really comes to shove. The Spratly Islands dispute has several countries up in arms, including Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei in addition to the Philippines and Vietnam. No doubt the claimants are far from happy about it, but China has already taken many measures to ensure that the others are going to have problems if they really do want to take them. Alongside China's military might and air power, the other nations are mere minnows. In 2016 a dispute between China and the Philippines brought up at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in favour of the Philippines. Yet China has since then constructed ports, airstrips and military installations on the Islands. All the Philippines and other Asian nations have been able to do is talk - and strengthen alliances with the USA. The US wants to maintain several principles, including Nonuse of Force in Settling Disputes and Freedom of the Seas. So far it has done little to stop China's expansion on the Islands. With increasing US sanctions against Chinese manufacturers resulting in China moving many production facilities into Vietnam, I simply cannot see Vietnam upsetting that economic applecart by taking an even greater position against China re the Spratlys.

I wonder if any of us would have made that comment, say, 20 years ago? And I expect probably not. Then we regarded China as the next big hope for the world's economy, the more so as Japan was only finally coming out of a decade of deep economic recession. China was expanding at such a fast rate and everyone seemed to want to be associated with it. We knew about the one-child policy and the deaths of so many girl children. We didn't like it but we probably accepted the policy was essential to get the population growth rate of an underdeveloped country down. Just as Thailand had in the years after 1960 when the fertility rate was almost 6 children per family. It is now just under 2, but draconian measures were not needed. Khun Meechai and his popularisation of condoms helped achieve that. What is so different now is that whereas China's leaders were then regarded as relatively benign and were following Deng Xiao-ping's policies of openess and economic development, Xi Jin-ping comes along and the ghosts of Mao, the dreadful Premier Li Peng and the old guard come back to haunt the country and the world. The extraordinary thing about Xi is that he comes from quite a liberal family. His father was a pal of Mao on the Great March and was made a Vice Premier in the new government. He advocated tolerance towards Tibet and even hosted the Dalai Lama in his home. His son's hard line probably developed after his father was denounced when the younger Xi was 9. Yet his father was rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution and became the top Party official in the soon to be economic powerhouse of Guangdong Province. China's top leadership was for decades after Mao a major struggle between the old guard and the reformers. I have no doubt that Xi, like others, lobbied hard for the top job. His campaign against corruption at high levels of the party was popular with the public, but that can not have been the only reason he got it. Did the reformer Presidents and Premiers who preceded him think he would continue their policies? Who was promoting him? We'll probably never know. But in the world at large, I think few expected he would become such a hard-line President much more in line with Mao than Deng?. As the country's military has expanded under Xi, I do not know which Asian country could stand up to him. Perhaps Japan, but only because it is inextricably linked to the power of the USA. The other Asian countries are either too small or too weak. What will be interesting in the future will be Xi's position if anything happens to Putin. And when, as inevitably he will either through death or assassination, he passes from the scene, who will take over and will the reformers once again find a way to the top job? But all that is going to come too late for many consideing where they might retire. South America and even Portugal sudddenly seem a lot more attractive!

I agree with much of @macaroni21's reasoning. I agree too with @reader's comment about location. And I suggest they are related, at least a litle. Westerners and expats knew about Sunee from a variety of sources. Asian tourists, for the most part, had no clue about it. I don't read Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Asian gay blogsites but in one English one based in Singapore I rarely ever read about Sunee. This was long after the under-age issue when it was effectively dead to all but those who had experienced it or heard about it. Sunee's location was definitely not somewhere a newbie gay tourist would accidentally stumble upon. Did any of the gay venues in Sunee ever attempt to market their service - even to the usual western expats? They just assumed since customers had been coming, they would continue to come. Word of mouth! For example, some will remember that there used to be various free gay publications available in many of the gay bars in Bangkok - and probably Pattaya and Chiang Mai. I cannot recall when the last one disappeared, but most were in English or Thai - with one or two being in both languages. Was there ever even one article in Chinese about Sunee Plaza and/or one ad from one of the Sunee venues? If so, i do not recall any. If people do not know you exist, you have to be mighty clever to keep going on any kind of commercial basis.

I guess you do not read. I have NEVER written "the farmer's stubbornness was due to traditional Japanese values". I have NEVER written "the whole country was behind him". As for your comparison with Luigi Mangioni, there is absolutley zero comparison. He is not Japanese and he does not live in Japan! What I have written is "Japan is Japan and trying to divine Japanese logic is all but impossible! I have always said that of Thai logic which in many senses is different from western logic, but I think Japan is even more difficult for westerners to comprehend." Yet you continue to reject this and confuse your own western values with those of people in Japan. No doubt you will continue posting silly childish cartooons which have nothing to do with the subject of one Japanese farmer in Japan. End of discussion on my part.

Flipping through youtube videos some evenings ago, I came across this wonderful version of the haunting Albinoni Adagio. It is sung by a choir named Libera which is based at one of London's churches. It seems the choirmaster enjoys taking short standard classical works and slightly rearranging them for the choir and a small group of instruments. In recent years it has become hugely popular, has a recording contract and made more than 20 CDs, and like the more famous Vienna Boys Choir Libera makes regular international tours including two to Japan. Libera has worked with many top international artists like Luciano Pavarotti, Jose Carreras and Neil Diamond. It has also provided backing music for several movies including Shadowlands, Hannibal and a preview for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni is thought to have been written around 1708. I rarely enjoy crossover-type arrangements but this short recording gripped me and I immediately fell in love with it. The young boy who sings the main theme Freddie Mushrafi's mother is from Ireland and his father from Bangladesh! He has one of the highest and purest boy soprano voices I have ever heard. Don't be put off by the formality of the pic below. The choreography of the piece and the camerwork is extremely fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_(choir)

That's exactly the reponse I'd have given up until last year. But I had been saying for years that Thailand was too conservative a society to allow gay marriage. I sure got that wrong! Maybe this is an indication of quite significant changes in society as a whole. The younger generation which voted overwhelmingly for the new party run by Pita Limjaroenrat which was then disbarred by the old guard has. I think, now got the bit between its teeth for change. Assuming the party or its successor gets its act together at the next election, I certainly expect more radical changes. Legalising prostitution, though, may go a bit too far.

When police finally broke into the tiny, dirty bedsit apartment in North London, even the most hardened were nauseated by what they witnessed. Blood was everywhere. Lying on the bed was the body of the younger of the two men, his head cratered as a result of nine fierce blows from the hammer that lay on his chest. The bloodied naked corpse of the older man lay prostrate on the floor, dead from a massive overdose of barbiturates. The plot that soon unraveled is the stuff of murder mysteries. One of the two deceased was indeed a writer and a highly successful one at that. But mystery novels were far from his genre. Outrageously gay and totally promiscuous at a time when gay men were supposed to remain very much in the closet, Joe Orton was one of the exceptions. Hailing from a cheap housing estate, Joe had left school early, later proudly telling friends, "I'm from the gutter." He knew he was gay and he did not care who else knew it. Rough trade was his delight and he'd cruise around London's public lavatories and red-light districts, later filling volumes of diaries with details of each encounter. Joe Orton: photo Douglas H. Jeffrey This, we should remember, was a time when homosexuality was still not decriminalized in Britain. In 1953 shortly after being knighted as one of Britain’s finest actors, Sir John Gielgud was arrested for trying to pick up another man in a public lavatory. He appeared in court where he was fined. But he was also recognised by a newspaper reporter. Publicly humiliated, for over a year Gielgud was tormented by the fear that his career was over. He even contemplated suicide. At least he did not suffer the even greater humiliation earlier endured by Alan Turing, the brilliant code breaker whose work is acknowledged as having shortened World War 2 in Europe by at least one year, if not two. Having had his house burgled, he reported the crime and admitted the fact that he had had a sexual tryst with a young man who had known the burglar. Arrested under the anti-gay 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, in 1952 the judge at his trial gave him a choice: imprisonment or chemical castration. As we all know from the relatively recent movie “The Imitation Game”, he accepted the latter. With a criminal conviction, his security clearance was withdrawn and he was banned from his government work as a cryptanalyst. In 1954 he could take the shame no longer. He committed suicide. It took until 2013 before he was officially pardoned by the Queen. Subsequently in 2017 a new law was introduced, named appropriately Turing’s Law, in which pardons were given to many, but not all, homosexuals earlier convicted under the old anti-gay law. To date more than 65,000 pardons have been issued. Sadly, nearly 80% are already dead, including Oscar Wilde. Turing’s legacy has also been honoured since 2021 when his face appeared on the back of the Bank of England’s £50 notes. This, then, was the background to Joe Orton’s public displays of his own gay nature. But Joe did not care in the slightest. Then as the Swinging Sixties arrived, London was finally breaking free from the deprivations of the post-war era, a time when Britain came to lead the world in everything from London’s Carnaby Street fashion to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Were his diaries how Joe came to realise he had a talent for writing? Who knows? Eventually he found his way to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a scholarship aged 17 to study acting. There in 1951 he met a fellow student seven years older, a withdrawn prematurely balding man from a wealthier family named Kenneth Halliwell. No one seemed to like Halliwell much, whereas the impish, no-nonsense Joe was the life and soul of every gathering. What Joe saw in Halliwell apart from as a cash cow is equally mysterious. Perhaps it was simply that the adage 'opposites attract' was true in their case. Even so, the relationship did absolutely nothing to stop Joe's promiscuous behaviour. On leaving RADA, both tried their hands without much success at acting, writing and then doing various odd jobs. They even landed in jail for a few months after a prank when they defaced hundreds of public library books. Although Halliwell had helped Joe with his writing, in two important ways prison actually liberated Joe. First he realised he was no longer dependent on Halliwell. More importantly, as he was later to say, “It affected my attitude towards society. Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallised this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul . . . Being in the nick [jail] brought detachment to my writing. I wasn’t involved any more. And suddenly it worked.” The iconoclast in him took over, poking fun at institutions and establishments that had been almost untouchable in British culture, like the police, the church and the government. Soon Joe's superior writing skills resulted in one of his plays being produced on BBC Radio. A modest success, he then embarked on what was to become his first major hit. "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" is very much a play of its time. Kath, a bored middle-aged spinster, runs a boarding house. One day a strikingly handsome blonde young man calls looking for a room. Kath really fancies her chances with this Mr. Sloane. But when her younger brother Ed arrives, he too fancies this stranger. What they are not aware of is that Sloane is a psychopath who later in the play goes on to murder their ailing father. When brother and sister find this out, they come to an agreement. In return for not reporting the crime, Sloane will spend a few months bedding Kath and then the next few months bedding Ed. It was the ideal Orton ending. “Sloane” transferred to Broadway, where the subject matter all but ensured it would bomb. It did. But it was performed more successfully in various other countries. It was also made into a film after Orton’s death. This was black comedy with serious sexual overtones. Some were outraged. As Orton became even more famous with his ensuing plays "Loot" and "What the Butler Saw", one Edna Welthorpe was a constant presence in the letters' columns of the major daily London newspapers, bombarding readers about "the filth" and "moral disgrace" of Orton's plays. Welthorpe came across as a fierce guardian of public morals. Yet she was none other than Orton himself! Ever the prankster, he was merely engaging in a bit of self-promotion. He laughed all the way to the bank! One man who admired his work was Brian Epstein, the gay manager of The Beatles. Epstein was looking for a writer for the group’s third movie. One evening at Epstein’s London house, Orton met Paul McCartney. During dinner McCartney told him he had loved “Loot” but generally did not like plays. “The only thing I get from the theatre is a sore arse,” he claimed. Orton noted that at one point there was a knock on the front door. “Five very young and very pretty boys trooped in. I rather hoped it was the evening’s entertainment.” Sadly for Joe, they were a very popular Australian group recently arrived in London which Epstein was considering managing, The Easybeats. Orton agreed to work on the movie. Five weeks later he delivered the script. It was rejected. The group did not see themselves as Orton’s cross-dressing murderers. At least Orton received his £10,000 fee. As Orton's success grew worldwide, Halliwell's career went nowhere. Popping all manner of pills to keep depression at bay, he grew both intensely jealous of Joe's success and desperately afraid he would leave him. They took a long holiday in the very gay resort of Tangier bedding all the trade that came their way. Joe sunning himself in Tangier But it did nothing to allay Halliwell's fears. Joe soon told a journalist friend that he had started another relationship and would finally leave Kenneth. Did Kenneth find out? Perhaps. But his increasingly tormented mind could take no more. Within days he had bludgeoned Joe to death before committing suicide. It was August 1967. Joe was just 34 years old. Many regarded him as one of the brightest creative talents the theatre had ever known. Apart from his plays, Joe's life and success is perhaps best-known today from the biography written after his death. In 1987 this was made into a film with Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina and Vanessa Redgrave. Appropriately both had the title, "Prick up Your Ears", ears in this context being a very obvious anagram for "arse"! How Joe would have loved it!

With respect, I was not wrong. I agree there are stubborn asses all over the world. And with your knowledge and experience of Japan you will be perfectly well aware that every Japanese will know this farmer is being stubborn - and indeed very un-Japanese. It's a country where for centuries the group has taken precedence over the individual. But this man is not merely an individual. His case about retaining his land struck a chord with vast numbers of Japanese people. It was that fact that made the government back off. It's nothing to do with a "valiant Japanese culture", as you call it. Your asssumption in this thread has always been that the man should have seen a sort of western reason about the benefits of selling his land. And you are correct in the western sense! I have no doubt he could have held out for a humungous amount of cash which could then have benefitted not only his family for generations and the farmers who did sell their land. For you have to remember that this man is still not alone. He has a great many supporters who agree with his action. In 2015 he turned down an offer of ¥180 million (US$1.7 million at the time and no doubt could have held out for considerably more). The anti-Narita movement is the longest running social movement in Japanese history. As author William Andrews points out, the struggle is "not just about the airport. It encapsulates the last gasp of the movement, the very last concrete struggle." And this is a struggle that has seen vast tracts of land seized by the government, many clashes with the police and not a few deaths. One question I have never seen answered is why the government decided on Narita as the site for its new international airport in the first place. It was initially a secret government decision and the original plan was that it have 5 runways. presently it has 2 and getting approval for the third which it wanted in time for the 2020/21 Summer olympics consumed such vast quantities of time and patience it is still not ready. Major demonstrations started within days of Narita being proposed back in 1966. Nobody wanted the main airport to be sited there. Yet government instrasigence peristed. Flying in to Narita from the north you see dozens of golf courses, all built some time after Narita opened. Could that land not have been considered?

I suppose I can't really talk as I was a repeat monthly customer with one masseur at Albury for about 6 years. But what about the new visitors, the tourists making their first, second or third visit and wanting to explore outside the main Silom Suriwong gay ghetto? I think there are two other very basic reasons which have been discussed before. One exmpale can be found in the hot springs. There the Japanese have absolutely no qualms about walking around totally naked. Thais generally cover their genitals with either a small cloth or their hands. Seeing a Thai walking around totally naked is a rare exception. Secondly, though, cities like Tokyo are so mega that the chance of any family member or family friend actually seeing a son on a gay spa site is zero. Even if very accidentally they happened upon a site and in a very un-Japanese-like fashion decided to open it, they would again in a very Japanese fashion not actually "see" it. The ordinary Japanese are masters at seeing but not seeing! You can witness this all the time on the subway and JR commuter trains. At rush hour young office ladies will frequently notice perhaps middle aged men reading the latest porn manga books. The men usually make no attempt to hide what they are reading. Unlike their western counterparts, the young ladies will not be shocked or even try to get closer to see all the nude drawings. They have seen but they do not see. It is part of a culture that westerners find all but impossible to comprehend.

You've already made your point which we all get - and a couple of posters who know Japan far better than you have explained why this farmer has acted as he did and continues to act as he does. Why do you now continue to mock him with silly cartoons? Why not instead learn some Japanese and go to Japan to check your western views with those of the average Japanese so that you can understand facts and not continue to be childish about it?

Oh dear! A memorial plaque? That's surely going way too far. Who sacrificed what? People "gave their lives"? Come on, let's face facts. With few exceptions, they worked in Sunee and virtually all were there for one reason and one reason only - owners and boys - to make money. It was their commerical decision to move and work there. Would a plaque be there to celebrate all those who failed to make money? Nobody conscripted them! Nobody forced them into some sort of slavery! These people were nothing like the 140,000 Chinese, mostly illiterate peasants, who were sent by their government to work as labourers to repair war machinery and to dig trenches for the Allied forces in Europe in World War 1 and who suffered in ghastly, appalling conditions. In return China gained less than nothing at the Versailles Peace Conference with, for example, the German concessions in Shandong being handed back not to China but to the hated Japanese! The ordinary Chinese man in the street was outraged and saw this as an enormous humiliation. Demonstrations led by students erupted in China. I mention this only because these were to lead directly to the start of the Chinese communist party. Had China been treated in accordance with its war contribution - perhaps a few plaques here and there - there might be no communist government in Beijing today. That from Bruce Ellemen, Professor of Maritime History at the US Naval War College. I know I've gone off on a tangent - but an important one given the thought that Sunee should erect a plaque! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/surprisingly-important-role-china-played-world-war-i-180964532/

And how many times have we heard this. New scheme, great idea - but sorry guys we have not yet got a clue how to implement it!!

And that, in my view and with respect, is the western way of thinking! 😀

I just wish the government would make a slight ammendment to the rules for retirees here and on certain other visas permitting them to work for charities. Presently this is forbidden, even though totally unpaid. During covid I so much wanted to help a couple of charities doing superb work in the Klong Toei slum area. There must be so many retirees and people like wives or husbands of expat workers with lots of time on their hands and no doubt a lot of experience. Not possible!

Haha! I'd actually be more scared in Laos which is the most bombed country in history. For the Americans, the whole Vietnam War episode basically started in Laos which Washington 'experts' thought would be the first Asian domino to fall to communism. The covert war in Laos started in its northern jungle where the CIA built a secret air base at Long Tieng. For some years it was the busiest airport in the world and often since called the "most secret place on earth." But it was the cluster bombing of the country that led to its dubious distinction of having more bombs dropped on it than in the entirety of World War 2. American aircraft dropped over Laos a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes of every day for 9 years - 9 whole years. It is estimated that 30% of those bombs (roughly 80 million) failed to explode on impact with the ground. After the end of that war, 10% of the country's population had been killed but the communiststill controlled virtually the same land area they had occupied when the CIA started it all. Virtual stalemate. Those unexploded bombs covered around 37% of agricultural land and have since continued to kill more than 50,000 Laotian people, the majority children. As President Obama said when he visited the country in 2016, "At that time, the US government did not acknowledge America's role. It was a secret war, and for years the American people did not know. Even now, many Americans are not fully aware of this chapter in our history, and it is important that we remember today." Little wonder it is still called "The Secret War". https://abcnews.go.com/International/bombing-laos-numbers/story?id=41890565