Nice follow-up to the previous piece, good to see some evidence of these music biz thugs at work..

& re freedom of speech, a piece in JT today records that in 2006 Japan fell from 37th to 51st place on the Worldwide Press Freedom index, due to "rising nationalism"

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070117f1.html

Thanks due to our glorious not-so-new leader, he of the plunging opinion polls, who, a reporter friend of mine tells me, has been assessed by a leaked US State Department report as likely to last "less than a year", and will mark a return to the pre-Junchan "Revolving Door Government". Bring it on...

So Oricon can sue someone into oblivion just for stating what's already well-known, but nobody can do anything about a massive, decades-long fraud against the consuming public? What century are we living in??

Why did it take them so long? Besides not wanting to draw attention to the statement when it was still on the shelves and widely available for all to read, of course.

Disgusting... Collusion will continue in some form, but won't all of this pretty much end when Johnny himself finally croaks? It can't be that long, can it?

Marxy, I notice you haven't said what you think should be done. Do you think Ugaya should go to court to vindicate, publicly, once and for all, these claims about Oricon, as a matter of public record? (Let's call this "the Debito solution"; kamikaze-style conviction-litigation politics.)

Or do you think that this is a classic case of omote / ura: that, since Oricon's unreliability is "an open secret", Ugaya can make the insincere apology Oricon requires to drop their case, and we can all go back to knowing what goes on, and taking for granted that omote and ura are not the same thing?

I seem to recall that when chart-rigging scandals have come up in the UK it's been generally concluded that no system is immune to manipulation by determined music companies, but that, as in Japan, it's hard to rig a chart totally. In the light of this -- and the understanding of most people that this is the case -- it seems to be a peculiarly masochistic thing to make a big stand over. Especially when there are whales being hunted and nuclear reprocessing plants being built.

What's most important is that Ugaya's intention was not even to "make a stand over" the issue. His comment seems to be tossed off as if, of course there are problems with the methodology... He did not write the article, and I don't remember his book making a big deal out of Oricon's reliability.

Chart-rigging doubts are not new to either the US or the UK, and I have a journal article somewhere all about the different types of methods used to rig charts. Charts can also be rigged by record companies WITHOUT THE RANKING COMPANY'S CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE, so while Oricon counting dummy reservations may be "inept" or "inaccurate," Ugaya never makes a claim that they are INTENTIONALLY twisting the numbers to help certain companies, which the Cyzo article tried to make a case for.

What should he do about it? I think the most important thing now is to make sure everyone knows what is going on and how generally unprecedented this sort of suit is - against a "commenter" in a piece rather than the editors/publishers/writers. Again whether he wins, whether Oricon is right or wrong or crooked or accurate, the point is just to bankrupt the writer with lawyer fees. So the only thing to do is to make the case go away. How do you stand up to bullies generally? Shame?

In the eyes of the Momus, one country's Karl Rove tactics are the other country's essential otherness.

While we're somewhat on the subject; marxy, did that 20-page english version of your thesis ever materialize? Did i miss it?

proprietary statistical methods suck.

How do I stand up to bullies? Well, I try to use the judo technique of turning their assaulting energy into something I can use. I was in quite a similar situation to Ugaya when someone in the US sued me -- or threatened to -- for mentioning them in a context they didn't like. I managed to turn it into publicity, a new album, etc, and paid off the substantial legal fees.

But, Japan being a place with much bullying but little litigation, I don't believe this case will ever come to court. Ugaya will not apologize, Oricon will not sue, chart-rigging will not stop, people will continue to be utterly indifferent to the whole issue (apart from you and the editor of Cyzo). The usual omote will resume, along with the usual ura. And all that raising the issue will have achieved is for a few people here to have wished a speedy death on Johnny-San -- a prominent homosexual who likes to promote cute boy bands and stop his acts getting married to, you know, women. Is he really the "evil" we should be fighting? Can't we find some bigger, more noble cause?

Marxy, you've been labeled racist before, now you can add "homophobic" to your resume as well!

hopefully this case will never go through.

and yes, momus is right, we should leave homosexuals alone--they should be respected and alloted the safety in their societies that other citizens are afforded--and worry about other, actual huge problems in the world--iraq, global climate change, nuclear proliferation (by, first and foremost, the U.S.) and the entrenched feud between rosie and donald.

Now, now, calm down, der, I'm not quite making that charge against Marxy. But I do think there's a link between rockism and straight attitudes, and popism and gay ones. Rockists want sincerity, popists celebrate the artificial and the acted. Rockists condemn things (music charts, hit films) because they aren't "based on a true story". A popist just wants to get carried away in a crazy whirl of glitz and have a good cry at some point. Like the old ladies (popists' mothers, mostly) who go to the kabuki theatre and stick 10,000 yen notes in the actors' costumes. Now, please don't shatter my illusions by telling me they're stooges planted by the theatre management. I'll thcweam and I'll thcweam!

ちょっと　まって　momasu-sama!

what about all the gender-bending in rock and all the androgenous sexual ceremony surrounding it? rockism is hardly straight!!

...androgynous, that is...

Glam rock is not "rockist", though. Anything but...

It's an easy mistake to make, because "rockist" sounds like it's just a condemnation of rock music. But rockism is actually a philosophy that puts primacy on sincerity, authenticity, reality -- and yet, at the same time, declares that reality is elsewhere. The rockist can then pose as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and a knight in shining armour, revealing this hidden reality and slaying the dragon which was so maliciously hiding it. Naturally, an entire nation is, at that hypothetical point, liberated from the series of systematic deceptions which it had previously regarded as its "culture".

Doesn't the overuse of the word rockism sound like an inflexible adherence to an ideology that puts the world in two binary options? Does it really matter for this particular discussion? Isn't the problem with Johnny's less that he is homosexual and more that he has been accused of a repeated pattern of sexually harassing his own underage employees?

The court date is set. I'm not sure why "Oricon won't sue" when they have nothing to lose and can easily pay the bill.

yes, rigid binary thinking is not healthy. it smacks of modernism, vapid and fallacious underlying meta-narratives, and it's very 20th century.

yes, less to do with his sexuality and more to do with harassing underage people. plenty of so-called straight people harass underage people, too. one's sexual orientation has nothing to do with whether or not one is prone to sexual harassment.

gay and lesbian rights are one of the the last frontiers of civil rights. one day, discrimination against gays and lesbians will be considered as sinister as outright racism is today--uncivilized and not to be tolerated.

I took this issue to be more about the use of the courts against a freelancer as this Asia Media article from 2005 noted:

http://128.97.165.103/article-eastasia.asp?parentid=25082

"'It is not a matter of winning or losing' for those who file such lawsuits, Miyake claimed. 'The significance lies in filing the lawsuit itself,' he said. 'For (writers) who are being sued, I think the most frightening thing is the fear that they may have to give up (writing) stories that could result in a major damages suit.'"

Marxy notes that Oricon is suing Ugaya and not Cyzo or Infobahn. The same article points out:

"[T]hose suing seem to be treating their targets differently, going after the weaker ones, including freelancers, with unmitigated aggression."

Thanks for that link.

And another reminder - usually they sue a writer when he has WRITTEN something critical of a company. In Ugaya's case, he was just quoted in a story he did not actively pursue writing.

I won't defend Oricon -- they clearly are bullying this man -- but I will say that sometimes a failure to litigate is taken as a tacit admission that a statement made against your company in public is true. Many companies have full-time legal teams, and part of their job is to challenge such slanders wherever they find them.

The risk here is that the man's allegations do have merit, apparently, and Oricon risk having a lot of very embarrassing information about their practises put into the public domain. That's why I think they will do everything to avoid actually fighting this. Sure, "a date has been set". But it's a bit like the US not wanting to see Saddam Hussein tried in The Hague or some proper international court -- they knew that if he had been, huge amounts of information about their part in his rise would have been released to the public. Can Oricon find a kangaroo court in Japan? Isn't it clear that this is just a threat designed to "hammer in the nail that sticks out"?

Maybe he can simply pull a 2-ch Nishimura from his court dates. Claim he didn't get the mail and you can avoid the subpeona.
That seems the most effective way of avoiding paying libel penalities and punitive damages in Japan.

I didn't know how to join you directly so i'm commenting, i'm french and working in a online associative magazine on asian contemporary culture and i've written an article on this case that owe you a lot, i find it more decent to say it to you, so that you can go and see, i've documented myself also and this is all but a c/c, i can translate it for you it if you don't speak french of course. I'm reading you every day and it's really such an incitation to go further that i just wanted you to know. You have my link and all so, go and see, i'm open to any critic you may have.

Thanks for translating that into French! Spread the word.