Japanese life expectancy climbs for both women and men

Hot on the heels of the doctor shortage...life expectancy climbs for Japanese women and men.

As the report mentions, eating habits are getting worse. But smoking rates are also falling.

Breaking news - smoking is bad for you!

Only 50 years or so behind the rest of the world:

The life expectancy of male smokers at age 40 is 3 1/2 years shorter than that of nonsmokers, according to a health ministry study released Tuesday.

The heavier a man smokes, the shorter his life expectancy. The figure was 0.9 years shorter for men smoking at least two packs of cigarettes a day than for those smoking less than a pack a day, the study by a group at the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry showed.

The study is the first in Japan to indicate tobacco's health effects in term of life expectancy.

Of course the reluctance to study this subject (the cited research only started in 1980) has nothing to do with the fact that the Govt here owns much of the tobacco industry and gets a lot of income from it (indeed that is explicitly the purpose of maintaining ownership).

Fortunately, attitudes towards smoking are changing rapidly here. When we first arrived, no-smoking areas were few and far between (and pretty meaningless, given the absence of any sort of separation from smoking areas). Now they are more and more common, and there are increasingly restrictions on smoking in public. It's been quite a turnaround, in fact. Who says the Japanese are conservative and cannot change?

Doctors are bad for you...

...and here's the proof:

OECD report indicates serious physician shortage in Japan

I've heard some horror stories about the Japanese healthcare system, but there are of course horror stories everywhere. The Japanese problems seem mostly to spring from authoritarian and old-fashioned attitudes among the medical profession, together with a large dose of cover-up and closing ranks after malpractice. In contrast, UK horror stories tend to be about people who cannot get treatment until it is too late.

My own limited experience is that the facilities are excellent and there does not appear to be any shortage of staff. When I had a slipped disk a few years ago and eventually went to see a doctor, he apologised for the wait for the MRI scan...because it was being used for hips that day, I would have to come back next week to get my back scanned. Seriously.

(Pause for UK residents to pick their jaws up off the floor).

Anyway, Japan has the highest life expectancy, and just about the fewest doctors and the lowest spend on health care. Obviously we can clearly see in these figures the malign influence of the medical profession on human health. OK, maybe I exaggerate - it is merely useless.

Oddly, Japan has the highest number of doctor consultations per capita, more than one per person per month! How on earth do people find the time? But obviously the doctors are too busy consulting to actually do any treatment, so that's ok. Anyway, I don't hear of people unable to get doctors' appointments.

Wet wet wet

This is the 4th typhoon of the year, but the first to aim anywhere near here. In anticipation, we've had more than a day of solid rain (well, wet rain), and the typhoon hasn't even got here yet. 400mm of rain is a full rainy season's worth in one day, something like a quarter of the annual average. The winds are fading rapidly, so it's not exciting, just wet.

Most of southern and western Japan has been thoroughly soaked over the weekend, which should go some way to allaying the recent fears about water shortages. Closing swimming pools may be sensible, but the decision of some schools to switch to bread rather than rice smacks of gesture politics rather than serious policy. The proportion of water used in steaming some rice is utterly trivial, but what better way to persuade people that there is a problem than by preventing their precious children from having their daily entitlement of rice, which holds a quite religious place as the centrepiece of every Japanese meal.

Not that long ago, we were being told that water supply was too high relative to consumption. There's no pleasing some people.

Tipping Point: The Movie

Just when you thought it was safe to come out from behind the sofa...a little birdie in my in-box tells me that there yet another climate change horror film in the works. Don't all yawn at once.

Live Earth

I'm going to take the cynical side on this, and wonder why pop stars whose entire lifestyle is based around conspicuous consumption think they have a leg to stand on with regard to climate change (or indeed just about any environmental problem), especially when their "contribution" is just more jetting around to mega-concerts. What is "awareness" supposed to achieve anyway? Climate change is hardly a secret (denial is a river that's drying up pretty fast even in the USA).

Jules is always complaining that I take her ideas without attribution, so I'll credit her for this one: they might as well be having an orgy to promote AIDS awareness.

Annan receives Japan decoration

Nothing really exciting, but I liked the headline :-)

Headhunted

So, after a year and a half, and having sucked up more than 60 bloggers, Seed(y) magazine is so desperate to expand its evil empire that they have even resorted to asking me if I want to join them at scienceblorgs.com. Is the barrel really that bare?

Just joking, guys and girls. There's a lot of interesting reading there, even if it does sometimes veer too much towards the politically-correct anti-Repuglicanism and evolution wars stuff (yawn) for my tastes.

So, the question du jour is: To blorg, or not to blorg? Lining up on the Pro side, there is the promise of more readers (probably). Lining up on the Con side, there is the promise of more readers (probably) :-) It's all very well having a select few discerning readers who pop by occasionally, but I'm not sure I want too many people to stumble across this drivel by accident, or even worse, get pointed this way in expectation of thoughtful, provocative analysis...I happen to be a scientist, and it influences what I write about, but I'm not really a "science blogger".

They also promise to pay me. Well, as a Japanese public servant subject to a strict ethics policy, I would have to apologise humbly to my boss for the embarrassment I have caused, fly over to the USA and return the "gift" in person, on my knees. No, that's a joke. I wouldn't really have to kneel.

You can probably guess I'm presently minded to come down on the side of not joining any club that would have me as a member. There are some other advantages of shifting: I would like to be able to edit comments properly (eg reply in-line, and selectively edit the critical ones to make them look silly) and although the Blogger approach to trackbacks seems better than the standard approach to me, the incompatibility is a little tedious. OTOH I could have got that by moving to wordpress.com and I never bothered (in fact I never even bothered to check that I really could have got that, I'm just guessing).

Any advice (especially from those who have been there and done that) is welcome.

An inspector calls

Last week we had a visit from our external evaluation committee. In principle this basically happens every 5 years, although in fact it is a little over 6 years since they last came (just before we arrived). It was interesting to re-read their previous report, to see what had changed in the meantime. That previous visit was their first time - the institute was only set up 5 years before then - so it probably seemed reasonable at that time to give people the benefit of the doubt in view of the difficulties in setting up a major new lab from scratch. But although a few things are better, many are unchanged and some are if anything worse. A significant amount of science has been done in the meantime, but there are some fairly obvious problems with the way things are organised.

In the three days they were here, they had a barrage of presentations from group leaders and programme directors. It was interesting to see all the absentee management suddenly turn up and rush around pretending that they are here all (or even a significant proportion of) the time. The committee didn't actually meet with anyone who really works here as a scientist (at least not in our division, to be fair there are some group leaders in other divisions who don't have full-time jobs elsewhere). We did have the pleasure of a barbecue with them one night, but after the visitors had just had a day packed full of meetings (and with bosses eavesdropping in the background) it wasn't really a conducive atmosphere for full and frank discussions. Not that I have anything to say to them that I would not (have not) said to the lab director, but people suffering under the delusion that they have a viable long-term future here might perhaps have felt a little inhibited. Still, it was useful to take a step back, examine the good things about working here (after 6 years I'm in no hurry to leave, there is lots to like about the freedom and facilities) but realise that problems that have remained for 11 years can no longer be considered teething troubles but are actually "features" of the organisation.

Too Many Couples?

I found this odd article via some blog or other. The anonymous author seems to have a bee in his bonnet about couples getting jobs in academia, and invents a number of of bizarre and implausible excuses to back up his prejudice.

I'll start off by agreeing with one point he makes - it is rather silly for a candidate to keep quiet on the subject up to the point at which a job offer is made, only then to spring the surprise "I need a job for my spouse too". That just wastes everyone's time in the case when a suitable second position is impossible. It may be illegal for interviewers to ask (in some countries: probably not Japan) but that doesn't mean the candidate can't mention it themselves. We have certainly always been upfront about our position: it may have put some people off, but (as I've mentioned before) I think others have seen the obvious benefits of capturing a couple who are likely to settle relatively easily and who are not liable to suddenly get up and leave due to external circumstances To be fair, the author does mention this one point in favour of couples - at least in the particular case where a department has had an excessively high turnover of staff.

On the other hand, given the prejudice the writer shows, maybe candidates feel justified in waiting until they have shown themselves to be the best, before giving the panel a reason to reject them out of hand.

Apparently the biggest reason for not hiring a couple is that he cannot tell whether they will vote together on departmental decisions. If they agree, then their 2 votes carry more weight than one person. Well, they are two people, so that's obvious enough. One could equally argue that if they disagree, then the committee does not benefit from their judgement and they might as well not be there. The author doesn't explain how this is any different from any other random pair of faculty members. I guess in his world view all faculty members are paragons of objective judgement, unless they fall under the spell of a wicked spouse, at which point they lose their critical faculties and do what they are told. Maybe the stupid spouse is told what to do by the clever one - an advantage that other stupid faculty members don't have. Maybe, just maybe, some rational discussion actually results in them agreeing, because the accumulated evidence of their joint experiences supports a particular decision. Rational discussion? Who'd've thunk it?

Better still, another reason for not employing a couple is that they cannot be trusted to keep secrets from each other. I suppose if your authority depends on mushroom management techniques (and although Jamstec has raised this approach to levels I had never imagined possible, it is hardly unheard of in the west), then the concept of staff actually sharing information might well represent a threat.

He emphasises how anyone stupid enough to marry someone in the same field has only brought their troubles on themselves, so they should just put up with whatever they are offered. Well, it's a free market and good candidates can be just as picky as good employers. He might as well have simply advised people to not marry academics at all - which I wouldn't have found grounds to disagree with, what with the low salary and job insecurity etc (#include std.whinge). But that's a general point that goes beyond couples in academia.

He claims that small departments may not be able to function properly with even a single couple, and even a large one won't cope with 3. The number of scientist couples of my acquaintance is very low (I know of a handful by reputation), so I ask if anyone can back up that serious allegation with any specific cases. As far as I can tell, the couples usually make a strong contribution, although whether their relationship actually has a substantial role to play in that is not clear. I would however guess it is usually more of a help than a hindrance, eg in terms of helping effective collaboration and flexibility in coping with workplace pressures.

Maybe I'm reading a bit too much between the lines, but I get the impression of an old middle-class white man who rather likes the old middle-class white man's club that is academia, and who rather wishes that inconvenient things like wives and diversity and lives outside of work didn't interfere with his collegial life. Tough luck, buddy. It's not 1950 any more.