Section 32 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 March 25 Tuesday.
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Over the weekend I thought "The hell with George Bush and the hell with his war. I'm going to scrub this stuff out of my mind."

I decided that I'd allowed the war to colonize far too much of my mind, and I was going to switch it off and, instead, write about the Japan of paper windows and tatami maps - to write about incense and meditation and household gods.

(Fair enough. I sleep on a futon in a room which has tatami mats as flooring, and this room has paper windows, as traditional as you could find. As for household gods, there is an effigy of the Laughing Buddha in the foyer, and an owl sacred to Pallas Athena sitting on the dining room table.)

However, yesterday, when I went to buy bread, I realized that it was going to be impossible to shove the war away that easily.

Foreigners in Japan - that is, white people or black people, people who are obviously non-Asian - are always conscious of the fact that they are extremely conspicuous. If a foreigner gets on the train, then I tend to think to myself, "Oh, there's a gaijin! I wonder where the gaijin comes from?" So it's natural that Japanese people have a similar curiosity about any gaijin - "outside person" - amongst them. And pretty much every obvious gaijin in Japan - white or black - is conscious of the pressure of observation. And for some people this pressure of observation can be quite hard to deal with.

(One guy I talked to, an African-American guy from Los Angeles, who was both conspicuously black and conspicuously big, said that his perception was that Japanese people perceived him as being scary, and he most definitely found his perception of their perceptions very hard to handle. He was distressed - no other word for it. He was, as it happens, a very nice guy - I've past-tensed him because he left Japan some time ago.)

Personally, I'm generally not fussed by the question of whether I am or am not under observation by the great Japanese public. However, yesterday, when I was buying bread, I got the impression that the guy who was selling me the bread was giving me a hard and unfriendly look.

It is entirely possible that this was just my subjectivity kicking in, and that actually his look reflected the fact that he was busy, or tired, or had some unrelated problem on his mind.

However, just after I left the bread shop - one of these little boutique bakeries which are very common in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, baking bread on the premises - I met the gaze of another Japanese national, and got the impression that this was an uncommonly direct and assessing gaze.

Now it is undoubtedly true that my perceptions may say more about my own mindset than about what is really happening on the ground, but while I was out shopping for bread I most definitely did get the impression that at least a couple of people were looking at me. And the thought flashed through my mind: do they by chance think that I am American? If so, what could possibly give them that idea?

That was when I realized that I was wearing an American-style sweatshirt emblazoned with a conspicuous brandname which looks like an American trademark and may quite possibly be one ("Converse," as it happens.)

This sweatshirt was given to me by someone when I first arrived in Japan, close to six years ago, and I've had it ever since. (It may be a bit eccentric, but it's my habit to wear clothes until they actually wear out, and it's amazing how much wear there is in a good-quality sweatshirt.)

I'd never given much thought to this sweatshirt, but when I got it home I was so curious that I actually took it off and explored the labels. One of the labels (the washing instructions) has faded beyond decription, but another declares "Converse Allstar" and "Chuck Taylor" and "Since 1917" and "Boston Mass.".

Yeah, it's American through and through. So will I still wear it? Sure. (Though I don't think I'd wear my Arabic T-shirt in America, the one which someone gave me which, for decorative purposes, bears both the English and the Arabic for selected words like "camel" and "moonlight".)

As noted above, this incident doesn't necessarily tell me anything about what is happening in Japan itself, but it most certainly does show me how deeply the war has dug itself into my consciousness, to the point where it's impossible to ignore it.

There's also a question about the objective realities here, one that I'm not in a position to answer at the moment, because it's early days and I don't yet have much in the way of data. The question is this:-

To what extent is the George Bush war in Iraq altering the relationship between American culture and Japanese culture?

Immediately after the terrorist incidents of 9/11, my perception was that Japan (culturally and politically) was firmly and squarely in the American camp, no ifs, buts or maybes. There was an enormous amount of sympathy here in Japan for America.

However, America being attacked by terrorists is one thing. America going and gratuitously bombing the hell out of some foreign country is quite another thing. As for the press coverage, that has been either professionally neutral (as in the case of NHK news) or negative.

An example of the negative is in an editorial first published in The Asahi Shimbun in Japanese on March 22 and republished yesterday, in English, in the English-language edition of The Asahi Shimbun which is bundled with the Japanese edition of the International Herald Tribune.

The editorial says that Japan's Prime Minister Koizumi supports the American rationale for attacking Iraq, the rationale being that regime change is necessary to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. The editorial then goes on to ask a question:-

So what would happen if the United States applied the same reasoning to North Korea, which is strongly suspected of developing nuclear weapons?

If that came to pass, Japan and South Korea could be seriously affected adversely. Did Koizumi really think through the logic behind supporting recent U.S. military activities, and the severe consequences that might entail?

This editiorial is published in English under a headline "Koizumi's U.S. leanings" with a smaller headline reading "Must an alliance mean blind support for the war?"

From watching CNN, from listening to other American news sources via radio, and from reading American-sourced opinion pieces and editorials in the International Herald Tribune, it seems possible to get a handle on the American response to the war in Iraq.

Broadly speaking, while resistance to the war undoubtedly remains in the United States, war seems to have caused both American public opinion and American opinion makers to line up behind the American president. In Japan, plainly, there has been no such effect.

Over the weekend, up in Gunma prefecture, I watched a TV show on one of the Japanese commercial channels. They paraded a number of Americans before the studio audience, each American bearing a large sign around his neck, identifying him (I think) as a citizen of the United States. What happened then was that a squad of Japanese nationals debated the Americans, and debated them very noisily.

Commercial TV in Japan is not serious - it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from NHK - and this debate had obviously been deliberately structured in a manner designed to maximize the amount of screaming and shouting. (If it hadn't been live Americans providing the entertainment, it would have been frog races in the studio with live frogs, or something similarly edifying.)

For most of the time, everyone was screaming and shouting far too fast for me to follow what was going on. Some of the Americans were extremely fluent in Japanese (infinitely more so than me) and were apparently holding their own in the hammer-and-tongs debate.

What surprised me was when the studio audience shut up long enough to let one rather slow-spoken American deliver himself of his thoughts in English, and he gave us the George Bush doctrine, straight and undiluted - the bad guys have got weapons of mass destruction so we've got to preempt them.

I had the momentary impression that I was watching some kind of wind-up robot on camera. Up until then, I'd never seen an ordinary American citizen reciting the Bush doctrine. Up until then, the Bush doctrine (in my mind) had always been the mutant child of a handful of Doctor Strangelove figures, and (somehow) I hadn't really internalized the notion that the Bush doctrine is spreading and is contaminating the wider American population. But, watching the American guy on TV, I thought, "Hey, the programming works!"

Despite all the shouting and screaming, I didn't detect any real antagonism in this TV debate - it was, after all, commercial TV, with everything staged for cheap kicks, and my guess would be that everyone walking into that TV studio knew pretty much what to expect. But, even so, the subtext of the whole setup seemed to be, "Hey, you guys, how do you justify what you're doing?"

If you scratch around, you can find a few shreds of support for the American position here and there in Japan, but basically the Japanese response is one big gloomy negative, with a certain number of worried thinkers speculating as to what may happen if America next turns its attentions to North Korea (which is entirely possible).

All that said, my guess is that, from the perspective of a living, breathing American, Japan remains one of the most hospitable foreign countries on the planet. While Japanese reaction to the war in Iraq has been solidly negative, the limited data available to me indicate that there are no signs that Japanese people are hostile to Americans as such.

However, it seems reasonable to assume that Japan's cultural relationship with America is slowly being deformed by the war. And if America were to start a war of choice in this part of the world, a war with North Korea, it's anyone's guess what would follow.

To wrap up, some quasi-random stuff, war-related. First, from yesterday's International Herald Tribune, an excerpt from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. An Israeli writer, Ari Shavit, supports the war, saying there is "no choice because the combination of a dictator and terror and weapons of mass destruction is an explosive mixture. There is no alternative because the Iraqi Pandora's box is already vibrating." He figures that there is no alternative but to go ahead and "smash the box" before the dangers inside are liberated.

Even so, the writer notes that this war takes us back to "the conceputal world of 1956," which is the year in which Britain and France went to war with Egypt over the question of who was to control the Suez Canal. Comparing the Suez Campaign with the George Bush war against Iraq, Ari Shavit writes this:-

The basic structure of the two campaigns is similar: When a nationalist Arab dictator threatens the interests of the West and upsets the world order dictated by the West, the West takes upon itself the right to invade that dictator's country and attempts to depose him. The West allows itself to intrude violently into the Arab region. That's colonialist behavior.

Bear in mind the fact that the above comment is from a pro-American opinion piece by an Israeli. The comment has been "Excerpted from editions [of Haaretz] of March 20".

Also in yesterday's International Herald Tribune, on the same page (page 8 of the IHT as published in Japan) is an opinion piece from The Daily Star, Beirut, from the pen of Saad Mehio, this opinion piece excerpted by the IHT "from editions of March 20".

It seems that the Arab street is seething with anger, not just at American behavior but (more significantly) at the behavior of their own leaders. Saad Mehio writes that the failure of Arab leaders to "formulate a unified position vis-a-vis the foreign storm" was the "final straw" for ordinary Arabs, causing these people to "lose faith in their leaders' ability to guarantee their security".

In arriving at this conclusion, Saad Mehio writes this:-

It is clear that there is unprecedented anger at Arab leaderships among ordinary people. Over the last 50-odd years, this anger was largely confined to the Palestinians, whose experience taught them not to trust leaders of the Arab world. Now though, it seems all Arab peoples have been "Palestianized" in one of the most significant developments seen in the Middle East in recent times.

In this context, it is worth noting that the Arab world is seeing TV footage which is not being shown in the West, and which is not being shown in Japan, either. While watching TV here in Japan, I have seen (either on CNN or Japanese TV, I forget which) some reasonably composed and bloodless scenes of Iraqi civilian casualties in some hospital somewhere.

But Salam in Baghdad has been watching less sanitized TV images. From the 23rd of March, this:-

The images Al-jazeera is broadcasting are beyond any description. First was the attack on (Ansar el Islam) camp in the north of Iraq. Then the images of civilian casualties in Basra city. What was most disturbing are the images from the hospitals. They are simply not prepared to deal with these things. People were lying on the floor with bandages and blood all over. If this is what urban warfare is going to look like we're in for disaster.

The American experts have been on TV talking about how precise and surgical their strikes are. And Salam writes about how he watched TV and thought the images of the bombing "terrible". On the 22nd he wrote:-

As one of the buildings I really love went up in a huge explosion I was close to tears. today my father and brother went out to see what happening in the city, they say that it does look that the hits were very precise but when the missiles and bombs explode they wreck havoc in the neighborhood where they fall. Houses near al-salam palace(where the minister Sahaf took journalist) have had all their windows broke, doors blown in and in one case a roof has caved in. I guess that is what is called collateral damage and that makes it OK?

The basic message seems to be that dropping bombs on people is not the way to win friends. It undoubtedly influences people, but not necessarily in the direction that you want.

On CNN today, there has been some outside expert talking about how the Shi'a have failed to rally to the American cause in the south of Iraq. Putting together what I've heard over the last couple of days, there seem to be two reasons for this, these two reasons interacting.

One reason is the George W. Bush's father encouraged the Shi'a to rise up in revolt against Saddam Hussein, and then, when the Shi'a did exactly that, George H. Bush let Saddam slaughter them. Presumably, a lot of love for the Americans died along with Saddam's victims.

The other reason seems to be that people in Iraq seem to think that maybe Saddam will survive, and, having survived, will then punish whoever supported the Americans. And - who knows? Maybe, just maybe, Saddam will survive.

A couple of days ago, I would have said that Saddam was guaranteed to be dead inside of a fortnight. Now, I'm not nearly so sure.

I had intended to resist the temptation to wargame the war. However, I am finding the temptation simply impossible to resist. This war really is taking over my mind.

My analysis is this: Saddam has lost the south of Iraq, but in political terms it's not a big loss, since the Shi'a who predominate in the south are not friendly to the Sunni minority which provides Saddam with his power base.

In the chunk of the country which Saddam now controls, the Sunni predominate, and a great many of these people - many Ba'ath Party members, for instance - probably feel they have something to lose if the Shi'a come to dominate Iraq (which, in any truly democratic setup, they would.)

Also - and this is more than a little surprising, given the lousy combat performance of Iraqi troops up until now - Saddam seems to have at least some people who are ready to fight, and who are capable of doing exactly that.

The probability, at the moment, looks to be that America will crush Saddam. I expect that the Americans will in fact win. However, my own perception of the war has changed, and presumably there are plenty of people who feel like me.

On Saturday, Japan time, I wrote "what is puzzling me - at this stage - is the question of why the Iraqis don't just throw in the towel and surrender". Because at that stage there seemed a strong possibility that Saddam might be injured or dead, and at that stage the American military machine seemed invincible.

Now, however, it is plain that the American military machine has started to bleed, and in fact someone on CNN today was saying that if statistics from past wars apply to this one, then American casualties may eventually climb to 17,000. (I was not listening with sufficient attention to gather whether that 17,000 was intended to mean 17,000 dead people or 17,000 dead and injured people.)

Also, the repeated American speculation as to whether Saddam is alive is starting to sound a little over-hopeful. (Or, to put it another way, to my ears it's starting to sound like disinformation rather than information.)

Furthermore, while the war has (broadly speaking) won the support of the American people (at least for the moment) the response elsewhere in the world has been negative. Particularly so in the Arab world.

Presumably what Saddam is hoping is that one or more Arab nations will destabilize in a spectacular fashion during the course of the war, and presumably item number one on his wish list is an insurrection in Saudi Arabia.

I don't think that will happen, but is seems (from Saddam's perspective, and from the perspectives of those around him) to be a dreamable dream.

I was a bit startled to see, on CNN today - on CNN as broadcast via cable TV here in Japan, which is sometimes a little different from CNN as broadcast elsewhere in the world - a commentator talking about Iraq and saying something along these lines:-

Iraq may have more oil than Saudi Arabia, cheap and easy to extract, and if America has access to the abundant oil of a grateful Iraq then America will be less dependent on Saudi Arabia, with which nation America's relationship has been strained since 9/11.

And I'm thinking: that may be true, but, even so, it's not exactly politic to come right out and say so in the middle of this particular war, given that there are (and have been for some considerable time) question marks about the stability of the Saudi regime, and given that so much of America's military is in Kuwait, which is sandwiched between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

So I now figure that I can see how Saddam thinks. He is probably wrong, but he probably figures:-

(a) If enough Americans die, America will pack up and go home, as it did in Vietnam, or

(b) If enough Iraqis die, Saudi Arabia will destabilize, the government in Saudi Arabi will be overthrown, and America will suddenly find itself fighting a war on two fronts.

Having said that, I have to say that I figure Saddam's chances of survival to be a lot less than one percent. But Saddam has probably gotten as far as he has by focusing on keeping on keeping on, not on computing the odds.

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Comment on CNN's war today: it's an American war. It is a war between America and Iraq. You would have to watch very, very carefully, and watch for some time, to learn that there are also British troops involved.

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Comment on Britain and Iraq: while surfing the Internet recently, I came upon a piece saying that the British used "police bombing" to control unruly civilian populations when Britain controlled Iraq (in the years after the First World War.) I found this startling and a bit hard to believe. It does not accord with my image of what "being British" means.

But then I remembered back to a book that I read a long time ago, an autobiographical account of warfare in Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere like that, a book written by the British writer John Masters, who was in the British military before and during the Second World War. And, yes, John Masters wrote - casually - about police bombing being used by the British to control unruly Pathan populations (somewhere up in the mountains in areas which are now part of Pakistan or Afghanistan).

While my memory of the precise details of what John Masters wrote are blurred (so I am not sure whether we are talking Pakistan or Afghanistan here, or somewhere else in that general vicinity - the Pathans, like the Kurds, are spread across more than one country) what I do remember is that I unquestionably accepted John Masters' assertion that this police bombing was not as barbarous as it might seem, since the Pathans are a hardy outdoor people, and the police bombing was more an inconvenience than anything else.

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Paper windows in Japan: as I think I've written elsewhere in this blog, traditionally Japan used a two-layer window system, the inner layer being of paper and the outer layer being sturdy wooden shutters. In the average modern Japanese domicile, there is still a two-layer system, the inner layer being glass and the outer layer being metal. The metal shutters are typically closed in the evening and then, in the morning, are slid into special housings designed to contain them. It is not common, these days, to find paper windows inside houses. Where they exist, they typically do so (as in the case of the house which I inhabit) as the innermost layer of a three-layer system: first paper windows, then glass windows, then metal shutters.

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