I guess in terms of where the herds of modern poetry are grazing, that's incredibly old-fashioned. But, as I'm not a career poet, that's something I don't have to worry about ... and what I wanted to deal with, here, was just rock and water in their own right ... not rock as the image of something else, and not water as the image of something else, either, but rock as rock and water as water, and the water pouring over the rock, endlessly, ceaselessly, regardless of whether it was observed or not, crashing down, hour after hour, in a remote valley in the Himalayas, in Nepal ... not all that many years ago, but, even so, in a world altogether different from this one.

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Section 11 Entry 0002. 2003 February 01 Saturday.
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And now for something completely different, which is the world of Indian SF. Today I found a site called http://www.indianscifi.com/ and, after I'd clicked on the story section button my eye was caught by the teaser for FANaticism by Bhaskar Dutt ... "Starring a fat priest, a heretic, and an exhaust fan. The exhaust fan does not have many lines".

The actual story opens like this:-

"In the Beginning," shouted the obese High Priest, "the Divine One created the Cafeteria. Then He made the Forty Rooms and called them Classrooms. Then He created, in His own image, the Exhaust Fan, His Watcher and His Messenger. From the modeling clay in the Playroom He fashioned the People, and gave unto all He had created the name School."

My initial impression of this site is one of bouncy confidence ... and, of course, a refreshing level of sheer difference.

Here in Japan, apparently it's the 50th anniversary of the start of television broadcasting, which, it seems, did not get underway until 1953, which seems a bit late ... I know the Germans were making experimental TV broadcasts back in the days of Adolf Hitler. It's also the 50th anniversary of the NHK broadcasting service, which is as old as TV in Japan.

I myself have a few fragile memories of TV broadcasts from later in the 1950s, not in Japan but in Britain ... something called, I think, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men ... and an on-going series about Robin Hood which really gripped my imagination. This despite the fact that I don't think my family had a TV ... I used to go play with the kid next door to watch his TV.

Apparently it's also Chinese New Year today, and on NHK this morning there were scenes of celebration filmed in Yokohama's Chinatown last night.

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Section 11 Entry 0003. Date:
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Yesterday was the great annual Japanese demon-fighting festival of Setsubun, on which demons are fought by the throwing of beans.

Actually, the fact that it was Setsubun completely escaped my attention until I got home and was informed of the fact. Nobody threw any beans on the train and nobody threw any beans at the office, either. However, since this was out first Setsubun in the new house, it seemed appropriate that we should do our share of anti-demonic bean throwing.

Unfortunately, we did not seem to have any beans to hand. However, we did have some peanuts in their shells, so we threw those instead. I suspect that they are just as effective.

In the evening, we saw scenes on TV of some temple somewhere in Japan where all manner of people were throwing beans at a number of elaborately costumed demons (or, in Japanese, oni.)

Here in Japan, there's an ongoing annual cycle of traditional rituals such as those involved with Setsubun, but I'm often oblivious to these, since I'm busy with other things. Sometimes I find myself in places or situations which remind me that I am definitely in Japan, but a lot of the time I'm doing standard Twenty-First Century things which could be taking place, really, pretty much anywhere in the world.

Today, for example, has been given over to editing e-mail assignments. Sitting at a keyboard punching keys, powered by cup after cup of strong tea.

Later this year, however, I'm scheduled to show a couple of visitors around Japan, so I'll get down to Kyoto, and I'll also get to do a whole bunch of the cultural stuff and the sightseeing stuff that I still haven't got round to doing even after years in Japan ... possibly get to see kabuki, and maybe get up early enough in the morning to get to see the activity at the famous fish market at Tsukiji, which apparently is one of Tokyo's touristic must-sees, though one which requires you to get out of bed really early in the morning.

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Section 11 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 February 05 Wednesday.
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Since I'm on the train for an hour this morning, I figured I might as well fire up the computer and write about one of the touristic parts of Japan that I visited recently, this being Yokohama's Chinatown. However, while the computer was booting, I skimmed the front page of today's International Herald Tribune, and inside of half a minute the red alarm bells were beating in my brain, and the question of the moment had become this:-

What the hell has this George Bush guy gone and done now?

What he's gone and done is to put B-52 bombers on alert so he has the option of bombing North Korea. Presumably it's possible to do this kind of stuff in secret, but instead it's been done with a very public hiss and a roar.

A couple of days ago I was looking at my predictions for 2003 and I came across a "Revised prediction: a thirty percent chance of war on the Korean peninsular in 2003."

And at the time I thought: that's a bit extreme. The world isn't run by a bunch of nuts, you know. The Russians and the Chinese and the Japanese and the South Koreans don't want war in their backyard, and their combined power is going to be enough to hold back the over-enthusiastic types in the White House.

Well, that's what I thought a couple of days ago. But now, thirty per cent is looking about right. Maybe a little on the low side.

Apparently on Tuesday the North Koreans was speaking about United States "warmongers," and I think that in this case the word fits. From time to time over the last few weeks, I've been thinking "How many dead bodies have these guys in the White House actually seen?" I don't know what the numerical answer is, but, whatever the number, it seems to work out as "not enough".

Bit by bit, over the last few weeks, I've been groping toward an understanding of the North Korean problem. Not that I want to - but the newspaper keeps sounding these red alarms, to the point where the problem is unavoidable. And I think I've now arrived at a partial understanding of the problem, at least enough to know that raising the ante is not the way to go.

By way of a preamble, let's acknowledge that North Korea is a grim 1984-type dictatorship in which the boss man, Kim Jong Il, eats gourmet meals and fools around with pretty Russian women while millions of his citizens live on the edge of starvation, eating grass. And he has secret police and death camps and all the rest of the totalitarian paraphernalia.

Without any exaggeration, North Korea can legitimately be described as an evil Stalinist regime, and it's legitimate for George Bush to feel (as he apparently does) a visceral loathing when he thinks about Kim Jong Il.

However, if you are trying to rule the world, it is best not to use the viscera for your most important political calculations, since there are other organs better suited for the purpose.

Apart from being evil, the North Koreans are also communicatively incompetent, and this is perhaps the most important fact to take into account when trying to puzzle out the North Korean problem. Their default behavior, when they don't get what they want, is to launch into an empty propaganda rant during which they will do things like threatening to destroy the world, which is not really within their capability.

However, I believe that the North Koreans are rational human beings, and what really convinced me of this was a newspaper account of one of Kim Jong Il's train trips through Russia, during which he enjoyed one great gourmet meal after another, together with the company of a bunch of elegant Russian women described as "train conductors".

That convinced me that inside the gray propaganda suit there's a guy who has plenty of really good reasons for wanting to stay alive, and, although Kim Jong Il may possibly believe at least part of his own propaganda, I don't imagine that he believes it enough to want to die for it.

With that said, my best analysis of the North Korean problem, based on everything I've read recently in the newspapers and on the Internet, is as follows:-

1. The North Korean leadership would like to dig the country out of the starvation hole that it's gotten itself into, so in their own clumsy way they're reaching out to the world and asking for help. Threatening to destroy life on planet Earth may not be a sensible way of asking for help, but these guys really have not been adequately socialized, and allowance has to be made for that fact. In a nutshell, the North Koreans are now ready to deal.

2. The Americans are not ready to deal. American diplomacy is based on the assumption that any attempt to deal with the North Koreans will end in failure, and that going through the motions of diplomacy is just a necessary propaganda preliminary to be gone through before the shooting starts. My reason for thinking this is my analysis of a 1989 report from the National Defense University which seems to reflect the current American administration's thinking about North Korea.

3. The North Koreans know the Americans are not ready to deal honestly, so they do the only thing they know how to do, which is to rant and rave and threaten the destruction of the world. This got them some payoffs from the Clinton administration, which promised them fuel oil shipments and a new nuclear reactor.

4. The Bush administration, which decided not to make good on the Clinton deal, takes the position that the North Koreans should back right away from the temptations of weapons of mass destruction before they get anything from the West. The Bush administration wants the North Koreans to make the first move.

5. The North Koreans are not going to make the first move because they don't trust the Americans - obviously Kim Jong Il is not going to trust a guy who viscerally loathes him. And the Americans, for their part, don't trust the North Koreans at all, believing (correctly, I think) that the North Koreans cheated on the deal they did with the Clinton regime.

6. Now, for the North Koreans, there's no way out. They seem to have concluded that living in the starvation box is not a viable long-term option. However, they cannot trust the Americans, so they cannot disarm. The reason they cannot trust the Americans is because the Americans are not trustworthy - under the leadership of George Bush, American has transformed itself into a caricature, becoming the evil oil-grabbing hegemonistic empire that Communist propaganda experts have for so long loved to hate.

7. Because there is no way out for the North Koreans - disarming and exposing their bare bellies is not a viable option for the North Koreans - it makes no sense at all for the American administration to ratchet up the pressure on North Korea by doing things like very publicly putting B52s on the alert. (Although the American administration leaks like a sieve at every level, presumably the American military still has the capacity, if it chooses, to alert bomber crews in secret.)

8. The American administration is in love with the exercise of imperial power, and the one token adult on the team, Colin Powell, now appears to have surrendered to the collective will of the bunch of warmongers in the White House, and is no longer leaning on the brakes. However, the exercise of imperial power cannot and will not lead to North Korean surrender. It can only lead to war.

9. The one thing that could save the present situation is for the Bush administration to back right away from the North Korean problem and work behind the scenes to try to persuade the other powers - Japan, Russia, China and South Korea - to sort out the mess. And the way to sort out the mess is to do something practical to ease the intolerable day-to-day pressures which the North Korean regime must be under. It's true that the regime's injuries are self-inflicted - to start with, sealing the country off from the rest of the world in the name of self-sufficiency was not a bright move - but the best way to restore sanity to this situation is to give the North Koreans a chunk of whatever it is they need, be that fuel oil or rice or whatever.

10. True, there is a problem with rewarding bad behavior in this way. The technical term for this is appeasement, and the wisdom of history is that appeasement is a bad move. If you allow someone to bite off your big toe, they are unlikely to be satisfied with that. They are more likely to come back, after digesting the meal, and bite off your leg at the thigh joint. However, the appeasing of North Korea would be the appeasing of the weak, not the appeasing of the strong.

11. The question has to be asked: how strong can North Korea possibly get? With not much in the way of an industrial base, and with a small population, something in the order of (from memory) fifteen million people, North Korea cannot become a dominant regional power (not in a region which includes Russia, China and Japan) regardless of how many nuclear weapons it ends up possessing. In other words, the risks of appeasement seem small.

12. The manifest historical destiny of North Korea is to be reunified with South Korea in much the same way as East Germany was reunified with Western Germany. Any opening up of North Korea to the outside world is probably going to accelerate this process. By playing the role of a hegemonistic warmongering imperial power, right now the United States is probably supporting the North Korean regime rather than undermining it. Any North Korean with access to outside sources of news will learn that, yes, the United States is indeed putting its B52 bombers on alert, reserving the option of bombing North Korea if it sees fit. The function of the external enemy here is to consolidate the group, and the best way to undermine the cohesiveness of the group is to remove the enemy.

13. The big question is what happens to North Korean nuclear material. If the North Koreans don't use it themselves, will they sell it to someone? The idea (mine, as far as I know) of a country like Japan offering to buy this material might seem outlandishly eccentric, but it seems as reasonable as starting a war on the Korean peninsular which might leave a million people dead (the idea which is kicking around in George Bush's head). (The estimate of a million dead is the CIA's, courtesy of today's International Herald Tribune.)

14. At the moment, the North Koreans really have nothing to lose as they gamble with the West. My guess is that they think that George Bush has already decided to eat them alive, that rolling belly-up is a losing strategy, and that their best chance of getting a workable bargaining position is to make as much weapons-grade nuclear material as fast as possible.

15. The good thing about appeasement is that it would give the North Koreans a stake in peace and stability. If the North Koreans were to be getting from the outside world regular shipments of fuel oil, rice and whatever else it is they need, then they would have practical proof (proof they could eat) that the world outside North Korea is a source of something other than threats.

16. The American logic is that if you increase the threat of force then the other guys will eventually crack - or, if they don't, you can move from the threat of force to the use of force, as George Bush's administration plainly plans to do in Iraq. The problem with this logic is, as noted above, that it leaves a million people dead. Unnecessarily. Since, as noted above, if the North Korean problem can be nursed along for long enough, the probable outcome is that the North Korean problem will vanish in the same way that the East German problem vanished.

17. The North Korean position seems to be that their best bet of survival lies in nuclear blackmail. Consequently, as the Americans have been ratcheting up the pressure on North Korea, the North Koreans have been scrambling to get in a position to play the nuclear card. As this dynamic leads us toward war or a nuclear disaster of some kind (for example, the North Koreans passing nuclear material to some well-financed nut who will use it in downtown New York)

At this stage it's the end of the day rather than the start. I began this on a train heading into Tokyo, and I'm finishing it on a train heading home. This is a real tough problem to think through, but I think my position ends up as being as follows:-

A. Trying to solve the North Korean problem through threats does not work, and accelerates the drive toward war, and war will leave a million people dead, unnecessarily. (I'm not a pacifist, but I do very strongly feel that the use of force should be firmly based on necessity.)

B. Given sufficient time, the North Korean problem is self-curing, since the political destiny of North Korea is to be unified with South Korea ... both North and South officially take the position that reunification is desirable.

C. In practical terms, the best thing the Bush administration can do is pledge to guarantee the military security of North Korea, however unpleasant that is, and then back off and let other powers, such as China and Japan, do the hands-on problem solving.

D. If the North Koreans get something from the outside world, they will then have a stake in the existing order of things. At the moment they are getting little or nothing, so the worst the outside world can do is threaten to cut off little or nothing. If you have a rich relative who is giving you ten cents a week, that relative doesn't have much of a hold over you. If the same relative is handing over ten thousand dollars a week, then the position is completely changed. The best way to see an improvement in North Korean behavior is to start giving them something.

E. I don't think the Bush administration is going to back off. I now think that the chances of the Bush administration taking some kind of military action on the Korean peninsular in the next two years are as high as eighty per cent, and I think that, yes, it is reasonable to think that there is at least a thirty per cent chance that this will lead to all-out war on the Korean peninsular.

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Section 11 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 February 06 Thursday.
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Two items in today's International Herald Tribune attracted my attention. Both were about the North Korean situation.

One was an editorial headlined "A ticking Korean clock." This says, in part:-

"Tuesday's reaffirmation by Washington that it recognizes the need for direct talks with North Korea is fine but not good enough. Those talks will probably never take place unless the administration drops its preconditions."

Later, the editorial goes on to say:-

"In the absence of active diplomacy, the Pentagon's decision to put 24 long-range bombers on alert for possible transfer to bases closer to Asia may do more harm than good" in that it could "heighten tensions in an already alarmed region."

The second piece that caught my eye was an opinion piece of Jon B. Wolfsthal headlined "Stop trying to isolate North Korea". Talking about North Korea's use of nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip, he writes:

"Washington's distaste for being blackmailed is understandable. But standing on principle and refusing to negotiate threaten U.S. security interests. Sometimes, to protect vital interests, governments need to make concessions."

Speaking of the North's nuclear weapons program, he then says that the United States "should test the possibility that Pyongyang's programs can be bought."

He doesn't define "bought", and it would be helpful if he did ... I'm unclear if he means a literal buying up of the weapons program or just giving North Korea something (such as fuel oil) to persuade them to back away from the weapons program. But, read either way, this makes sense to me.

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Section 11 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 February 07 Friday.
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And today's cheerful news is that the guys in Pyongyang are threatening total war if the United States launches a surprise attack against North Korean nuclear facilities.

This is one threat that the North Koreans can make good on - at least, they can go to war with South Korea.

Apparently the North Koreans also seem to be threatening a possible preemptive strike if the United States builds up its forces in the region ....

From where I'm sitting in Japan, North Korea is closer to me than Canada is to Texas, so this whole business of a possible war in my backyard is very real for me.

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