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Section 2 Entry 0001. Date: 2002 October 23 Wednesday.
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Over the past few years, since achieving the age of forty, from time to time I've been surprised to find how many things I never knew when I was younger, and how many things I knew that were wrong.
Just recently, one of my students was telling me about places in Japan which are worth visiting (one of the best ways for the student to learn is for the student to educate the teacher) and he happened to mention karamatsu, a type of pine tree which loses its foliage in the autumn.
Now, hearing of this phenomenon came as a big surprise to me, since up until then I had gone through my entire life thinking that pine trees (all pine trees) are evergreens, and keep their foliage right through the winter.
But it seems that the needles of the karamatsu pine turn yellow as the weather cools and then fall, leaving the tree bare through the winter. What's more, apparently karamatsu is a famous feature of the scenic beauty spot known as Kamikochi. This added to my surprise since I have been to Kamikochi four times .... it reinforced my belief that travel is not necessarily an educational experience.
Just now, I looked up "karamatsu" in my Japanese-English dictionary and found it defined as "a Japanese larch" having the scientific name Larix leptolepis. But what exactly is a larch? I've read this word in plenty of books (although I've never heard anyone actually say it) and I've always understood that it was a kind of tree. But what kind of tree? A pine?
A different dictionary informs me that a larch is a kind of conifer found in the northern hemisphere - I've spent the greater part of my life in the southern hemisphere, in New Zealand.
Speaking of New Zealand, this year I learnt that something I'd believed right from early childhood was wrong.
In New Zealand, there are a certain number of geothermal pools in which people swim. Most New Zealanders know that you should never duck your head beneath such geothermal water because there may be an amoeba living in the water. The amoeba may swim into your ear, get into your brain and kill you.
Right up until this year, I believed that this amoeba was only found in New Zealand. (This belief was natural enough since there are plenty of living organisms which are only found in New Zealand, such as the weta and the tuatara. Also a carnivorous worm which eats other worms .... and which has now escaped from New Zealand to cause agricultural havoc in places such as Ireland.)
However, this year I read an article in the English-language edition of the Asahi Shimbun (published daily in Japan in association with the International Herald Tribune). The article was about Japanese onsens (hot spring resorts), and from the article I learnt that the same death-by-amoeba problem exists in Japan.
This really surprised me.
A few years back, I was in Rotorua, a focus of geothermal activity in New Zealand. At a motel which had a pool fed by natural geothermal water, there was a sign warning visitors not to put their heads beneath the waters. (Although, coyly, it did not say why.) I had occasion to draw the attention of a Japanese tourist to the sign, and I explained the background.
The tourist had good English and had no trouble understanding my explanation. But obviously found it very hard to believe.
However, the Asahi Shimbun report was clear that the amoeba exists, and can kill the unwary bather in Japan just as easily as it can kill the unwary bather in New Zealand.
This points up a key cultural difference between New Zealand and Japan. New Zealand is a nation of very aggressive problem solvers. ("We must pass a law about this.") By contrast, in Japanese culture, problems tend to be diligently avoided rather than aggressively tackled.
(One of the intriguing things about Japanese politics, for example, is that political careers tend to be made by not doing things rather than by doing things .... traditionally, the rule has been that if you draw your pay for a sufficient number of years without doing anything to upset the apple cart, then you, too, will get the chance to be prime minister.)
Well .... that's pretty much it. However, to wrap up this entry, I thought I'd better fact-check my amoeba statements. I picked up the only reference book I have which might have the facts - the 8th edition of the Lonely Planet New Zealand. According to this, the amoeba which causes amoebic meningitis "occasionally" gets in through the ears, but "usually" enters by way of the nose.
Once again, my knowledge proves to be less than accurate .... since early childhood, I've had this lurking, half-formed image of the amoeba swimming in through the ear .... darkness invading ....
Well .... to tell the truth, that's artistic license getting away on me. In fact, what really scared me when I was a kid - and scares me now - was (and is) sharks. Even though, statistically, the shark risk in the northern parts of New Zealand (which is where I grew up) is not high.
I have in fact known about death-by-amoeba since I was a little kid, but they have never really been a part of my imaginative machinery since I have never lived near a source of geothermal water.
Section 2 Entry 0002. Date: 2002 October 26 Saturday (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents)
Today I've been inputting the text of the poem Cicada Sun which dates from 1973 (first published in 1976), a portrait of the artist as a very young man (a rather immature age 17, in fact) which really takes me back down memory lane.
Inputting it, I've had to make an editorial decision: do I change the New Zealand spellings, like "clamour", to their American equivalents? I've decided to leave the spellings in their original form.
What gets me about this poem - what gets to me emotionally - is the utter and absolute familiarity of a world that no longer exists, a world that has been destroyed absolutely by time and change.
Although I'm only in my forties, at times I'm starting to get hints of what it is like to be old - to live in a time in which the greater part of all that has ever been important to me exists only as memories.
The only thing about this poem that surprises me is the reference to "sleepless hours" before examination. Since leaving school I've done so many tests, quizzes and examinations that I'm now a consummate master of the process.
If I could talk to my 17-year-old self about the life that he was destined to lead, then, of all the possible things that I could say, the most surprising would be, "Kid, you're going to become a consumer of more training, testing and general mental reengineering than you can even begin to imagine. You think you know what study is? Gee, you've got a lot to learn!"
(My 17-year-old self would have bridled at the term "kid". He was very thoroughly convinced that he was very thoroughly adult, and a mature adult at that.)
Just as I was writing this, the TV started talking about New Zealand. Reminded of its existence, I looked up and saw that CNN (CNN International, which is piped into my home by cable television) was kicking off coverage of the world's weather with the conditions in New Zealand.
Outside, it's a rainy day in Japan ... gray skies and cool autumn weather. The foreground of the view from the window is one of wires ... two, three, four ... a total of fifteen wires. Telephone wires, electricity wires and cable television wires.
By the time I left Auckland, New Zealand, pretty much all the urban wiring had been buried out of sight underground. But here in Japan, the webwork of wires is a standard feature of the urban environment, with more wires still to come - fiber to the home (FTTH, meaning Internet via fiber optic cable) is already available in a few selected areas, and its inevitable spread will mean yet another layer of wiring.
(My understanding is that the existing broadband connection that I am using is a hybrid. If I understand the technical details correctly - and there is no guarantee that I do - then my cable modem is connected by old-fashioned wiring to the fiber optic cable which the cable TV company has strung between the utility poles. The broadband connection is fairly fast, but FTTH, when it arrives, will be unimaginably faster.)
If I were to tell my 17-year-old self about my current existence, then the biggest surprise for 17-year-old self would be the relentlessly urban nature of my present existence in a world made of black wires and gray concrete, a world of gray skies where the horizons are cut short, for weeks at a time, by pollution.
later "grass" reference
During my first five years in Japan, I almost never walked on grass. With the move to the new house, six months ago, I insisted on a lawn. Even though private lawns are extremely rare in Japan - most people who have gardens seem to be content with mud - turf proved to be obtainable from a garden center.
Grass proved to be easy to grow - water the turf regularly and it just grows - and after a few weeks I finally found the time to walk on it barefoot.
That was a really weird experience. I had pretty much forgotten what grass is really like, and in my imagination it had become something soft. But the reality is that grass is fairly tough, wiry stuff - logically so, otherwise you could not use a field of grass as an arena for a rugby game.
Parenthetically, as Japan does not have a grass-growing culture, in Japan rugby is played on fields of mud. Mud which often has stones in it. I've seen students from Keio University playing on such fields in Hiyoshi, after the sun had dried the mud .... playing on this hardened mud with the wind stirring up clouds of dust. Unsurprisingly, rugby is not a popular game in Japan (particularly not at high school), and the few Japanese rugby players I have met most definitely qualify for the term "tough guy". (Nice guys but, yes, definitely tough guys.)
I was really surprised to discover that grass was such tough stuff. I patted it experimentally and pulled at it. Has grass always been this tough? Well, maybe so. Probably so, in fact. But, if so, then how did it come to be softened in my imagination to something as soft as fresh white bread?
If I were to tell my 17-year-old self about my present existence, the rediscovery of grass would be one of the most surprising tales I could tell.
later "grass" reference
On CNN now, the coverage is of Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward, where smoking on the streets has recently been banned. Suddenly my own familiar world is up there on the TV screen - I regularly go to Chiyoda Ward, and have lately seen the signs appear on the sidewalks, a cigarette as the centerpiece of the familiar red circle-and-bar "this is a no-no" sign.
2002 October 23 Tuesday continues ....
The CNN program is "Inside Asia" - I vaguely thought I was watching the world news, since the Asian news (the aftermath of terrorist bombs in Bali, the confession by North Korea that it possesses nuclear weapons) has recently been a large chunk of the world news.
Correction inserted 2002 December 17 Tuesday: actually, it's not correct to write that North Korea has confessed to possessing nukes.
Rather, North Korea has confessed to having a nuclear weapons development program, which is not exactly the same thing.
As to whether North Korea actually has or does not have nuclear weapons, opinion seems to be divided. In my favorite newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, I have read statements saying, variously, that nobody knows, that the North has at least two nukes, and that the North is believed to have about five nukes.
My own guess? Well, on this occasion, I think I'll pass up the opportunity to throw in my own ten cents' worth of opinion .... and now let's go back to the diary entry for 2002 October 26 Saturday ....
2002 October 26 Saturday continued ....
Hugh complacent about North Korea
to 2003 February 20: Hugh worried!
Personally, I'm not fussed about the North Korean nukes. When I was 17 years old, nuclear war was one of my real worries .... like a lot of people growing up in the Cold War, I thought it entirely possible (even probable, in fact) that I was destined to die in a nuclear holocaust. (These feeling intensified considerably during the months that I spent living and working in London, England, in my early twenties.)
The problem with the Cold War was that it did not seem to have a solution. At age 17 I was an avid reader of science fiction. The brightest and the best tried to imagine the future, and the future led, typically, to global thermonuclear warfare.
At that time, the West seemed locked in an inevitable conflict with the Communist bloc. The official ideology of the Communist bloc was that of jihad .... death to capitalism, death to the West!
Still, we outgrew that problem .... we found that, if the truth be told, our supposedly implacable enemies would prefer to eat Big Macs and drink Coca Cola rather than destroy Western civilization as we know it .... and, with that precedent to go on, I have every confidence that the North Korea problem will ultimately prove equally tractable.
It is true that North Korea is the ultimate totalitarian dictatorship. Occasionally, just for kicks, a commercial TV station in Japan will rebroadcast little snippets of North Korean propaganda, and what you see then is straight out of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il playing the role of Big Brother.
On CNN now (I don't know what program) there is coverage of an American case of mad cow disease, which the victim probably acquired by eating cow meat during an extended period of residence in Britain .... yeah, and I was eating meat when I was living in Britain at a time when mad cow disease was already in the meat system ....
Here in Japan, at least some of the cows are now contaminated by mad cow disease, but nobody knows how bad the problem is. Apparently there is still no program to systematically test cows which die of natural causes, and apparently to really know how bad your problem is you have to test cows which drop dead, and see if it was mad cow disease that killed them.
Although the risk is probably small, I have now given up eating beef .... although I have to confess that I still drink milk.
Question: why do I worry about BSE (bovine spongiform encephalitis, otherwise known as mad cow disease) when I don't worry about North Korean nukes?
I think the reason is that BSE is one of a range of medical problems (such as Aids and Alzheimer's) for which there does not seem to be an easy technical fix. By contrast, with the precedent of the end of the Cold War behind us, there doesn't seem to be any reason why the North Korean problem should not be resolved peacefully.
I remember when I was a little kid, at elementary school (or "primary school", as we call it in New Zealand) watching a documentary movie about agricultural progress in China. The documentary had been sponsored by some Western farm machinery manufacturer which was selling tractors to China, and it showed scenes of happy, prosperous Chinese people getting stronger and healthier.
And I remember thinking (I was, at a guess, about nine or ten years old at the time) "Someone should nuke those people before they get too strong."
That was a child's sentiment, but it reflected (albeit in an extreme, distorted form) ideas that were on the loose in Western culture at the time.
I can't quite figure out how, as a child, I acquired these ideas .... certainly not in the family home .... when I search my memories, the only formative image I can come up with is the evil oriental bad guy (probably Chinese) who figured in the old Flash Gordon TV series which I sometimes saw on TV (though I'm not sure how or when or where, since TV was banned from the family home during my childhood, apart from an experimental period of six months or so).
Of course, I was growing up during the years of the Vietnam War, and I know for a fact that I read the newspaper even as a child (I have firm memories of cutting photos of outer space out of the newspaper when I was a really little kid, maybe only eight years old).
As a kid, I don't remember having any particular opinions about the Vietnam War, even though New Zealand troops were fighting in Vietnam alongside their American allies. The war was just there in the background .... a picture of a bombed bridge, a paragraph about combat casualties .... a constant trickle of newspaper news .... an ongoing part of the world, like the space program.
Even so, despite my lack of overt opinions, as a child I probably absorbed the Western understanding of the Vietnam War which was current at that time, and that view probably conditioned my childish perception of China.
In those days, the West perceived the Vietnam War as being (to a certain extent) a war between Capitalism and Communism, a war between Western freedom and the world-conquering ideology of the Communist jihad. (Some Westerners would probably still see it in those terms.)
(These days, if I was asked to give my understanding of the Vietnam War, I personally would characterize it as a civil war between a privileged and thoroughly corrupt French-speaking ruling class and the Vietnamese-speaking majority .... in retrospect, the Vietnam War was a domestic affair, an armed argument between competing segments of the Vietnamese people with no particular relevance for the West).
When I was a little kid, I was seeing the People's Republic of China from the perspective of a world in which the West (or, at least, the particular corner of the West in which I was growing up) was already (or so it thought) in a firefight with the Communist jihad.
It was a world in which the Western view of Chinese culture was conditioned by the notion that the culture of China, like the culture of the entire Communist bloc, was the culture of jihad .... its slogans being, as mentioned above, death to capitalism, death to the West!
(And, of course, you could point to the sacred writings of the Communist bloc, to the writings of holy prophets such as Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung, and find certain sutras which very much supported that intellectual interpretation of the jihadistic tendencies of the Communist bloc.)
Furthermore, in the world in which I grew up, actual living, breathing Chinese people simply did not exist. The "Chinese people" were symbolic counters in a game of abstractions. They were, really (even though they might be buying our tractors) the Other, the alien, the Enemy.
Now, however, when I'm looking at North Korea, I'm culturally located (to a certain extent) not in the West but in Japan. To me, now, Asia is not a largely unknown, distant Other, but, rather, the breathing body in which I live. "Korea" is not a glittering icon of the alien. Rather, it is the specific taste of kimuchi in my mouth, memories of particular Korean restaurants, particular Korean students.
And the People's Republic of China is no longer a distant ideological construct, either. It is no longer the ultimate jihad in waiting, but, rather, a succession of specific individuals .... the Chinese woman in one of my business classes, for example, who got into a discussion with one of the Japanese students about certain conventions regarding the use of names in China two thousand or so years ago ....
She's saying things like "in my culture, two thousand years ago, we ...."
And I'm sitting there, quietly, in the background (it's the student who is supposed to be speaking English, not the teacher) and I'm thinking "Two thousand years ago? Two thousand years ago my culture hadn't even been invented." (And I'm feeling, for just a moment, like an untutored barbarian in an animal skin .... two thousand years ago, my ancestors were still in the tribal woad and druidism phase.)
This problem with North Korea, then, it's not a problem involving the Other, the alien.
I've never been to Switzerland, but I've lived in England, I've known a fair few people from Europe, and I've visited a bunch of European countries, countries as different from each other as France and Greece. Consequently, I feel that I can fit Switzerland into the mosaic pattern known as "Europe", and I can make sense of the news I hear from Switzerland (a country where one of my brothers currently lives, and which my parents have just recently visited.)
Similarly, while I've never visited North Korea (or even South Korea, for that matter), I've been living for some considerable time now in Japan, I've traveled widely in Asia (Lombok, Bali, Java, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and so forth), and I've met a great many people from different parts of Asia, starting back when I first went to university, still only seventeen years old .... for two years my fellow inmates in the student residence known as International House included people from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam. (There was still an entity known as "South Vietnam" back then .... Richard Milhous Nixon was still the president of the United States of America when I first went to university).
Consequently, I feel that I can fit North Korea into the mosaic pattern known as "Asia", and I can imagine the human realities which underlie the propaganda image .... having read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the saddest book ever written, also helps ....
While North Korea is a jihadistic state, at least as far as its official ideology is concerned, and while it is true that North Korea is a cruel and oppressive dictatorship, I fully believe that it is possible to achieve a peaceful resolution to the problem posed by North Korean nukes.
And, much to my surprise, the present American administration, the administration which is presided over by George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, seems, at least for the moment, to be ready to continue exploring the option of a negotiated settlement to the problem ....
Yeah, let's hear a round of applause for George W. Bush, the mature senior statesman, the man of peace, the acknowledged master of international diplomacy, reacting in a calm and measured way to the North Korean nuclear confession, on the one hand acknowledging the gravity of the situation but, on the other hand, indicating a willingness to explore the possibility of achieving a negotiated solution to the problem ....
to 2003 Feb 20: Bush is playing dice with Apocalypse and Hugh is worried!
Okay, and now on CNN there's another scene (it's over already) from (I think) New Zealand (but I'm not sure, because I wasn't paying attention) and it's "car soccer", which I have never heard of before, but which appears to be soccer played by people in cars, using a really, really, really big ball (which appears to be the approximate shape of a jellybean). If that really was New Zealand, then New Zealand culture has been entirely bent out of shape since I last encountered it ....
A last note on the poem Cicada Sun:-
I find the line "Man's first death is the random potential" and remember that, at that time - back in 1973, the year in which the poem was written - political correctness had not really been invented. (Or, if it had been invented, it had not yet reached the shores of New Zealand.)
Yeah, and one more thing. If you gave me a few spare years to play with, I'd still like to learn to surf .... something which, although the poem doesn't really confess it, I never really even came close to doing. (My "surfing", so called, was more about falling off the board than standing up on it.)
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