Section 47 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 June 18 Wednesday.
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No sign anywhere of any revised draft of THE WIZARDS AND THE WARRIORS, and I'm starting to feel that it may have been typewritten, in which case it would have been incinerated some years back when I cleaned out my paperwork.

However, as I was going through my archived database, what I did discover - much to my surprise - was a complete travel book about Japan. This was written in 1992 on the basis of my first visits to Japan - my first ever visit was in 1989.

Having taken a brief look at this travel book, I thought it was a bit pedestrian and also naively uninformed. But it has the advantage of dealing in detail with things which I no longer notice (because, after six years of continuous residence in Japan, they are now far too familiar) or because (for the same reason) I can no longer be bothered to write about them.

So I figured that this travel book could be sliced up into a series of short , the 1992 text being supplemented with observations from 2003 where appropriate. And that's one of the things I plan to get done over the next few months.

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Section 47 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 June 19 Thursday.
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2003 June 19 Thursday.
Salam in Baghdad has been having a pretty eventful life. On his blog he has the tale of an incident from his life involving a taxi and a grenade. The tale starts like this:-

just then we pass a US patrol; one humvee and a couple of soldiers on foot. He slows down and looks intensely at them. They are on my side and he leans on me to look out of the window. This is the point when I start wondering whether I will die from the explosion after the this crazyfuck throws the grenade or from the retaliation fire.

So what happened? You can check out the continuation here:-

Salam Pax Baghdad

Last night I watched "Star Wars," Episode IV, and the movie really resonated with me ... imperial stormtroopers invading ... prisoner held in dungeon without trial, imprisoned in isolation and, as far as the rest of the world knows, dead ... prisoner under interrogation ... where are the rebel bases?

Which reminds me. In the last couple of days I saw something in a newspaper about an outfit called:-

persianblog.com

... the significance of this being, of course, that "Persia" is another name for "Iran," and Iran is the next target of the Death Lord, who seems to be getting a hankering to go and encourage the growth of democracy and freedom in Iran by bombing the hell out of the (admittedly shaky and not quite in control) democratically elected regime and installing a tame dictator (prettied up by the name of "shah").

So I went to persianblog.com, hoping to find something in English about the coming war, but what I found instead was something in Farsi (I suppose, though it could be in Arabic for all I know) about Harry Potter:-

Harry Potter Iran

... day by day I get more and more hints that the world is stranger than I think.

Anyway, I found a guy with a bunch of stuff to say about Persian blogging:-

hoder.com/weblog/archives/005549.html

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Section 47 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 June 24 Tuesday.
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We were outside the shop, taking things from the shelves and stuffing them into our bags, piratically, when a middle-aged woman saw us. "Hey!" she cried, in a loud, sharp voice. "Is it okay for them to be taking this stuff?" The shop owner, who was trudging up the street to the uphill entranceway, turned and looked, and saw what we were doing.

He gave a kind of grunt to say, "Yeah, no worries," and continued on his way.

If the woman had looked, she would have seen that there was a sign right there saying "you can take this stuff for free." However, as shops don't usually display signs saying "Take free," she can be excused for not having noticed this one.

The shop in question is the local junk shop, which, as I may have mentioned, has an arrangement with a house-moving company. Sometimes customers have excess junk, and, as a customer service, the house-moving company takes this junk off their hands. It ends up in the junk shop.

The guy running the junk shop has the problem of getting rid of a constant flow of incoming inventory. And he doesn't always manage it. One day I went past the junk shop and saw him busy with a hammer, busting up unsold furniture into firewood-sized pieces.

Apparently, back in the rich old days, Japanese people used to routinely throw away perfectly good stuff (toasters, for example) in order to make room for new stuff. As a rule, that no longer happens.

Over the last several years, Japan has been getting poorer and poorer, and people's habits have been getting more and more economical. At the same time, the market for second-hand stuff has been growing, and flea markets have been becoming more popular.

Even so, if you look around, you can get a certain amount of stuff very cheaply, and occasionally even for free. Plus, prices are dropping for stuff which is on sale brand new in the shops.

This is part of the whole depressing cycle of deflation. Prices drop, and people expect them to drop further, and nobody is motivated to rush out and buy stuff because the whole national economy is looking increasingly tottery.

As the economy continues to decline, more and more people are committing suicide, not uncommonly by jumping in front of trains. It's not unusual to see, on the TV screen in the morning, a little sign saying "The train from A to B is delayed because of an incident involving a body."

Usually I don't think about the suicide rate any more than I think about the dioxin levels (better not to think!). But last week (or maybe it was the week before) there was one incident which really made an impression on me. Somewhere further south (near Osaka, I think) an entire family hunkered down on the tracks at a level crossing, and waited for the train, and didn't move.

Anyway. The results of our looting expedition at the junk shop were one sausepan lid, one drinking glass and, for me, one jersey. The jersey is a really hideous orange-brown, but it's pure wool, it's really good quality, it's lightweight and it has a handy little zip-up pocket on the front. So I figure it will be an excellent garmant to take backpacking, if I ever get to go backpacking again - I have the backpack, the boots and a whole heap of gear, but I just don't have the time.

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What the woman actually said to the shop owner, in Japanese, was something like "Shachô! Kore o totte mo ii desu ka?" Which translates, roughly, as "Boss! Is it okay to take this stuff?" What came back in reply sounded something like "Grmp," and, out of context, wouldn't really have meant anything.

Note: on this website the long versions of the Japanese vowels "a i u e o" are represented as "â  î  û  ê  ô". In printed books, it is standard practice to represent a long Japanese vowel by putting a black bar over the top of the letter in question, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do this in HTML.

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Section 47 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 June 24 Tuesday.
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Today I saw another sign of economic disaster in the land of the falling prices. Japan is now enduring the rainy season (hot and wet) and when I went to Bic Camera at Shibuya today there were a couple of guys (maybe working for Bic Camera or maybe for some other store in the same building) handing out umbrella-sized plastic bags for wet umbrellas.

In Japan, it's common for large stores to have umbrella bag stands so you can sheathe your umbrella rather than carry it, wet and dripping, into the store. (Post offices and small stores tend to just have umbrella racks by the front door. Museums and large office buildings often have special racks in the foyer into which you can lock your umbrella.)

Anyway, I was a bit surprised to see store employees actually helping customers to sheathe their umbrellas - this was a first - but that was not the thing which really startled me.

The startling thing I only noticed on the way out. The guys were not just sheathing umbrellas. They were also selling little itty bitty el cheapo plastic umbrellas to the umbrellaless. And what took my breath away was the rock bottom price - 143 yen, which at the current rate of exchange is something like US $1.20.

The standard price for the cheapest of cheap umbrellas (which are not uncommonly treated as disposable items) has always been round about a thousand yen, or about US $8.50.

So that's today's deflation story.

I went to Bic Camera (an electronics store) to get a mouse. Personally, I'm more than happy with the ThinkPad's pointer, which is built right into the keyboard - as a ten-finger touch typist, I don't like to take my hands off the keyboard. But lately I've been hearing a voice (with a human being attached) saying "I want mouse!" So I finally decided today was the day, and after a certain amount of bewilderment (mice, evidently, breed and mutate like crazy) chose my rodent.

I thought I had a Bic Camera point card somewhere in my wallet, so I pulled out my collection of cards - about twenty of them - and shuffled through them. And there it was. Each time you buy, you get points, which you can later use as plastic cash. I wasn't sure if this card had any points on, so when I gave it to the cashier, I said:-

"Moshi point ga areba, tsukaitai n desu."

Which was intended to mean "If there are any points on the card I want to use them," and probably does mean more or less that - I'm still doing horrible mutilating damage to the Japanese language, but at this stage I can generally get my point across, although not always efficiently.

I now have four point cards, and if I didn't keep saying "no" then it could just as easily be forty. Point cards are one of the most complicated parts of living in Japan, since every store seems to have its own variation, and even individual stores may change their schemes from time to time.

The basic idea is that you get credited with points each time you make a purchase, and you can later use the points to buy things. Sometimes the points decay rather rapidly if not used, deteriorating month by month, and sometimes they have to be used within a fixed time period (two years, for example) or they abruptly vanish.

Sometimes the point rate goes up if a store is running a special sales campaign, and at some places you may get extra points for shopping at a particular time. (For some reason, a supermarket in my locality offers extra points to people who shop on weekends before twelve noon.)

You may (possibly, but often not) be able to get extra points (usually at a supermarket) by saying that you don't want your goods wrapped up in a plastic bag. Sometimes you have to come out with a sentence in Japanese to make your meaning clear, but in some places there are a bunch of "I don't want a plastic bag" cards hanging by the cash register, and you take one of these and present it with your purchase.

One thing I've noticed about point cards: in the time that I've been in Japan, the average payoff seems to have been getting steadily lower. At some electronics stores the credit can range from five to ten percent, but at my local supermarket it's down to one percent. Still, given that you'd have to park your money in the bank for ten years or so to see it grow by one percent, a percentage point is worth having.

The mouse I bought, by the way, was the cheapest one they had, going cheap because (if I interpreted the sign correctly) production of this particular item in the range has been discontinued. In more optimistic times, I would have dipped a little deeper into my wallet. But now, like the average Japanese consumer, I'm Mister Financial Caution all the way.

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Section 47 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 June 26 Thursday.
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Disgusting Pictures

There's some stuff on the Internet which I just won't look at. It's just too hideously disgusting, and I don't want to admit it into my mind. Consequently, there are some photos on some sites which I've been deliberately avoiding. You can click and see if you want to click and see, but I don't want to. This evening, however, I found out that a book containing just this kind of picture had found itself into our household. So what did I do?

I opened the book. I looked.

I felt I had a duty.

The book in question is in Japanese and is by a Japanese author, but it comes complete with an English title, which is "Children of the Gulf War." The author is Morizumi Takashi, born 1951; the ISBN for the book is 4-87498-281-6, and the book seems to be from a publisher accessible at www.koubunken.co.jp.

If I interpret the Japanese correctly, the book was published last year - before this year's Iraq war, in other words - and it is about the damage done by depleted uranium.

In the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the American-led coalition used something like 300 tons of depleted uranium. (Depleted uranium, or DU, is very heavy and so makes very hard-hitting warheads.) Since then, various activists and Iraqi health professionals have been blaming this tonnage of radioactive warhead material for a health catastrophe in the south of Iraq, but the American military establishment blandly denies that this stuff represents a health hazard.

The pictures you can find on the Internet, if you look - the pictures that I have studiously avoided seeking out - are pictures of hideously deformed children. And there are photos of just such children in this book by Morizumi Takashi.

The problem with such photos is that, by themselves, they prove nothing, since a certain number of deformed children are born into any community of any size. Even so, I felt it was appropriate to look at the photos, to encourage me to keep gnawing away at the DU problem.

There are any number of pages about DU on the Internet, some saying "danger" and others saying "no danger," but most of them tend to be repetitive.

I've recently been working on a revised version of my own DU page and, in conjunction with this, I've been keeping a log of my own online depleted uranium research.

My ambition is to build a properly-documented webpage about DU, a page which would reference its claims to scientific documents. The problem is, however, that when you grasp for the "truth" it dissolves into a statistical slurry.

If you're just interested in debating, it's certainly possible to find enough statistics, of one kind or another, to support whichever case you want to make ("danger" or "no danger".) However, if you want to conclusively prove something, things become much more difficult.

The scientific situation seems to be:-

(i) depleted uranium, considered as a chemical, is genotoxic - that is, it damages human genetic material;

and

(ii) it is possible that there may be a synergy between the chemical toxicity of DU and its radioactivity, and, if this is in fact the case, it follows that it is more dangerous than it has hitherto been perceived as being.

On top of that, DU

However, the view taken by the American military (and by scientific writers who have seen fit to support the official line on this subject) is that the DU used in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 was dispersed so widely that it does not represent a health hazard.

So the question is this: can you take three hundred tons of a material which is both radioactive and chemically toxic, dump it into an environment inhabited with human beings, and expect to have no untoward consequences?

The official position of the American military authorities - and of the British military authorities likewise - seems to be, "Sure."

My own feeling is that the authorties would not be so blandly sanguine if someone went and dumped three hundred tons of depleted uranium in the south of England or the state of Virginia. However, feeling is one thing and proving is another.

In the process of digging into the DU database, I recently came across an abstract saying, in part, that:-

These data suggest that uranium may be directly genotoxic and may, like chromium, react with DNA by more than one pathway

So now I have a note scribbled on my "follow this up" list: "How toxic is chromium?"

This kind of research is, at one and the same time, both interesting and frustrating. The big problem is that depleted uranium itself seems to have been under-researched. There is basic research underway right now which would have gotten done years ago if the governments of the UK and the USA had placed this subject high on their priority lists. But, given that the scientific literature on DU is full of phrases like "little is know about," it's hard to use science to construct a firm case against DU.

(However, this cuts both ways. Because there are so many gaps in the science of DU, the bland official assurances of officialdom do not have a sound scientific footing.)

I'm starting to feel that in the present circumstances, in which the research is patchy and incomplete, it should be possible to make some kind of reasonably elegant argument as follows:-

(i) DU is a toxic substance, and toxic substances (and cocktails of toxic substances) tend to have widely varied effects on the human body, these effects expressing themselves idiosyncratically in particular individuals. For example, one person may smoke and stay apparently healthy; another person may smoke and get lung cancer; another person may smoke and may end up with gangrene. Consequently, a risk may be real and yet statistically invisible. If we studied seventy smokers over a period of thirteen years, for example, we might end up with zero gangrene cases, zero lung cancer cases, and a couple of mild respiratory problems which might not seem statistically significant. To get a scientifically valid assessment of the health risk we would need a larger sample and a longer time period.

(The context here is that assessments of risk by the military authorities are based on the perceived health outcomes for a limited number of military personnel. The health statistics for the Iraqi population have not been admitted into the debate, and, given the chaos in Iraq, and the wholesale looting of the entire Iraqi hospital system, the chances of a clear statistical picture of Iraqi civilian health outcomes emerging in the near future seem rather slim.)

(ii) Three hundred tons of DU inserted into the environment in Iraq would act like three hundred tons of well-studied chemical X inserted into well-studied environment Y.

(iii) Consequently, the effects of three hundred tons of DU would be similar to those of well-studied chemical X in environment Y.

There are two problems with this approach.

The first problem is that I don't have (and perhaps cannot find) chemical X running wild in environment Y.

The second problem is that the approach is to argue by analogy, and analogies are a literary device rather than a scientific device.

I have to say that, considered as an intellectual challenge, this looks more formidable than anything else I've ever tackled before in my life. And, so far, I'd say that all I've done is thrash around uselessly, except for one thing:-

All the breaking news is bad news.

As the scientific research gets done, the research into what happens at the cellular level, the news that it's bringing is bad news.

Well. Bedtime.

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Section 47 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 June 27 Friday.
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This morning I took a look at yesterday's entry and wondered whether I should add a description of one or two of the pictures. I was in two minds about this.

The fact is that the end results of human reproduction are sometimes disastrous, and pictures of genetic disasters, either seen or described, add nothing to the argument about the dangers of depleted uranium.

Unfortunately the statistics don't add much to the debate either. As Winston Churchill observed (though I don't think the expression originates with him) there are "lies, damned lies and statistics."

However, at present it seems reasonable to make the following observations:-

(i) The authorities in both Britain and the United States continue to blandly maintain that depleted uranium is safe, but, given that the science of depleted uranium is full of holes in the form of "perhaps," "possibly," "maybe" and "not yet known," there is no firm scientific foundation for assertions that the battlefield use of depleted uranium is safe. ("Safe" here means "safe from the point of view of the survivors, such as military veterans who were on that battlefield and resident civilians who are now busy farming the battlefield.")

(ii) The authorities in Britain and the United States appear to have zero interest in cleaning up the battlefield in Iraq. Regardless of the overall effects of depleted uranium, it seems very clear that tanks and other vehicles which have been destroyed by projectiles using depleted uranium warheads do represent a very real localized radiation hazard. In the face of this demonstrable radiation hazard, the Anglo-American attitude seems to be one of indifference.

(iii) Scientific research into the biological effects of depleted uranium is sketchy, but the emerging evidence from studies currently in progress is that depleted uranium is more dangerous than previously thought rather than less.

(iv) If statistics generated by Iraqi health professionals can be trusted, then the battlefield use of depleted uranium in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991 was followed by a significant upturn in negative health events (for example, genetic disasters) which, in the absence of any other candidate, may reasonably be attributed to the battlefield use of DU. Of course, this is just another "if."

The subject of depleted uranium is dismayingly large, and, as I've floundered around in this impossibly large subject, I've more than once been tempted to abandon the effort to get to grips with it. One of my problems is that I keep running up against unknown technical terms, and finding out what these terms mean (in the context of the debate on depleted uranium) is sometimes a non-trivial task.

This has finally led me to conclude that, in order to make progress on this subject, I have to pull together my own small lexicon of depleted uranium terms, each carefully defined and documented. So that's my projected next step: to pull together a depleted uranium lexicon and put it online.

As far as the science of depleted uranium is concerned, there's a sober and informed analysis of some ongoing research on the site of the science magazine The New Scientist. The article is from this April:-

Depleted uranium casts shadow over peace in Iraq

A sample of the ongoing scientific research into depleted uranium can be found at an American military website:-

Carcinogenic Potential of Depleted Uranium and Tungsten Alloys

This talks of DU (depleted uranium) and HMTA (heavy metal tungsten alloy) and provides a little window into some of the science of depleted uranium:-

Exposure of cultured human bone cells to DU or HMTA resulted in a transformation of those cells to a type with biochemical and growth characteristics typical of tumor cells. The magnitude of transformation observed with DU and HMTA was similar to that observed with the known heavy metal carcinogen, nickel. These cells, once transformed, produced tumors when injected into immune deficient mice. DU and HMTA were also shown to be genotoxic and mutagenic in model system studies.

Further down the page there is a list of "Most Recent Publications" such as:-

Miller AC, Mog S, McKinney L, Lei L, Allen J, Xu J, Page N. Neoplastic transformation of human osteoblast cells to the tumorigenic phenotype by heavy metal-tungsten alloy particles: induction of genotoxic effects. Carcinogenesis, 22(1):115-25, Jan 2001. Abstract

This gives a good indication of some of the unknowns in modern science as it relates to the use of military metals:-

Heavy metal-tungsten alloys (HMTAs) are dense heavy metal composite materials used primarily in military applications. HMTAs are composed of a mixture of tungsten (91-93%), nickel (3-5%) and either cobalt (2-4%) or iron (2-4%) particles. Like the heavy metal depleted uranium (DU), the use of HMTAs in military munitions could result in their internalization in humans. Limited data exist, however, regarding the long-term health effects of internalized HMTAs in humans.

The point here is that, in addition to DU, other military metals may also constitute a health hazard, and that the dimensions of this health hazard are currently unknown.

In summary, then, the science of depleted uranium is incomplete, but the science that does exist seems to undermine the official Anglo-American stance, which can reasonably be summed up as being that "DU is no problem."

It may well be the case that DU is much more hazardous than previously thought (the article in The New Scientist provides analysis of this possibility) and it may also be the case that (as indicated by the passage on heavy metal tungsten alloys, quoted above) DU may be just one component in a toxic military cocktail.

I'm looking now at the pictures in "Children of the Gulf War," the book by Morizumi Takashi, and one of the pictures is of a smiling kid in a ragged jersey standing on the dry brown soil of some place in Iraq, hands (dusty) on some tomato plants.

And that reminds me of something else I found online. In this case the data repository is maintained by some branch of the United States government. The data repository is the:-

United States National Library of Medicine

Here you can drill down to a large collection of

references and abstracts from over 4600 biomedical journals

And if you punch "depleted uranium" into the search box then you can locate the abstract for:-



Military use of depleted uranium: assessment of prolonged population exposure

by Giannardi C, Dominici D., which deals with "a residential farming scenario". This says, in part:-

Critical pathways and groups are identified in soil inhalation and ingestion; critical group is identified in children playing with the soil. From the available information on DU released at targeted sites, both critical and average exposure can produce toxicological hazards. The annual dose limit for the population can be exceeded within a few years from DU deposition for soil inhalation. As a result, clean up at targeted sites must be planned on the basis of measured concentration, when available, while special measures must be adopted anyway to reduce unaware exposures.

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