Section 17 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 February 21 Friday.
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The Korean peninsular, site of the next George Bush war: latest developments:-

(i) North Korea this week threatened to pull out of the armistice that caused the Korean War to pause in 1953, a pause which has lasted until the present day. (Although there have been some shooting incidents along the way. Only last year, back in June, six South Korean sailors were killed in a small-scale naval engagement with North Korean forces in a disputed fishing area.)

(ii) Yesterday, for the first time in twenty years, a North Korean fighter plane intruded into South Korea's territory. Maybe it was an accident, or maybe it was Kim Jong Il sending a signal to Colin Powell, whose latest visit to Asia (starting about now) will take him from Tokyo to Beijing to Seoul.

(iii) North Korea warns "nuclear war could break out at any time".

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Section 17 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 February 22 Saturday.
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Today, Saturday, I'm teaching an intensive class from 1000 to 1800. Fortunately, there's a one-hour lunchbreak, which gives me a chance to haul out my laptop and write this.

Tomorrow will be my first full day off for three weeks. I've been exceptionally busy recently with a wide range of tasks, including (but not limited to) teaching my regular business classes, developing material for a computer-based study course, managing two editing projects and doing my share of the editing.

I'm hoping to get round to posting a couple of pieces of writing on the site tomorrow. I've been planning to post these pieces for some time, but recently I've been too busy, although in the last few weeks I have managed to find the time to post both some fiction and some poetry. Stuff posted not so long ago includes:-

• "Grafton in Spring , a very old-fashioned nature poem (nature in the city) ... "The winds pasture in the clouds; / The earth breathes:" (and so forth).

• "Dreamscape With Giraffes", a very short poem written very recently, starting "I am a search engine. / My landscape is XX erotic."

• "Acorns", a mainstream story about the weirdness of what passes for normality, including this passage:-

Pavern is now in the business of drugging kids. He's a dealer, but it's totally legitimate. Uppers, downers, heavy-duty anti-psychotics - you can feed anything to little kids as long as you've got a team legally authorized to produce the right paperwork. The aim seems to be to have a hundred per cent of the kids on drugs. We're not there yet, but, naturally, a lot of money is being made along the way.

•"UFO Invasion - the Truth about Alien Abductions!!", which is about what the title would lead you to expect it's about. Sample:-

The aliens looked to be right at home in their capsules of green gel, though Errol was ready to guess that their natural habitat was not green gel, but, rather ... something else. If you lived inside a capsule of green gel and if you could hook your nervous system up to things and control those things, then maybe you could live inside ....
        Then Errol's thinking came to an end as the experiments began, and soon Errol was reduced to a quivering mass of weeping humiliation, wishing he was dead, wishing he had never been born.

Despite being busy, I do find myself with a certain amount of spare time, such as the time spent sitting on trains, but this time tends to get chewed up by my increasing obsession with the war about to be launched in Iraq, a war which will be both unnecessary and unjust.

The word "unjust" is appropriate because this war will create new evils and perpetuate old ones.

Turkey has reportedly been offered the right to occupy much of Iraqi Kurdistan. Yes, that's right: As we move to liberate the Iraqis, our first step may be to deliver people who have been effectively independent since 1991 into the hands of a hated foreign overlord. Moral clarity!

Meanwhile, outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won't be any equivalent of postward de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life. Instead, the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don't have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power - more moral clarity! - and that the United States will in effect take responsibility for maintaining the rule of the Sunni minority over the Shiite majority.

If this all sounds incredibly callous and short-sighted, that's because it is. But then what did you expect? This administration doesn't worry about long-term consequences - just look at its fiscal policy. It wants its war; there's not the slightest indication that it's interested in the boring, expensive task of building a just and lasting peace.

The above is from today's edition of the International Herald Tribune (as published in Japan), on page 4, with the headline "These American statesmen prefer the martial plan". The article is from the pen of Paul Krugman. I think it pretty well sums up the self-serving selectivity of the moral judgments which are in play right now, and I don't think I have anything to add.

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Section 17 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 February 22 Saturday.
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Note: main "War Links" page on this site, with links to a bunch of blogs and news sources, is here.

Latest Additions to War Links

I've found found a highly vitriolic attack on the Bush administration by Edward Said, a no-holds-barred slash the throat and rip out the intestines onslaught ... having read it through carefully, I have to say I can't find anything in it that I disagree with ... it's on the site www.mediamonitors.net and starts It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at tnews in this country.

The www.mediamonitors.net site apparently has over 2,000 essays and articles in its archives ...

I'm becoming really conscious of my ignorance of the ethnic complexities of the Middle East, and, although my state of ignorance is probably no worse than that which afflicts George Bush, it's started to worry me. So I've looked around and I've found a site www.kurdistanobserver.com.

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Section 17 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 February 23 Sunday.
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My first full day off for three weeks. Today, posted a short story called The Transfer of Patient Twenty-Seven - a mainstream story written a while back, and so containing nothing even remotely connected to the present crisis.

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Section 17 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 February 24 Monday.
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I left the house at 0615 today on a cool and cloudy morning. As I was locking the door - a standard Japanese door, steel, with a spyhole and two locks - a rooster crowed. Yes - here in the heart of suburban Yokohama, in an area that is so quiet that sometimes the sound from the outside world drops right down to zero, someone is keeping a rooster.

Fortunately, the rooster-keeper is reasonably remote, and the bird's distance-diminished cry is so weak that I've never heard from inside the house. This is just as well, otherwise the impulse to indulge in an act of war might come bubbling to the surface.

The thing about roosters is that they don't just crow in the cool of dawn. In English literature, roosters are typically portrayed as birds that cry to greet the dawn, and in fact the word "cockcrow" refers to this fact. Dawn (cockcrow) is the time at which the rooster (the cock) crows. In theory.

When I was a child, I absorbed all this "the cock crows at dawn" literature and (unthinkingly) got the idea that the cock crows ONLY at dawn - or, at the very least, not until dawn. But this is wrong, although I didn't find out that it was wrong until I was in my early twenties.

(Though I grew up in a rural part of New Zealand, with a dairy farm just across the road, there were no chickens in my life, except for the ones that I ate. Some of these possibly came from the nearest chicken farm, which was forty minutes away by car.)

I discovered the truth about cockerels on a trip to Tonga. On the evening of the first day, I went to bed, and seemed to have slept for a grotesquely insufficient amount of time when a rooster in the neighborhood started to crow.

"The cock crows at dawn," I thought, groggily, and stumbled out of bed, meaning to get dressed - because this trip was for work not for pleasure, and I had a duty to be up early.

But it was uncommonly dark - no sign of dawn in the sky - and when I checked with my watch I found it was only four in the morning.

Today, however, the neighboring rooster was crowing at dawn (more or less) on a cool and cloudy day which, by the time I got into Tokyo, was starting to degenerate into a cold and rainy day.

I never go anywhere without my collapsible umbrella, and this was sufficient for the light rain that was falling as I headed for the office. En route, I passed a man in his early sixties, conservatively dressed, who had no umbrella. Instead, he had placed one of his gloves on top of his head. How remarkably extraordinary! Particularly so in Japan, where there is a set way of doing everything, and walking along with a glove on top of your head is definitely not a part of the Sacred Set Way.

Later in the day, on the way home, I saw some workmen on a train platform, and one of them was doing this "point to it as you check it" thing which seems to be a standard Japanese habit. Just before a train departs, for example, a conductor may point at a closed-circuit TV picture which gives him a view of what is happening on the platform, and helps him see if it is safe for the train to move.

When I first started writing this diary, I had really planned to capture more of these tiny little moments ... a man with a glove on his head, a conductor pointing at a TV picture, a man on the train in priestly robes with a bracelet of amber-colored beads on his wrist.

What I wanted to do was write something which would bring the place to life, as Salam, I think, brings his city to life when he writes on his website in Baghdad (the quote is from the entry for Friday, February 21):-

Today in the morning Raed, our friend G. and I went for a late big breakfast we had 2 tishreeb bagilas (can't explain that, you have to be an Iraqi to get it otherwise it sounds inedible) and a makhlama (which is an omelet with minced meat), tea, fizzy drinks and argila afterwards (the water-pipe-thingy) all for 4,750 dinars, and we were not going super cheap.

It's precisely those little quotidian details that, to my mind, capture what it means to be human, to be alive on planet Earth. That's where the truth is. Not in the business of war and trumpets, not in history books - past, present or future. It's in the omlet with minced meat and argila afterwards ....

Today it's a quiet day on planet Earth, at least in this part of it, the rooster quiet (or, at least, out of earshot) and the falling rain sometimes turning briefly to snow, allowing us to enjoy a few moments of sleet before it turns back to rain again ... I'm home by now, and the plan for the rest of the day is hibernation ....

My new Japanese word for the day is "yukimajiri," which the dictionary translates as "rain mingling with snow," which I think means "sleet". "Yuki" is "snow" and "majiri" means mixture ... "Yukimajiri no ame ga futte imasu" means (I think) "It's sleeting."

"Rain" is "ame" and the dictionary gives the sample sentence "Amemajiri no yuki ga futte ita," which it translates as "It was snowing with a mingling of rain."

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In order to check the spelling of "cockerel" (and, as I suspected, I had it wrong) I consulted my new dictionary (which I will write about tomorrow, maybe) and so I've just found that a "cockerel" is a "young rooster". Right up until sixty seconds ago, I thought that "cockerel" and "rooster" were interchangeable.

Earlier entry:-

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.

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2003 February 24 Monday continued ....

Later ....

The evening's big excitement was eating out at an Italian restaurant, one of these "only in Japan" places with aboriginal art and boomerangs on the wall.

They had a sign saying that all their hamburgers are made out of minced pork, and will be until the BSE problem has been resolved, which I think will be never. (I haven't eaten beef in over a year.)

I settled for the shoga yaki, the pork with ginger, advertized as being "mane dekinai oishisa" - something like "nobody can cook it like us." And I ordered rice, not the regular rice but the large rice.

Well, the shoga yaki came, and so did the rice, and the rice was a big shock. This was not a large serving of rice. This was a huge serving of rice. This was the most rice I've ever had served to me at one sitting anywhere in the world. This was about five ordinary servings of rice.

My companion speculated that maybe they had decided to give me an extra large serving because I was a foreigner, and maybe that was why the rice was on a plate which looked as if it might ordinarily do duty as a spaghetti plate.

The problem was, though, that I'm now pretty much adjusted to a Japanese-style calorie intake. Even though I'd eaten very little all day, this humungous serving of rice was a major challenge. I thought I might just possibly be able to eat a third of it.

With the honor of the Western world at stake, I gave it my best shot. And, to my astonishment, succeeded in eating every single last bit.

Afterwards, a walk down darkened streets still wet in the aftermath of rain, searching for some park which is alleged to be in the locality. Given the demands of busy schedules, there hasn't really been time to explore this neighborhood properly yet, even though the move to the new house was made over half a year ago.

Nice to be in a country where you can wander around at night with no fear of terrorists leaping out of the bushes to hose you down with a flamethrower ....

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• BSE: bovine spongiform encephalitis. Otherwise known as mad cow disease.

• "shoga yaki" - literally, "fried ginger," but in this case sitting under a heading for pork dishes. The "o" in "shoga" (ginger) is long.

• Word for word, "mane dekinai oishisa" is something like "imitation cannot do deliciousness". (The "dekinai" is the "cannot do," the negative of "dekiru," which means "to be able to do".) However, word for word translations between English and Japanese quite simply do not work.

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