Section 37 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 April 05 Saturday.
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It's spring in Japan, so the kerosene deliveries have stopped, but today was such a cold, raw day that we have been keeping the kerosene heater going all day.
Spring brings rain after the dry winter, and, thanks to the rain and the warming temperatures, green grass is appearing in the yellow-brown of the lawn. I lived through five whole years in Japan without noticing that Japanese grass dies in the winter, which doesn't say much for my powers of observation - mind you, in Japan, there's not a whole lot of grass to observe.
In the mornings, an uguisu can be heard - the dictionary defines this bird as a "Japanese bush warbler". The Japanese name mimics the bird's cry, a fluid, piercing sound which reminds me of the forest, the mountains.
Seen by the roadside recently, a toad: stirred from winter sleep, presumably, by the gradual strengthening of the sun.
There is, of course, cherry blossom, delicately pink in the rain.
Section 37 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 April 07 Monday.
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Spring in Japan. Cherry blossom. Yesterday, a trip to Nakameguro, where there are cherry blossom trees on both sides of the Meguro River. The Megurogawa Sakura Matsuri - the Meguro River Cherry Blossom Festival - was in full swing. Complete with Hawaiian dancers.
Afterwards, on to Iidabashi, home of the Ginrei Cinema Club, an arthouse cinema where you can see weird foreign movies about bizarre gaijin cities, the movies usually not in Japanese but in strange foreign languages. This time, the foreign language was English, the bizarre gaijin city was New York, and the movie was "Dinner Rush."
All very civilized, the whole day, and I came home with notes about petals drifting down onto the waters of the river, and about the Per Gramme Market in Nakameguro, where the gimmick is that they charge for the clothing they sell by the gram - eight yen buys you on gram.
Then I got home and turned on the TV and found out that the Americans had been killing human beings in Baghdad, thousands of them. Of course, the human beings have been labeled "soldiers," so apparently it's okay to kill them by the thousand, regardless of the fact that they seem pathetically incapable of defending themselves.
Anyway, this rather took away my appetite for writing about my day with the cherry blossom. And, later, in the small hours of the morning, I found myself revolving various rhetorical strategies for dealing with what I'm seeing on TV, without finding anything that satisfied.
One thing that occurred to me was a philosophical approach. Immanuel Kant tells us (I think) that we can figure out whether an action is virtuous by asking ourselves what would happen if everyone went and did that. The possibilities of that seemed pretty obvious.
Yesterday's Japan Times contained a lengthy review of the latest novel by Gunter Grass, something about a ship sinking and thousands of people dying - another step in the writer's efforts to grapple with German history. And it vaguely occurred to me that something in Gunter Grass's efforts might suggest a rhetorical approach to the present situation.
I've also been thinking, recently, about another country where America went to war. A lot of people were killed, but the ending was happy enough, as these things go. Twenty years or so after the war, I visited the country in question, and the people were friendly, the country seemed reasonably happy, and the cities seemed tolerably prosperous.
The country, as it happens, was Vietnam.
But none of these strategies seem attractive. And why not? Because I'm experiencing a delinkage between language and the living world. Years ago, I read something about Gunter Grass and his struggles to write in the German language, the language that had been used to construct the horrors of the Second World War.
At the time, I didn't really understood that. I could understand the intellectual proposition that was being made, but I didn't really see why a writer should buy into that intellectual proposition. But right now I find myself feeling a little bit like that about the living English language.
Anyway, in the end I wrote a poem, A Day in the Life of a War.
Section 37 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 April 08 Tuesday.
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The war in Iraq seems to be winding down, and the interesting thing at this point is that we still don't really know what caused it. In Japan, a commentator thinks that it was caused by fear:-
The fear engendered by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is at the root of the American psyche driving the nation to go to war against Iraq. Instead of stabilizing the world, the new empire is creating instability with its own quaking imperialistic psychology and strategy.
Quote from the English-language edition of The Asahi Shimbun, a newspaper bundled with the Japanese edition of the International Herald Tribune - page 24, 2003 April 8 Tuesday, from an opinion piece by Yoichi Funabashi, a senior staff writer and foreign affairs columnist with The Asahi Shimbun. The piece has the headline "American Imperial Reach Unsettles the World".
This analysis makes sense to me, because it's pretty close to the position that I've arrived at through my own analysis, although my analysis was focused very sharply on George Bush as an individual - George Bush as a case of aggression triggered by insecurity.
Why did America attack Iraq? Because America was afraid.
But, within America, there was no immediate call to attack Iraq. After the attacks of 9/11, the people were not demanding retribution against Iraq, because there was then - and is now - no evidence that Iraq was involved in planning the 9/11 terror attacks.
Rather, the impetus to attack Iraq came from the Bush administration, which did everything it could to generate the fear that helped to win the nation's support for the administration's war.
This is a rather sad and sorry state of affairs, because the world is full of things to be afraid of, and to live our lives we have to get a grip on our fears and make measured, reasoned decisions. Instead, the Bush administration chose to bomb, burn and kill, gratuitously, without the excuse of necessity, and is still in the process of bombing, burning and killing even as I write these words.
Here in Japan, the nation's political establishment did a reasonably good job of managing the state of affairs generated by certain members of the group known as Aum Shin Rikyo. Various members of the Aum group carried out unlawful actions inside Japan, including, in one case, releasing the nerve gas sarin in a subway.
In response, the police moved against the guilty, and the government drafted special legislation to keep the group as a whole under a measure of scrutiny.
However, in responding to this challenge, the Japanese government did not seek to undermine the rule of law, nor did it seek to generate fear, hysteria and panic in the Japanese people. Faced with a practical problem, the Japanese government chose a response which was proportionate to the challenge.
By contrast, the Bush administration seems to have a policy of deliberately hyping threats, both real and imaginary, in order to generate fear. This policy includes manufacturing counterfactual beliefs, such as the notion that Iraq was somehow getting stronger as the years went by, whereas in fact the Iraq of 2003 is significantly weaker than the Iraq of the Persian Gulf War fought by George W. Bush's father.
There is really only one word for this policy of magnifying fear and deliberately engineering paranoia, and the one word is shameful. Anyone who has the responsibility of governing a nation state should really know better.
So what we have, now, is the spectacle of an aggressive superpower which appears to have every intention of taking further steps to destabilize the world as we know it, using absolute war as its chosen instrument.
As the war in Iraq approached, I followed the blog written by Salam in Baghdad. Unsurprisingly, this has not been updated recently - it stopped being updated after the war got into full swing.
Of the many things that Salam wrote, one has stayed with me, the thought surfacing and resurfacing during the days of war. This:-
The situation in Iraq could have been solved in other ways than what the
world will be going thru the next couple of weeks. It can’t have been that
impossible. Look at the northern parts of Iraq, that is a model that has
worked quite well, why wasn’t anybody interested in doing that in the south.
Just like the US/UK
UN created a protected area there why couldn’t the model be tried in the
south. It would have cut off the regimes arms and legs. And once the people
see what they have been deprived off they will not be willing to go back,
just ask any Iraqi from the Kurdish areas. Instead the world watched while
after the war the Shias were crushed by Saddam’s army in a manner that really
didn’t happen before the Gulf War.
The key words here are "other ways". When it comes to settling international problems, absolute war is not the only resource available to a nation state. However, this seems to be the only resource which the Bush administration wishes to exploit.
At a guess, the next target is going to be North Korea, a nation with which the Bush administration has refused to hold bilateral negotiations. If the Bush administration does decide to go after North Korea, it will be interesting to watch what the administration does to crank up the hysteria level.
Section 37 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 April 9 Wednesday.
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Last night, George Bush and Tony Blair showed up on Japanese TV, both looking very relaxed for men who have long since lost count of how many people they have killed.
Shortly afterwards, they were replaced by an Iraqi guy, who was looking a bit mournful. The Iraqi guy was speaking Japanese, so presumably he was in Japan. If he was in Japan and far from the shooting, then why wasn't he happy to be liberated?
This news program was made in Japan by Japanese people for Japanese people, so I had to rely on my rather shaky Japanese to follow the story.
However, the vocabulary was generally in my range - "kekkon" (marry), "tsuma" (wife), "Baghdad" (Baghdad), "Iraq" (Iraq), "pasupoto" (passport) and the like. It also helped that the Iraqi guy spoke Japanese fairly slowly (although, that said, his Japanese was a lot better than mine.)
Anyway, I think I followed this fairly simple news story reasonably well. The gist of it is that the Iraqi guy, who apparently lives and works in Japan, went back to Iraq to marry an Iraqi woman - a couple of months before war broke out.
Unfortunately, because of some problem involving a passport, a problem which was going to take a considerable time to sort out, the Iraqi man's bride could not return to Japan with him, so she is still in Baghdad right now (at least, as far as anyone knows). And, if she is in Baghdad, then she will probably be staying with the Iraqi guy's family there (here I presume that "family" means his mother and father and perhaps a bunch of other people.)
The Iraqi guy had a map of Baghdad, and, if I followed the dialog correctly, it seems that his family's house is on or near one of the roads which the Americans are using as they advance into the contested city of Baghdad.
This was on an NHK news program late at night, I guess on the New Ten program - we switched to NHK late last night after watching the movie "Batman Returns" on cable TV.
I find myself watching less and less of the actual war coverage. Sometimes I will tune in to CNN to see if anything radical has happened, but the actual bombing, burning and machinegunning has become less and less appealing.
In the beginning, it was both interesting and exciting to watch the war live on CNN. But, as the days have dragged on, the one-sided killing process has started to seem squalid and disgusting.
On top of that, after having watched quite a few hours of CNN's war coverage, I have found myself starting to feel an irrational sense of disgust when I look upon the faces of the very CNN people themselves. My perception of the CNN reporters is that they are very upbeat, and this has at times given me the sense that they are taking pleasure in the killing.
No doubt this impression is not just mistaken but horrifically unjust. My logical mind tells me that my emotional response represents a gross error. Even so, the emotions are what they are. Gradually, a feeling of creeping disgust has begun to color my perception of CNN's war reporting, to the point where I'm no longer keen to tune in.
Additionally, when it comes to getting an overview of what is actually going on, I think I'm better served by NHK, which does not place America at the center of the universe.
It was on NHK that I saw the combat footage which made the deepest impression on me. It was a couple of days ago, and I'm not sure of the context. Someone was filming across a river in Baghdad, and on the far side of the river there were some men in uniform who were rolling down a sandy riverbank. I got the impression that they were being shot at as they were rolling. The men were too far away for me to be sure that they were under fire, but in the middle distance there were bullets ripping up splashes from the surface of the river.
I'm not sure what happened to the men who were rolling - my memory is blurred, and I'm unclear as to whether they rolled into some vegetation and out of sight, or whether the TV cut to some other scene at that point.
That, anyway, is the image of the war that I won't forget: a group of Iraqi soldiers, rendered totally helpless as a result of some kind of tactical happenstance, rolling down a sandy riverbank, exposed to the camera's gaze - living human beings reduced to targets on an American shooting range.
When it comes to analysis of what's going on, and why, and what it all means, TV is limited, because "why" does not explain itself by way of explosions.
In today's International Herald Tribune, as published in Japan, there is an opinion piece on page 8 by Mohammad Tarbush, under the headline "Britain's inglorious experience in Iraq".
The focus of the piece is historical. Of the present, Tarbush writes that:-
There was a shortcut for Britain and the United States to demonstrate their care for the well-being of the Arab people. They could have forced Israel to implement long outstanding UN Security Council resolutions calling from its withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, and helped the Palestinians build a modern democratic state
However:-
Instead, the American and British leaders are persistently saying that it is their war on Iraq that will herald the arrival of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
Analytically, the relationship between Israel and America seems to be symptomatic of the gap between American propaganda and American actions.
I do not believe that America is waging war in Iraq on behalf of Israel. I believe, rather, that America would have gone to war with Iraq even if Israel had not existed. (I sat down one day and worked through the logic in a little piece with the heading Are the Jews to blame? - the conclusion is that, no, this is just Western imperialism in action once again.)
American propaganda seeks to portray America as a moral nation, but the selective nature of American actions undoes the propaganda. The morality of the present American administration is rather like that of a city mayor who denounces street crime while ignoring police brutality. The selective, opportunistic, self-serving nature of this "morality" makes it odious.
Right now, the American administration is ignoring the ongoing problems between Israelis and Palestinians. These problems most certainly warrant American intervention because America funds Israel and has armed Israel. During the Yom Kippur war of 1973, America militarily supported Israel with an airlift. To an extent, Israel is an American creation.
And yet the current American administration is taking what seems be a "none of our business" approach to the problem of Israel. While ignoring this problem - a problem which an American administration could work on without killing anyone - the American administration has chosen to expend life, treasure and rhetoric on a totally unnecessary war.
A slogan pops into my head: "We don't solve problems unless we can kill people in the process." The slogan seems jejune, and at first I'm inclined to reject in on those grounds. And yet, the slogan seems to fit.
The propaganda line from the American administration is "We're doing this because we love the Iraqi people." When George Bush showed up last night on Japanese TV, he seemed to have quite a bit to say about the Iraqi people, and he seems to think that he's their white knight, coming to the rescue.
But I really don't think the world needs this kind of superhero - a pathological problem solver who won't tackle any problem which doesn't involve killing people.
I've made an attempt, today, to write about "America" and "American policy" - to try to construct some kind of framework for what is happening in the world right now. But I find myself pulled back to a simple question: What makes George Bush tick?
And I find myself thinking, well, maybe, right now, the historical answers are in that very simple question. Today's answer is from an Egyptian intellectual, Ahmed Kamal Aboulmagd, age 72.
This gentleman features in an article under the byline of Susan Sachs, an article apparently written for The New York Times, which appears on page 5 of today's International Herald Tribune under the headline "Egyptian speaks out on despair of Arabs".
It includes the following:-
When speaking of President George W. Bush and his administration, Aboulmagd uses words like narrow-minded, pathological, obstinate and simplistic.
The war on Iraq, he said bluntly, is the act of a "weak person who wants to show toughness" and, quite frankly, seems "deranged."
And, reading those words, I find myself thinking, "Yeah, I can agree with that."
Section 37 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 April 10 Thursday.
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I wasn't going to post today. Instead, my Internet activity was going to be restricted to fixing up some of the broken links on my website (which I did).
I saw a piece in the International Herald Tribune about how Bush is now popular because he won a war that he didn't need to start and he only killed a few Americans in the process. That looked tempting, but I resisted the temptation.
And I saw this and I saw that, but all these temptations had to be resisted, because today I had stuff to do (like buying a five-kilogram sack of Kirara-brand rice at Shibuya). (Oh, and putting in a day's work, too.)
However, in this evening's e-mail there was quote from one of Hitler's henchmen, Herman Goering, and it was just too apt to pass up. It goes like this:-
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
But is it a real quote or was it just manufactured by someone? I tried to hunt the quote down, and didn't have to look very far. There is an authentication of the quote, authentication which looks reasonably convincing, at:-
www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm.
Thanks for sending along the quote, Joshua.
Section 37 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 April 11 Friday.
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Today I had occasion to go to a building in the center of Tokyo. On the big brown doormat sprawled on the stonework immediately outside the entrance doors, there was a scattering of fallen petals. Inside the entrance, on a similar doormat, more petals. When I exited the building, I paused to check that I had everything - because I'm always on the move, I have any number of opportunities to lose stuff, and have to guard against this - and as I checked the contents of my bag more petals fell from the very roof itself, scattering about me.
Looking at the cherry trees in the neighborhood, I realized that most of the blossom had fallen, revealing green leaves.
And I remembered back to my first spring in Japan, when the warming weather brought pink blossom to the bare black boughs of the cherry trees. One windy morning, late in the cherry blossom season, I went for a run. And, as I ran, the wind stripped the blossoms from the trees, revealing the sudden green of new leaves, which had not been there before.
Although some days of pink cherry blossom intervene between the bare boughs and the sudden revelation of fresh green leaves, subjectively the effect is of an instantaneous transition from bare boughs to leafy green.
"Bare black boughs" - in point of fact, I don't think that Japanese cherry trees have black branches. But the unfortunate fact is that, while I've looked at quite a few cherry trees, I haven't registered as much as I should have, and I can't quite remember the color. I think maybe some kind of olive color (or, then again, maybe not), but "bare boughs which might be more or less kind of olivish, possibly, maybe" doesn't quite do it for me. I suppose I could find a real cherry tree and check, but I'm writing this at close to nine o'clock at night, on the train heading home from work, and it's solidly dark outside.
Section 37 Entry 0007. Date: 2003 April 13 Sunday.
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Nice war, pity about the peace. Yesterday I was surfing the Internet and found the website of some newspaper in Kansas which said that the United States was sending twenty-six peace officers to Iraq.
I figured that as being roughly one peace officer per one million Iraqis, which didn't really make much sense. So, with all respect to the state of Kansas, I decided that was probably one of the ten a half billion pieces of counterfactual data kicking around on the Internet.
I was too busy to research further, but today I bought The Japan Times and found that the United States is actually sending 1,200 "police and judicial officers" to Iraq to "help restore order". Which made more sense.
"So Kansas was wrong!"
That's what I thought. But then, deeper into the article, it turns out that, hey, right now it is just twenty-six people going. The United States puts forth its power and twenty-six people get on a plane. To me, this is the most interesting statistic of the war so far.
It's a surreal statistic, really, and it fits in rather well with secretary Rumsfeld's comedy hour analysis:-
"Freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
I seem to remember that after the last riots in Los Angeles (something to do with a guy called Rodney King, if I remember correctly) the Americans put troops on the streets (called in the National Guard, in fact) to bring an end to the looting.
All things considered, the Bush regime did a very efficient job of deconstructing the Iraqi regime, but at this moment the peace looks a bit problematic. No doubt twenty years of oil revenues will fix most of what was broken, but last night on CNN (I've started watching it again) I saw footage of an Iraqi in hospital who needs a leg amputated right now.
What we get is something called CNNj, which I take to be "CNN for people in Japan". It may differ from CNN as seen elsewhere. What I saw last night was footage of bloody bandages - the individual who needed an amputation was bleeding, and the bandages were sodden with blood. This is the kind of problem which is not going to wait for twenty years and the arrival of petroprosperity.
Today, on page four of The Japan Times, there is an article headlined "Tragedy abounds as liberated Baghdad sinks into chaos". It comes complete with a photo spread, and the first three photos show:-
(a) a woman who has fainted (a car has just been towed home, in it the bodies of three male relatives who were shot by Americans "after the car they were driving allegedly did not stop while passing a building occupied by U.S. Marines.")
(b) a corpse.
(c) Demonstrators in Bahrain burning Bush, Blair and Ariel Sharon in effigy outside McDonald's.
Viewed from Japan, America's victory in Iraq does not really look like an unqualified success. However, perhaps Japanese attitudes are changing. Before America's military triumph in Iraq became undeniable, I did not personally meet any Japanese nationals who spoke in favor of the Americans. However, in the last few days I have met one Japanese national ("one" as in "more than zero and fewer than two") who has spoken in favor of American actions in Iraq.
Well. When I started writing today, I was actually going to write about today's shopping trip, and the quest for a proper pillow. I thought I'd broken free of the grip of the war. But it seems I haven't. It will be a little while yet before the world and I get back to normal.
The Japan I saw today while I was out shopping, though, was STUNNINGLY NORMAL. While a good chunk of the rest of the world seems to have been completely bent out of shape by the events of 9/11 and its aftermath, nothing very much seems to have happened in Japan, except that the economy has continued to decline and the suicide rate has continued to go up.
I read this weird stuff from America about Homeland Security and duct tape and detention without trials and the government disappearing people and all the rest of it, and by contrast Japan seems pretty rock solid normal.
Apart for the pillows. It has to be admitted that Japanese pillows are pretty bizarre. But that's another story.
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