Section 6 Entry 0001. Date: 2002 December 02 Monday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

Today I was depressed to see in the newspaper indications that we may be heading in the direction of a global war between religions. I never expected this to happen. In fact, I thought the whole reason we had the Middle Ages was so people could spend a few hundred years killing each other in the name of religion and so get it out of their systems.

Back last year, on September 11th, the train known as Consensual Reality jumped tracks. The familiar world disappeared, and we found ourselves in this strange and increasingly unpleasant alternate reality. However, even after all that has happened, this latest development really takes me by surprise.

My source is today's International Herald Tribune, published daily in Japan in conjunction with an English-language edition of The Asahi Shimbun. The news makes the front page: Dana Milbank of The Washington Post writes an article datelined Washington. It has been headlined "Bush chided over view of Islam" and starts "President George W. Bush finds himself in a rare disagreement with conservatives in his party over his efforts to portray Islam as a peaceful religion that is not responsible for anti-American terrorism."

A gentleman by the name of Paul Weyrich is quoted as saying "Islam is at war against us," and it is this kind of position that the president is very sensibly trying to avoid.

From Dana Milbank's article, it seems clear that there are a number of intellectuals prepared to argue that "Islam = the enemy" or "Islam = terrorism", and to my way of thinking this kind of argument is a recipe for disaster.

I'm living in Japan, which is a Buddhist country (to the extent that it is anything at all), and from where I'm sitting the only people I can see are Buddhists. There isn't a Christian or a Muslim in sight. (I'm sitting at a park bench by a broad pavement in Iidabashi, in the center of Tokyo, on an overcast afternoon, autumn leaves everywhere.)

My co-workers are (I guess) mostly Christian, and I generally don't meet Muslims from one day to the next.

However, some time after the events of 9/11, I did meet one Muslim. To tell the truth, he's the only Muslim I've had a conversation with in the days since the 11th of September last year.

This guy was from Bangladesh, and I met him at a friend's party in Tokyo. I asked him how 9/11 had affected him, and he said it hadn't, really. He had been working at the same factory for quite a few years, so all his co-workers knew him well, so they weren't going to mistake him for Osama bin Laden.

In fact, what was on this Muslim guy's mind, at the time I met him, was not the events of 9/11 but events back home in Bangladesh, which at the time was experiencing a certain degree of tension in the run-up to an election.

Now, although I've only met this one Muslim guy in the days since 9/11, I'm sure that he can be multiplied by the hundreds, the thousands and the millions.

Although Osama bin Laden is real, there are millions upon millions of Muslims who are not Osama bin Laden. There are millions upon millions of Muslims who are not at war with Christianity or with the West or, in fact, with anyone. They're just getting up in the morning, going to work in the factory, going to parties, sending money home, and worrying about the next election.

To take the position that "Islam is at war against us" is a statistical nonsense. However, if enough of Judaeo-Christian America is persuaded to believe this, then it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The expression which comes to mind is "It takes two to tango." I don't think that Osama bin Laden has the power to destabilize the world and bring about a war between cultures. But there's a big "if" involved here.

If we take the position that "Islam is at war against us" then it logically follows that we must destroy Islam, and that leaves no place in the universe for the regular Islamic guy, the guy who is not Osama bin Laden, but just some guy who goes to work like everyone else, pays his taxes and worries about the elections.

I very strongly feel that we are at a decision junction here. And if the train jumps tracks again, and heads off into even grimmer territory than we are presently inhabiting - into the part of the map marked "replay of the Dark Ages" - then we're in for a major catastrophe.

And I think there's a choice. I think that what happens next is something we choose, of our own free will.

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Section 6 Entry 0002. Date: 2002 December 02 Monday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

.... so we're wandering around in this Islamic city at four in the morning, total strangers to the country, we just got off the bus half an hour ago, and the police come up to us and ask us something in a language that neither of us really understands, but the question seems to be, approximately, "What gives?"

So I answer:

"Nous cherchons un hotel, monsieur."

For the life of me, I can't understand French when it's spoken to me, despite having studied it for three years at high school. But I can speak it, a little.

The woman I'm with, who happens to be my first wife, can't really speak French at all, but her listening skills are much better than mine, which leads to these weird triangular conversations in which I ask the question in French, a native speaker responds in French, and she translates the French into English for me.

.... so the police understand what I've just said, and they point us at the nearest hotel, where the lights are on and the door is open, despite the fact that it is about four in the morning. Unfortunately, that hotel is full.

Anyway, this is a bad situation, or that at any rate is our feeling, so we decide to head back to the bus terminal, which is where we arrived in the city, and hang out there until daybreak. That will at least keep us off the streets.

.... and we're back at the bus station and the young Moroccan guy, Mohammad, is still there, and his offer is still good. If we want, we can go home with him and stay.

Now we've already turned down this offer once, because before we left the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and headed south we were told, very emphatically, by people who had just returned from Morocco, "Don't trust anyone."

This is judgment call time ... and, really, if you can't make the judgment call, you shouldn't be traveling. (The guy who got held up at knifepoint in Spain on three separate occasions obviously should never have left the front door.)

So, okay, we go home with him, and spend the night sleeping in the living room, and by the time daylight comes round everything is a lot clearer and it seems that this is going to work out okay.

The guy, Mohammad, is a high school student, and he lives with his father, who is some kind of teacher, and his mother, who I guess is a housewife, but who also has her own little business selling beadwork in the marketplace ... I have a vivid memory of her showing some of her beadwork to my wife, my first wife, and when we went north again I think some of that beadwork went with us, as presents.

Mohammad is still at high school, but he hangs out with older kids, university students, and his hobby seems to be collecting foreign visitors, whom he subsequently takes around Casablanca, showing them off to these various older kids ... one of whom turns out to be studying geology, and, specifically, right at the moment, by weird coincidence, to be studying the massive ironsand deposits in New Zealand, New Zealand being where we come from, both me and my first wife, Isla.

And so we have these days in Casablanca, not so many days, maybe three, but these are really long days, everyone speaking French maybe eighty per cent of the time, so I find myself having these long conversations in which I understand maybe (optimistically) one word in twenty, conversations in which even the main topic is unclear, although someone will generally help out with a little English at strategic moments.

And then there was one guy, black African, who didn't even speak French, neither English nor French but some other language, maybe Arabic, and who sticks in my mind on account of his cheerfulness, although, if I understand correctly, he's scheduled to head south to some kind of war zone, Morocco being involved at that time in some kind of military conflict in the south, though why or with who I have no idea ....

.... and there's this mosque next door, and the shoes are outside, these guys kneeling down and praying, and what gets me about this mosque is that it's just a storefront operation in what is, really, by my standards, a gritty, industrial, poverty-stricken city ... one squat toilet on a landing serving as a common facility for Mohammad's family and three or four other families in the tenement block.

The thing being that in my mind the word "mosque" conjures up an image of a really elaborate exotic building, but this is just part of everyday life, woven into the fabric of reality.

.... and then we're ready to go, planning to head south, to Marrakesh, but Mohammad's father makes a point of warning us, very clearly, that if you do get to Marrakesh, then you really had better be careful, because it's not like Casablanca, not at all.

.... and all this was many years ago, around about 1980, give or take a year, back before the fall of the Berlin Wall, back in the days of the Cold War.

.... and that's my personal encounter with Islamic culture, really, the experience of the unimagined, the alien, very rapidly becoming understandable in a very human way, the mosque across the street not a piece of inexplicable exotica but a part of the fabric of everyday life.

As far as the debate on the nature of Islamic culture is concerned, that's my ten cents' worth.

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Section 6 Entry 0003. Date: 2002 December 02 Monday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

I wrote the above, my recollections of Casablanca in 1980 or thereabouts, on the train coming home. Once home, I zapped around the Internet, trying to hunt down the latest news on the war between the cultures.

It seems that, at this writing, the notion that Islam is irrevocably hostile to the West is still only the view of a minority, and maybe it will stay that way.

I thought about this while eating dinner and watching TV ....

(TV was about ants, and I found out that there are some ants which can swim ... I had never suspected the existence of any such breed of creature ... watching ants is very soothing, whether you are watching the real thing or watching them on TV, and I rather suspect that the world would be a better place if everyone could be persuaded to spend ten to twenty minutes a day watching ants ... of course, I realize that this is likely to remain a minority opinion.)

By the time I'd washed the dishes, I had figured out my intellectual position with regard to the statement that "Islam is at war against us".

In my own head, I'm clear about what I think, but it's a bit tricky putting it down on paper. This is very slippery territory.

The basic question, as I see it, is whether the idea invents the reality or whether the reality invents the idea. Does an idea call into existence a political movement, or do the practical realities of a situation provoke the creation of a matching set of intellectual tools?

That, I think, is what could properly be termed a non-trivial question.

If you believe that ideas create realities, then you might think it useful to argue about whether Islam is or is not a warlike religion. That might lead to a question like "How does the West deal with the challenge of Islam?"

On the other hand, if you believe that the pressure of endured realities provokes the selection of the intellectual tools of the day, then you might arrive at a question like "What set of circumstances has provoked a certain group of people to choose these particular intellectual tools from the range of equipment available?"

The question, then, is whether politics flows from the abstract to the concrete or from the concrete to the abstract.

I personally believe that politics is a response, rational or otherwise, to the concrete conditions of existence. I do not believe that dogmas create realities but, rather, that realities create dogmas.

I'm really hoping that I won't have to live through a replay of the Middle Ages, complete with heresy hunts, the Inquisition, Holy Wars, witch burning and all the rest of it. And I most certainly hope that Western culture is not going to make the mistake of reinventing the Crusades.

However, given a sufficient level of fear, a sufficient number of people in the West could choose the dogmas necessary to bring that about.

I wrote above that I believe that politics flows from the concrete to the abstract. In other words, that the objective conditions of reality create dogmas. However, I think that's a little too simplistic, and I think that allowance has to be made, too, for the influence of visceral emotions like fear, hatred and non-comprehension.

At the end of the day I'm not as depressed as I was at the beginning. Having had time to digest the news and think about what's going on, I'm persuaded that, by and large, a return to the Middle Ages courtesy of a religious war between Islam and the West is a reasonably remote and entirely unavoidable possibility.

I think I would be more worried about it if there weren't so many other problems to think about, everything from the ongoing slow-motion collapse of the Japanese economy to the question of what is going to happen next in North Korea.

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Section 6 Entry 0004. Date: 2002 December 09 Monday.
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The metal shutters are always drawn at night, cutting off the outside world. Sounds tend to penetrate the house regardless, but this unexpected visitor came silently in the night, making absolutely no noise whatsoever.

The first clue of the visitation came from the television. There were Chinese characters silently scrolling across the top of the screen. (Although the Japanese language has two syllabic alphabets, and although, theoretically, everything in the Japanese language can be written in those alphabets, in practice heavy use is made of Chinese characters, particularly where space is at a premium, as for example on a TV screen; "Tokyo", for example, compacts into two Chinese characters, and so does "Japan".)

So there were these Chinese characters scrolling across the top of the TV screen, and they listed train after train either running slow or not running at all, and as the usual suspects could be ruled out (we would have seen the approach of a large typhoon on the satellite pictures days before, and a major earthquake would have woken us up) that left only one possibility.

The act of sliding back the metal shutters revealed a world of white, a vast swathe of Yokohama converted into a positively Siberian scene, snow on rooftops, snow clotted in evergreens, more snow still falling. The snow had covered the garden. And, mysteriously, there were depressions in the snow which looked very much like yeti-sized footprints, although to the best of my belief there have hitherto been no yeti sightings in Yokohama.

According to the TV, three centimeters of snow fell on Yokohama overnight, generously more than an inch. And it's still coming down in a leisurely fashion, showing no sign of stopping, falling on the garden, falling on the neatly-stacked neighborhood garbage which is waiting for collection under the protection of the theoretically crow-proof net. (Once the digital camera arrives, I'm going to collect some examples of the arcane Japanese art of garbage stacking, and put them on the Internet.)

Ordinarily, the garbage would have been collected by now, but it's still sitting there under the blue net, a visual testimony to the communal and collective nature of life in Japan.

So, anyway, where are my boots? I have to go to work today - I'm going to be sitting in an office working at a computer - but there's no way I could make it to the station in my street shoes. (My street shoes will have to come along for the ride, though, to be worn for the entrance to the office.)

In theory, one of my hobbies is hiking in the mountains, but in the last couple of years I've only been to the mountains once. That was a couple of weeks ago, when I climbed Mount Takao. No crampons required - in fact, this little itty bitty mountain is so civilized that the path I took boasted street lights, at least for part of its length. What's more, the street lights were on, since it was a foggy day with occasional light rain, the light so poor that hiking through the soggy ruins of autumn was like walking deep underwater.

For that trip, I thought I could get away with wearing just my Solomon hiking shoes. And so it proved. A couple of years ago, I got a pair of solidly built Lowa hiking boots, but I've had so little time to get into the mountains that I've only worn them once or twice. That was a couple of winters back, when heavy snow fell in the Hiyoshi area, and I wore the boots to hike through the snow to the supermarket.

So, once again, where are the boots? Finding the heavy mountaineering-grade socks which go with them is no problem, because I habitually wear the heavy socks around the house in lieu of slippers. But the boots? I haven't seen them since the move to this new house. They're one of the things which still haven't been unpacked.

A search finally locates the boots ... I have an aerosol can of waterproofing spray which smells like glue, and probably is ... time to eat breakfast, which is noodles with (curiously) bits of lettuce and cucumber. Why? Apparently because I didn't eat my salad "and it was sitting in the refrigerator looking miserable."

Well. It's now eleven in the morning, and it's still snowing. Anomalously, the garbage still has not been collected, although the neighborhood kerosene delivery truck did (heroically) make it through the snow. Because snow is rare in the Tokyo-Yokohama area (most years there is none worth mentioning) people are generally not geared up to cope with it, and it only takes a little snow to start bringing life to a grinding halt (something which perpetually amazes people from snowy parts of Japan such as Hokkaido.)

I really must get going. Today's schedule is flexible, but not infinitely so. And, unfortunately, the train line which serves this neighborhood is depressingly reliable, typically maintaining an uninterrupted service regardless of snowstorms or typhoons.

Okay. I've put on my boots. I'm just going out for a walk ... I may be gone for some time.

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Section 6 Entry 0005. Date: 2002 December 17 Tuesday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

It's getting pretty close to the end of 2002, so I guess it's time to sum up the year.

This was my fifth year of teaching in Japan, and in the course of the year I did quite an amazing range of things: taught (during the first part of the year) at junior high school, taught (occasionally) at elementary school, taught business classes (regularly), edited e-mail, wrote three complete e-mail writing courses and did some other curriculum development work as well.

As far as my day job is concerned, the thing that satisfied me the most is getting more heavily involved in curriculum development, since that plays to my strengths.

On the creative writing side, I continued to write and submit short stories, some of which were accepted and published here and there. However, in terms of productivity, 2002 was not a great success story.

Why not? Well, two things chewed up a lot of time. One was the move from a small apartment in Hiyoshi (an area in Yokohama) to a house in a different part of Yokohama.

This house business is pretty time consuming ... yesterday's main event, for example, was a visit to the Noritake showroom at Akasaka, in Tokyo, because if you have a house then it necessarily follows that you need a set of dinner dishes.

The other thing that chewed up a lot of time was learning HTML and putting together three websites, completed with content ... this website, a work-in-progress website and a how-to-write-creatively website.

However, as the end of the year approaches, I seem to have developed a reasonable amount of momentum, and work is progressing reasonably well on the rewrite of West of Heaven, a book set in Chalakanesia. Which reminds me ... I planned to add the text of my Chalakanesian story Diving on the Wreck to this website. Well, let's do it ... okay ... done ... the text of Diving on the Wreck is on the website.

The West of Heaven book is the first part of the Oceans of Light trilogy which I wrote in about 1992. At that time, the background really came to life for me, but I had problems managing the plot. Now, returning to this project after about a decade, I find myself much better able to handle the plot problems, and work on the book is going extremely well.

Looking ahead to 2003, then, I'm anticipating a reasonably productive year, although there are potential problems which could upset my productivity drive, these including a possible eruption of Mount Fuji, the next great Tokyo earthquake (always an active possibility), the complete and total collapse of the Japanese economy (watching the way the Argentinian economy collapsed, I got really worried) and ....

contents

Well, do I really have to worry about North Korean nukes?

Well ... I feel I should. I have a duty to worry. I shouldn't be complacent in the face of a potential nuclear holocaust in the making. But the truth is that I'm experiencing worry fatigue ... in fact, I'm starting to suspect that some of my worry circuits have quite simply burnt out through overuse, leaving me with this vaguely lobotomized grin on my face ... recently, in fact, I have to confess that I've even been sleeping well at nights.

Despite those potential threats lurking in the background, I'm closing out the year on a reasonably optimistic note.

.... reading over this, I feel that I should be disgusted with myself for not worrying my head about the nuclear problem ... however ... I can't muster the moral outrage. What happened?