From A Distance

Shitamachi area of Tokyo, night of March 9-10.

They train young men...
to drop fire on people...
But their commanders won't allow them to write "Fuck" on the sides of their airplanes...
because it's obscene!

Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Seventy years ago tonight, the greatest massacre of civilians in wartime since the fall of Baghdad to a Mongol force in 1258 took place in Tokyo's low districts.

Robots of my homeland are still dropping fire on people, on what seems an almost daily basis, the mayhem and murder made moral, seemingly, by altitude and distance.

Were it that for every bomb and missile, the amount of money spent in ending lives were awarded as scholarships training specialists in Pashto, Dani, Arabic, Farsi, Turkmen, Uighur, Tajik, Uzbek, Malay and Kanuri, languages and cultures, we might call ourselves civilized, or have plausible claim to a civilizing aim.

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine!


Later - Unstinting reporting from

Julian Ryall (Link)

and

Elaine Kurtenbach and Mari Yamaguchi (Link)

A Month Away

Been away...doing things...and not doing things too.

Much has happened in the interim...and in at the same time, not much, aside from world spot oil prices (huge shifts there) has changed.

Two items of note:

1) Abe Shinzo did not go to Yasukuni Shrine in the 2014 calendar year.

He may have done so in secret. Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi supposedly paid a secret visit in 1992. Current Education Minister Shimomura Hakubun supposedly paid a secret visit sometime in 2013, proving that the trick can still be pulled off.

By not publicly paying his respects at Yasukuni, Abe has betrayed the revisionists and the mawkish sentimentalists, those who have been the rungs on the ladder he has climbed to prominence within the Liberal Democratic Party and ultimately into the premiership. It is fitting: what one does with rungs is step on them.

In not visiting Yasukuni, Abe has also shown he is playing a very long game indeed in terms of being a mover and shaker in East Asian politics, sacrificing immediate political and psychological advantages for a bigger political payoff later.

2) Anti-government conservative forces triumphed in the Saga gubernatorial election.

A Japan Agriculture (JA)-supported candidate defeating the LDP-Komeito supported candidate. Most analysis focuses on the supposed black eye suffered by the Abe administration, a third embarrassment after last year's humiliations in Shiga and Okinawa -- and on the supposed red flag the victory portends for the Abe Administration's hopes to reorganize Japan's agricultural sector -- both for growth and to facilitate the completion of Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations.

What is less talked about is the implications of the victory of a non-LDP supported conservative for the basing of U.S. forces in Japan. Since his victory, the new governor of Saga has been desperately trying to reverse the agreement the prefecture has with the national government to host Self Defense Forces V-22 Ospreys at Saga Airport. As a special Socialist Party project team noted in 2009, Saga Airport boasts a very, very long runway, is not very, very far from Sasebo and its U.S. Navy homeported amphibious strike group, and is surrounded on three side by hectares of hectares of rice paddies, with narry a dwelling in sight -- the perfect place, really, for a Futenma replacement facility (FRF). The already agree-upon SDF deployment, with the ancillary development of the infrastructure to host Ospreys, is an open door to deployment of U.S. Marines Ospreys at the same dedicated facility.

How Pyrrhic a victory JA's triumph over the Abe government will appear in retrospect -- and how clever the administration -- if Saga Airport becomes a supplement to, a second, or in the extreme a replacement for the fraught Henoko FRF.

The Problem With Yasukuni - From A Company Man

All the brave soldiers
That cannot get older
Been asking after you.

- Stephen Stills, "Daylight Again/Find The Cost of Freedom" (1982)

I have been thinking for the past week about the controversies that rage over Yasukuni, of how the inclusion of the 14 Class A war criminals taints the place, or as Shigeru Shino of Katsushika City, Tokyo Metropolitan District wryly remarked in a senryu published in the Tokyo Shimbun of August 17:

英雄と
A雄が棲む
一つの屋根

Eiyu to
“A”yu ga sumu
Hitotsu no yane

The Spirits of Heroes (eiyu) and
the spirits of Class A war criminals (eiyu) dwell
under a single roof

Through the blunt pun the poet offers the conventional criticism toward paying one's respects at Yasukuni -- that while it is right to pay respect to those who heroically made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, the simultaneous presence of the kami of the Class A war criminals muddles the message, making a Yasukuni visit a protest against the judgment of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (a.k.a, "the Tokyo Trials"), the acceptance of which is demanded in the 1952 San Francisco peace treaty. Politicians, by their visits are issuing an implicit challenge to the underpinning to the postwar order and/or are revealing a wish to revive elements of the pre-1945 order.

The surreptitious enshrinement of the 14 Class A war criminals in 1978 is not what is wrong with Yasukuni, though. The Unforgivable Fourteen are a side show -- a profitable, cynical and self-perpetuating sideshow. The governments and civil society of China and South Korea -- and to a lesser extent counterparts in the United States -- work themselves into self-righteous, indignant lather over Japanese politicians directly or indirectly paying respect to the Unforgivable Fourteen. This festival of outrage in its flaming hypocrisy (the governments of all three countries having been involved in the killing millions, mostly civilians, in the period since 1945) in turns empowers self-righteous Japanese right wing, which harrumphs, not without reason, about Japan's innocuousness in security affairs over the last six decades.

Each side, after a florid show of umbrage, marches back to cheers and applause from their benighted and shallowly patriotic supporters.

"No!" I have wanted to say, "What is REALLY WRONG WITH YASUKUNI IS..."

...and had to stop for over a week now, since my visit to the shrine on the 15th.

One of the seductions of writing about policies and politics is a pretension of esoteric knowledge -- of becoming so confident about a country's culture and quirks as to presume to know what the real story is, or worse, what the story should be.

I confess I am not always successful at avoiding the pitfall of prescription. I do offer advice -- mostly of the trivial kind, such as suggesting to Finance Minister Aso Taro it is time to stop dyeing his hair black.

Jumping up and down as to what is really wrong with Yasukuni, beyond the 14 Class war criminals, seemed beyond the pale -- or at least beyond this pale's bailiwick.

However, on Saturday (August 24) my local newspaper published a letter to the editor (in a special box, so as to attract the eye) by a reader who shared the main elements of my disquiet, one who took issue with the whole concept of heroes being enshrined at Yasukuni:

[Dear Editor]

Last year my grandfather passed away. He served in the war as a merchant marine sailor. The story is that the ship that my grandfather was on was attacked by Americans and sunk. My grandfather, in the confusion inside the ship, grabbed ahold of a door. By holding tight to the floating door, he survived to be picked up by another merchant marine vessel, thereby escaping the fate of losing his life in the battle zone.

Many times did my grandfather say to me, "Had I died then, your father, and of course you, Tetsu, would never had been born." However, never did anything like "Ah, to fight for one's country is a glorious thing!" come to his lips.

Those wishing to legitimize Yasukuni or the Great War always talk about "heroes (eiyu) who died fighting for their country" or some such thing. But to make it sound like a Hollywood movie where alien life forms were coming to our land to unilaterally to attack us -- this is mistaken. Those whose lives were sacrificed in that war were sacrificed for the idiotic lusts and policy failures of the military leaders and the politicians, and the capitalists who insinuated themselves into their company.

In the first place, as was written in the Sanmen no kakushin article "Thinking about visiting Yasukuni" (Yasukuni sanpai o kangaeru) published in this newspaper on the 14th [of August], how much value should we be assigning Yasukuni? The shrine was built to honor the battle dead of imperial forces, those who died in the Meiji Restoration and other conflicts of the time, using Japan's tradition of imperial rule to political ends.*

If there are those who wish to believe that the spirits of their ancestors, who, unlike my grandfather, did indeed die on the battlefield, are honored at this shrine, fine -- I have no problem with that. However, the statement "They died fighting for their country" -- that I want revised. At the very least, it was not for these chest-thumpers in the present day who say "the honored dead (eiyu) are the pride of Japanese people and the State (kokka)" that those who sacrificed their bodies and lost their lives on the field of battle did what they did.

Kameda Tetsu
Age: 35
Occupation: company employee
Matsudo City, Chiba Prefecture

Thank you Mr. Kameda.

At some point I will have to write about the kind of persons I saw at Yasukuni on the 15th. Someday also I should examine the Prime Minister's assertion in Diet session in April this year that visits to Yasukuni by Japan's leaders should not be framed as excusing the pre-1945 order because visits to Arlington National Cemetery, where Confederate soldiers are buried, does not result in U.S. presidents being accused of honoring slavery. (Link - J)

But that will be for another day.

As for that purported rightward shift in public attitudes, it seems as though the wave has not swallowed up quite everybody just yet...

-----------------------------------

* The implication being that far from being a place for honoring those who fought for the protection of Japan, Yasukuni was at its origins a shrine tasked with the placation of the spirits of those who lost their lives in domestic political violence.

If Things Are Going Great, Remember

Sometimes you're just lucky.

Jean-Pierre Lehmann provides some deflation, of the good kind. (Link)

Of course a country needs some basic strengths to capitalize on the opportunities that being in the right place at the right time tosses in its direction.

And of course, leaders of a country have to keep the "feel good" quotient high so as to attract voter and manipulate insecurities.

However, leaders should never get so high on the mythology to believe that hard work and sacrifice were even close to being all that was needed.