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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2005

TOKYO Japanese citizens keep $3 trillion in postal savings and insurance, but for decades politicians serving vested interests have been able to siphon off these public funds. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sees postal reform as crucial to stemming Japan’s endemic corruption. So when his reform legislation was blocked in Parliament, Koizumi took a gamble and decided to take the issue to the people.

Postal reform legislation had squeaked by in the lower house of the Diet, Japan’s Parliament, in July, but was convincingly defeated in the upper house on Aug. 8, in no small part because of defections from within Koizumi’s own Liberal Democratic Party. So Koizumi promptly dissolved the lower house and called for elections on Sept. 11.

In this political game of chicken, Koizumi didn’t blink. He wasted no time in ousting the dissidents from the LDP and is backing pro-postal reform candidates to unseat them. This intra-party family feud has dominated the election coverage, with three small new parties emerging that include ousted LDP members.

Koizumi is serious about postal privatization, but the defeat of his legislation provided a good excuse to get rid of colleagues he has dubbed “the forces of resistance.” Koizumi’s term as party president ends in September 2006 and he wants to be remembered as the man who smashed the factions that have dominated the LDP since its inception in 1955. He sees the factions as representing the vested interests that have long had their snouts in the public trough, drawing off funds for roads and bridges to nowhere.

Japan has a supplementary budget called the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program, or FILP, which dwarfs the official budget. In addition to dubious sand and gravel contracts, this opaque budget subsidizes many state-owned enterprises that are awash in red ink. FILP spends money that the government borrows from the $3 trillion in postal savings and insurance, helping explain why Japan’s public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is more than 150 percent. Privatizing the postal system is about fiscal discipline and who decides how this $3 trillion is invested, loaned and spent.

Koizumi has deftly managed the news media so that he is contesting the election on his own terms. Koizumi has been able to assume the reform mantle, a major asset in a country where polls indicate that more than half the people say they favor reform.

But the devil is in the details. People on the street and in the rice paddies seem confused about the implications of postal reform. The news media have been content to focus on the theater of politics orchestrated by Koizumi. Those who initially claimed that this election would lead to a significant political realignment and a system where principles trumped expediency have sensibly gone silent.

Koizumi benefits from the lack of clarity concerning postal privatization, since his plan has been so watered down that it is uncertain whether much will actually change. As with the 1985 privatization of Japan National Railways, NTT and Japan Tobacco, the process will be gradual. Privatization à la Japonaise minimizes disruptions and allows time for adjustment. Economists and business people want more dramatic measures, but they don’t have to face elections.

The good news is that postal privatization is already under way and postal savings are no longer invested at the whim of the Ministry of Finance. Habits and inclinations persist, but postal czars in the future will grow less inclined to fund white elephant projects that show little prospect of plausible returns.

Koizumi is frequently criticized for presiding over a Japan where there are growing gaps between “haves” and “have nots” and for introducing a sharp-elbowed version of enterprise capitalism based on the U.S. model. Advocates of maintaining the status quo argue that public spending is beneficial, generating jobs, improving infrastructure and lessening rural-urban income disparities. Naturally they skirt the issues of wasteful spending and endemic corruption that have left this status quo irredeemably tarnished.

But the ready-mix politics of the LDP’s “construction state” are giving way to new priorities and needs. In Japan’s rapidly aging society, voters are increasingly interested in improving medical care, pensions and social welfare services for the elderly and working mothers. Koizumi is draining the trough for pork-barrel projects and patronage while repositioning the LDP, whose capacity for reinventing itself is legendary.

For now it looks like the voters are behind Koizumi, if for no other reason than that the economy is recovering. In response to Koizumi’s gamble of dissolving Parliament and calling elections, they are gambling that the consequences of reform are preferable to the discredited ways and means of the status quo.

(Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University Japan, is the author of ”Japan’s Quiet Transformation.”)

Posted at 3:30 PM · Comments (0)

The Internet, long proclaimed a conduit for democratization, is meeting its match in China. While Western libertarians believe China is fighting a losing battle as protestors and dissidents increasingly organize online, the Chinese leadership is betting its dual strategy of censorship and development will ultimately succeed.

The Internet provides an unprecedented ability to create, access and exchange information. Unlike other mass communication mediums, cyberspace allows for the multi-directional and (theoretically) borderless free flow of information. These characteristics imply that it cannot be controlled like traditional forms of media. Or can it? Technological libertarians maintain that autocratic leaders face a zero-sum dilemma: embrace information technology and sacrifice political power, or suppress it and pay the economic price.

The Chinese leadership, however, appears undeterred. From modest beginnings of about 2,000 Internet users in 1993, the number has surged to more than 94 million in 2005, the second-largest population online after the United States. China also boasts the world’s largest number of mobile phone subscribers, the second-largest personal computer market and the third-largest number of personal computer users.

Contrary to popular thinking, Chinese leaders do not need to block all Internet content in order to reap major economic and political benefits.

An OpenNet Initiative report on Chinese Internet filtering revealed a sophisticated system of control combining technological checks and social persuasion. Access to some websites is intermittently blocked while others may be accessible but filter certain keyword searches. Provincial and local governments hire employees to scan e-mail and chat rooms for sensitive discussions.

Self-censorship is “encouraged” with myriad regulations placing responsibility on the user, from Internet content (ICPs) and Internet service providers (ISPs), cybercafes and website creators, down to the individual subscriber. Businesses are pressured to endorse a self-regulation pledge. Even foreign companies like Yahoo! have signed in order to gain access to China’s burgeoning IT market.

China’s experiment in Internet management is literally paying off. Information technology is driving China’s development - from military modernization to domestic business competitiveness on a global scale. E-commerce is exploding in China; it’s expected to reach $6.5 billion by 2007.

The political advantages may be even greater. On one hand, e-government is improving the efficiency and effectiveness of central administration. On the other, the Internet may be used to promote the party line. In July, to counter the Pentagon’s report on the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese government posted a censored version of the document and organized online chats with military analysts.

Nationalistic sentiments have also found voice online during such incidents as the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the anti-Japanese demonstrations in April. Such protests can divert attention from thorny domestic issues. Some potentially damaging local news stories circulated online have forced the central government to be more forthright with information - often with positive results.

From greater access to educational and cultural cyber content, to online dating, chatting, shopping and games, the Chinese are enamored with the Internet. Few want to chance participation in politically risky behavior such as browsing dissident websites or posting controversial messages in chat rooms. A study funded by the New York City-based Markle Foundation found a majority of respondents said when the Internet provides more opportunities for citizens to criticize government policies, they trusted online content, and supported some Internet restrictions.

So far the Chinese government is staying one step ahead of the game. China Telecom has enlisted China’s Huawei Technologies, US companies Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, France’s Alcatel and Sweden’s Ericsson to upgrade its backbone network ChinaNet, the country’s largest and most extensive. Called the ChinaNet Next Carrying Network or CN2, the system will connect more than 200 cities with China’s international access network, further establishing domestic mechanisms of control.

China is not alone. Although the Internet developed without much regulation, governments around the world are adapting and cyberspace monitoring is increasing.

Singapore implemented the world’s first Internet censorship regulations in 1995. Now China is serving as an archetype for other countries that wish to restrict online usage while reaping its benefits. From Australia to Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia to Vietnam, governments have been establishing more Internet controls.

OpenNet Initiative studies have revealed infrastructure and regulations akin to China’s in place in countries such as Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kyrgyzstan. Utah recently passed a filtering law targeting content harmful to minors.

Not all filtering and surveillance is inappropriate, but it does raise questions over the fine line between legitimate and illegitimate controls. Consider e-mail authentification programs currently under development in the US. Ostensibly being created to combat spam, they will permit the identification and tracking of e-mail senders. How might China and other like-minded governments adapt such technology?

China’s experience challenges the view that the Internet is an irrepressible instrument for democracy. Yet while the Chinese government is successfully harnessing information technology to maintain its political monopoly, the Internet is also contributing to China’s political transformation. It remains a positive force for economic development, improved quality of life and better governance.

Tamara Renee Shie, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. Author of: “The Tangled Web: Does the Internet Offer Promise or Peril for the Chinese Communist Party?” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 40 (August 2004), PP. 523-540. The opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author alone and do not reflect NDU, Department of Defense, or US government policy.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved

Posted at 11:08 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2005

It was only a matter of time before one of the modern rags-to-riches soccer superstars ran for office as president of a country.

George Weah, who left behind life in a shack on a former Liberian mangrove swamp to score goals and make his fortune on three continents, is back in Liberia to put himself forth as the leader who will raise his homeland out of bloodshed and poverty.

It is a big task, but George Manneh Weah is a big man.

“I don’t need political experience,” he tells the crowds, “to give you schools. I don’t need political experience to give you lights, and water, or to see that the roads are bad.”

And this man of many abodes, with a family home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is like a magnate to the poor. He came through poverty, he carries titles like Unicef goodwill ambassador, he donates to the building of schools and clinics, and at one time he literally clothed Liberia’s national soccer team when it had no kit to call its own.

Why would he not be a credible political head of state in the October election? If Ronald Reagan could make American president, if Arnold Schwarzenegger can be governor of California, who is to say that a well-traveled soccer star has less intellect, or attracts less popularity, than a Hollywood “great”?

Weah knows the odds. He is one of 27 candidates for the job in Liberia. But then he was one of 13 children, abandoned by his parents and raised by his grandmother.

Barefoot shantytown soccer was where he found himself. As a child he was blessed. He always could move swiftly, and shoot ferociously. He was a legend in his own boyhood, leapfrogging from teams called Young Survivor of Clartown, then Bongrange Company and next, Mighty Barole and Invincible Eleven.

Those Liberian junior teams give the flavor of his youth; the names hide a troubled adolescence from a growing menace, on and off the dirt pitches. He departed Liberia for the richer pastures of Tonnerre de Yaoundé in Cameroon - and his good luck was that Claude le Roy, a Frenchman coaching the Cameroon national squad, recommended Weah to Arsène Wenger.

Wenger, now the Arsenal manager, was at that time gaining coaching experience with Monaco. He took the explosive, untutored African talent to the opulent ministate of Monaco and, as with the grooming of Eliza Doolittle, he taught him airs and graces and not simply how to develop his natural talent.

Monaco couldn’t hold Weah, and Wenger wouldn’t hold him back. He moved on to Paris Saint-Germain, then to AC Milan where he replaced the irreplaceable Marco van Basten.

Among the accolades came the European, African and World player awards in 1996, and on one ceremony in Milan, Weah called his former mentor Wenger to the stage and handed over his award to “the man who taught me to persevere, to live a decent life and to play fair.”

It seemed spontaneous. It was done in the same breathtaking way that Weah had that year collected the ball near his own penalty area and outpaced, outwitted seven men of Verona until, with handsome, elegant, brutal finality he shot past the goalkeeper.

Statistics give you an inkling of what that goal drew out of him. He covered 85 meters in 14 seconds, with the ball. He took just 30 strides. And none of us has any idea of whether he knew where he was going or how he would finish it off.

In the summer of 2002, we saw a more calculating side to Weah, the first inkling of politics. At the congress of the governing body of world soccer, FIFA, in Seoul, Sepp Blatter, the European, was in competition with Isa Hayatou, the African for the presidency.

Weah, by then converted to Islam and enjoying the riches of playing for the Al Jazira club in the United Arab Emirates, spoke on the congress floor - against the Cameroonian Hayatou.

“Blatter has been a true friend to football and Africa,” he said, “I guarantee he will have the support of my own country.”

He went on, heatedly, to praise the “Goal Program” through which FIFA, in Blatter’s first four-year term as president, handed out millions of dollars for building projects.

“Hayatou has been at the helm of affairs for 12 or 14 years,” Weah said. “But African football has remained in a pathetic state of affairs. He is contesting the election for personal gain, something which will not help African football.”

That withering intervention in FIFA politics cut to the jugular as precisely as Weah’s goal against Verona.

Weah was emerging as more than a soccer player. He personally funded the Liberia team through a World Cup campaign, he worked with Unicef on issues like AIDS prevention and vocational training for former child soldiers.

His villa in Monrovia was torched during Charles Taylor’s regime. He took French citizenship and lately has been living with his American wife and three children, one of them adopted, in the United States.

And now, he’s back home, leading the Congress for Democratic Change Party.

Reports from Monrovia suggest that Weah will score a win in the poll on Oct. 11, and that the soccer wanderer will then have to deliver on his promises to rebuild a country fractured by 14 years of civil war.

His family is concerned for his safety, but he appears compelled to convert sporting popularity into a catalyst for change where he came from.

In modern international sport, only Imran Khan, the cricketer, has managed to cross the threshold into politics - though many have predicted that Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, even though he was again accused on Tuesday of taking performance-enhancing drugs, will try for U.S. office, following the lead of such sportsmen politicians as Bill Bradley, Jim Ryun, Jack Kemp, Jim Bunning and Steve Largent.

To the young electorate in Liberia, the stature of Weah, a 38-year-old whom they call King George, might well be reason to trust him rather than the ex-soldiers and career politicians seeking their vote.

Posted at 6:54 PM · Comments (0)

One of the year’s best-sellers has been Donald Richie’s tokyo journals: 1947-2005—first edition sold out, paperback out in a few weeks. The 494-page selection from nearly 60 years of expatriation is, however, only half of the journals. Before these unpublished entries go to their final resting place in the Donald Richie Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Metropolis prevailed upon the author to share a few final tidbits.

Nov 3, 1983
With Akira Kurosawa
Courtesy of Donald Richie

Movie lunch. Nagisa Oshima in full kimono—an inward look, eyes close together as though peering at each other. With him I always feel that there is a transparent barrier, like a pane of glass. Not only me from him, but him from the rest of the world. Today he did not have much to say because he never does in company, only when he is with a single person or with the millions on the tube. Today he was in company and other directors were there. Kihachi Okamoto, in black, looking just like Godard now that his eyes have gone bad. He too said not a word, but Masahiro Shinoda talks enough for anyone. Now grey and a bit plump he still has that boyishness that allowed us always to refer to him as the Boy Scout. Since he speaks a kind of English it was this language that he was using today, but he was thinking Japanese. I heard sentence after sentence beginning with: We Japanese. On the other side of the room, his wife, Shima Iwashita. Lots of makeup these days and each time I see her in a kimono more beautiful than the one before. She always looks as though she has a secret. Perhaps it is the little-cat way in which she holds her mouth; perhaps it is because her dark eyes always seem to know much more than she is saying. At the other table [Teruyo] Nogami instead of [Akira] Kurosawa, who could not come. But she, right-hand woman deluxe, is Kurosawa. He is something she puts on like a suit. Against the wall [Kazuo] Miyagawa the cinematographer, always small and smart—dapper. Bows like a little boy, hands held to sides. Perhaps the finest eye in all of cinema and at a party he acts like one of the help—no waiter ever gave a smarter bow. Non-movie folk too. Next to me, Issei Miyake. Talk about boyishness. He has a rare gift. It is as though he stepped into you. His laughter, his stories, his attitude toward himself (he treats himself like a deplorable but still presentable younger brother)—impossible not to like him. Anything this spectacular is a construct but it is one that he now not only believes in, he has also become it. Much of his success (clothes are clothes and that is all) must come from this unusual gift he has. Afterwards, some milling before departure. Again I notice that film directors rarely talk to each other. Oshima, Okamoto, Shinoda—they kept apart. In fact the only time I saw one approach another was when Oshima walked up to Kurosawa at one of the parties and introduced himself. They had never before met. One can understand why they do not usually meet. Directors can only talk shop. And if we have directors talking then each can only talk about his new film.

May 17, 1989
Black Rain, Shohei Imamura, 1989

Went to see [Shohei] Imamura’s Black Rain again. This time, knowing what would happen, remembering the power, I am relatively unswayed and can pay attention to the construction. Before, immersed in the story, I did not realize just how many doors are open and shut, just how many windows are peered through. Interior architecture encloses and delineates this film. As in [Yasujiro] Ozu, the fact that domestic architecture confines also serves to shape these people. How free is the great outside, the paddy—and the big fish jumping? Perhaps a symbol but, more, a big happy fish. No doors and windows for him. And the sick girl forgets herself in wonder at this great jumping creature. This is what art is made of, I think, a concern for parallels and balance and enclosure and freedom, contrast, opposites, but not many. Just two or three, enough to make a container to hold the strongest of emotions.

June 4, 1989
Equinox Flower, Yasujiro Ozu, 1958

Coming back from Karuizawa in the train, looking out of the window, contented, humming, I suddenly remember the final scene of Equinox Flower of Ozu where Shin Saburi is doing just this. To be sure he is going to see a married daughter and I am coming from seeing a son married, but the effect is the same. Also the contentment—something I felt by proxy over 20 years ago and am now feeling in reality myself.

Dreams, Akira Kurosawa, 1990 (¥3,129)
Courtesy of Warner Home Video

Feb 5, 1990
The new Kurosawa film, Dreams. Sententious to an extreme. Old folks in the film (Ryu Chishu himself at least eighty, made up as an “old man”) tell us we are destroying our nature. So we are, but such bold statements will not make us stop. Still, the film is beautiful and oddly innocent. And the spectacle of Kurosawa’s moral earnestness is in itself impressive.

With Masahiro Shinoda
Courtesy of Donald Richie

June 25, 1990 Learned that I had made a serious mistake in translation. For all these years I have been translating Ozu’s Higanbana as “Equinox Flower.” Well, that is what it means if you use the dictionary. But now I discover that the higanbana is the spider lily. Maybe the mistake was all for the best, however. Imagine going to a nice quiet Ozu film called Spider Lily.
More serious the earlier mistake, discovered but uncorrected: translating Kurutta Ippeiji as “A Page of Madness.” Neither Joe Anderson nor I knew that this is an idiom for “a page out of order.” However, it could have been worse. I remember poor Ivan Morris to the day of his death cringing at having translated the name of the actress Isuzu Yamada as “Yamada of the Thousand Bells.”

Oct 17, 1990
With Leza Lowitz, editor of The Japan Journals
Courtesy of Donald Richie

I introduce a program of the films of Shuji Terayama I chose for International House. When you look at these short films you look into his mind. His mythology is there, beautiful, distant, wrong end of telescope, the past animated. And I remember him with his odd searching gaze, his rueful little-boy smile, his sickly complexion—for the kidneys that killed him had gone bad in childhood. In the first film the naval officer father takes off his pants, then his fundoshi, and staggers drunk and naked about the old farmhouse, and in the last Terayama sits in his director’s chair, back to camera, as the play of shadows is dismantled, and then gets up without a backward glance and leaves. And in an hour and a half I have encompassed a life.

Den’en ni Shisu, Shuji Terayama, 1974

Feb 12, 1991
Party for the prize-winning of Sakura no Sono [The Cherry Orchard]. The all-girl cast is there, and since the film was made half a year ago and they are now about 18 years-old each, looking different—one changes fast at that age. I go up to the one I like best, the one who played Yuko, and begin a conversation. Yuko is ready for it—at a big party, talking to a real foreigner. Then some battle-axe appears, takes part in the talk, kills it—her mother. Talk to another young actress, the one who played the bad girl. Maybe she really is bad. Nineteen and hard as nails. “Huh?” she says when I congratulate her on her difficult role. “What are you talking about? It was a piece of cake.” I see she also stands apart, eats by herself, has nothing to do with the other girls, but does have a roving eye for executive types. Maybe this is a case of life imitating art.

Feb 23, 1992
With Marco Muller, now artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, and Nagisa Oshima; (top) with director Keisuke Kinoshita, Italian actor and screenwriter Adriano Aprà and critic Tadao Sato at the 1984 Pesaro Film Festival

Memorial service for film documentarist Shinsuke Ogawa at Athenée-Française. The auditorium is gotten up with rice sheaves, spring flowers, reminiscent of the mountains of Yamagata where he lived and made long films on rice farming after finishing his series of documentataries on the “radicals” getting in the way of the eventual construction of Narita Airport.

I sat with Nagisa Oshima who later gave an emotional memorial speech. He is good at that. I heard him give one equally tearful a few years ago for the still living Kurosawa. At the service lots more speeches, telegrams read, a two-hour performance of his uncut last footage—about snow apparently.

I remember the talkative, volatile, opinionated and occasionally irresistible Ogawa in Milan. One of his favorite films was Miraculo a Milano of De Sica. Particularly he loved the final scene where the cast flies off on broomsticks over the spires of the cathedral. And there he stood, I remember, on that cold afternoon in front of the cathedral, saying: “I cannot believe it. It was right here they took off. I don’t believe it. I am here. Really here.”

The Cherry Orchard, Shun Nakahara, 1990

July 2, 1992
Took Dick Cavett to lunch. Being with him can be demanding. He never forgets anything. Can reach in and produce a minor actor of [the] ’30s and his one famous line of dialogue. Or, one idea will attract another and he goes sprinting off into the distance. Or, determined to interest and amuse, a string of one-liners files on, empty jokes betraying his night-club-circuit, talk-show background.

Talking of his beloved Setsuko Hara—safely distant, however: he took flowers, heard her coming to the door, dropped the flowers, turned, fled—he wanders to a consideration of Ozu’s audience, sees correspondence to guests at party, remembers party at John Lindsey’s, remarks on quality of present mayor, then wonders (loose connection) about the Hindu goddess Kali and from there to Amaterasu-o-mikami, and did I know that Setsuko Hara played her in that awful Toho movie? What was its name? Oh, yes. Dick is consistently interesting and also consistently tiring, because you have to trot beside him to keep up. Not that trotting is not good for you.
Then he stopped stock still, spoke of his analyst and for the first time told me the details of his years of depression. He tried to make me feel it, its awful texture, and he succeeded. He communicated that coarsely woven and hopeless state.

May 6, 1993
The Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa, 1957

In Sydney I am doing a seminar on Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. The students and I are watching it—after I have introduced it and before I lecture on it. We reach the part where Washizu has been given his little country palace and his lord appears with his procession—pretty little building set in the summer paddies, soldiers idling, farmers working, [Toshiro] Mifune coming on the run.

And suddenly, in my memory, everything turns real: the summer breeze of Izu, the lazy sun of an early afternoon, the stale smell of water standing in the rice fields. For a moment it is that day in 1956, 37 years ago, and I am standing there, 33 years old myself. See—just to the left of the camera, just out of range. Here comes Mifune running, and there stands my younger ghost, right of that pillar, just off screen.

Ah, there is that young soldier who smiled at me and who I was too busy to go talk to and whom I never forgot. And the summer sun beats down and the fresh breeze of Izu bathes my face, and then the story continues and the film ends and the lights go up and the students open their notebooks and I stand up and began talking about the influence of the Noh.

July 8, 1996
A party for Tadao Sato upon the completion of his four-volume Japanese film history. There was Sachiko Hidari. She has aged elegantly, and tends to be grand. Looking at a nearby actress somehow different appearing, she said: “She has had something done to her face. One of those things where they make new holes for the ears and pull everything up.” I mention that the director of her own latest film is there. “Where, where? I must snub him. He understood nothing about me. Nothing.”

Oshima’s wife [Akiko Koyama] is there with news that her husband [who had suffered a major stroke] is now in a wheelchair and is genki, if you can be that in a wheelchair. The director of Violated Angels, Koji Wakamatsu, is there, now even more grey, even more affable. Since his old films were at the Haiyuza last week and my old ones are there this week, we talk of the brave days of 1965.

Nobuhiko Obayashi is the master of ceremonies and manages to snare me into making a speech. I say whatever comes into my head, talk about the singular fact that you can really trust Sato as a film critic, something rare in Japan; you always know he is speaking for himself and not for his old sensei, or for some film company, or for his country. No one listens—not to me nor to any of the other speakers. Once eating begins the ears are stopped. Me too. I put away large quantities of lobster and caviar and uni and don’t hear a word from anyone.

Nov 3, 1997
To see a 1936 [Mikio] Naruse film, Kimi to Iku Michi (“The Road to You,” the title might be rendered), which no one had seen since its premiere. Toho had finally been prevailed to make a screening print. And there in the audience was a dapper gentleman in his ’80s who was introduced as Hideo Saeki, one of the actors in the film. He was interviewed on the stage and told us a bit about making [it] and then said that, of all the actors and technicians who worked on that film, only he survived. He hoped, he said, that they were all up their watching today, and then he broke into tears. It was very sudden, the way that real, wrenching sorrow has, surprising in its vehemence. Then the film begin and what no one had seen in 60 years was before us—including Hideo himself at 20, strong, athletic, handsome.

Oct 31, 1998
To the opening of the Tokyo International Film Festival. There I found Non-chan [Teruyo Nogami]. We sat together and talked about Kurosawa. He had his last script all done and even had the money for it but kept putting it off because he said that he would have had to direct it from a wheel chair and that that was just too mitomonai—maybe “unseemly” would be the best translation.

A tall, young man came up to talk with her and I was introduced. Kurosawa’s grandson. When he left I told her that I had met him before, when he was four or so, at one of his grandfather’s birthday parties. She said he probably wouldn’t have remembered me. This led us to talk about gone and vanished friends. I said we were just about the last left. And she smiled and quoted a poem about two leaves, the last left on the old tree.

The funeral mood was maintained by the minute of silence as we all stood and observed the death of Kurosawa. After that Armageddon, two hours and half of mindless noise and violence, so crudely made that there was no tempo, no pace, no suspense. All the scenes seemed four seconds long and even the narrative barely survived. It was a feature-length music video with Bruce Willis in it. It seemed lively but this was really the galvanized jerkings of a corpse.

June 2, 1999
With Michael Rayns to the National Film Center to see Gosho’s Where Chimneys are Seen. Since it was shot largely on location, there unreels 1953 Tokyo. The Ueno plaza with its statue of Saigo where I walk almost every Sunday—how small the trees were, and how empty the view. I see the old Nikkatsu Theatre down there, long gone, long forgotten. One of the scenes is right in front of where I now live. It is filled with construction and the lake seems smaller. Also there seems to be no Benten Temple, now the principal ornament of my view. The present structure was postwar I knew, but more than eight years postwar? What moves me most are the people—that friendly, ragged, wily, beautiful and hopeful crew that I can never forget, even now that they are extinct.

The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 is published by Stone Bridge Press. www.stonebridge.com

Copyright Metropolis Japan Today

Posted at 6:34 PM · Comments (0)

August 28, 2005
IN THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family’s first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country’s best butterfly hunting.
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On those trips, during sudden rainstorms, bouts of insomnia, long drives, and flashes of impromptu inspiration in this or that alpine meadow, the Russian emigre Nabokov began to jot down on three-by-five-inch cards a singular story. This story was to become the greatest and most controversial American novel of the 20th century: ”Lolita.”
The summer over, Nabokov continued work on the scandalous tale of the middle-aged Humbert Humbert’s love for 12-year-old Dolores Haze. He spent long hours in the libraries of Cornell University—where he had become a professor of Russian literature—reading psychological case studies so as to more effectively impersonate the tones and torments of a madman. He rode around in schoolbuses in order to get the feel of American children’s slang. Despite his efforts, the diabolically difficult task he had set himself frustrated Nabokov so much that one day in 1950 he decided to put an end to his suffering and took the unfinished manuscript and note cards to the incinerator behind his house. His wife caught him just in time.
When the 54-year-old Nabokov at last finished ”Lolita” in 1953, it was his 12th novel and his third in English. He presented it to a publisher and was told that the book was excellent, but that if he published it they would both go to jail. He remained tight-lipped on the subject of his new work, and decided to publish it under a pseudonym. With time, however, it became clear to him that nothing was more likely to attract the attention of the censors than anonymous publication, and agreed to publish the work under his own name.
”Lolita” appeared in two pale green volumes from the Paris-based Olympia Press in September 1955. Few readers took notice of the foreign publication until December, when Graham Greene, writing in the London Sunday Times, included the book by the virtually unknown Nabokov in his list of the three best he had read that year. John Gordon, a conservative Scottish editor, examined the unexpected entry in Graham’s list and shortly thereafter denounced it in the Sunday Express as ”the filthiest book I have ever read,” adding that it was ”sheer unrestrained pornography.” Sales soared, interest increased, and when, after much fearful hesitation on the part of publishers, the work was published in an American edition in 1958, it spent six months as No. 1 on the bestseller charts.
”Lolita” was a disturbing book—both in its manner and its matter. Its matter is the relationship—sexual and other—of a European professor and his pubescent American stepdaughter, who he calls by the pet-name Lolita. The book’s manner is more difficult to describe. Its form is a faux first-person memoir written, in the words of the dubious European in question, ”first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion.” Nabokov’s narrator composes the text in 56 days, at a feverishly brilliant pace. He takes personal, narrative, and linguistic liberties (his native language is French) which are as surprising as they are amusing. He shows brilliance in virtually every respect. The name he elects to write under is Humbert Humbert.
…
In 1958, ”L’Affaire Lolita,” as the French had christened it, was just beginning its long career. The following year, Nabokov wrote a screenplay based on his novel for Stanley Kubrick and James Harris. The 1962 film propelled Kubrick’s career and its success allowed the Nabokovs to retire to Switzerland.
But stranger forms of reception were already underway. As Kubrick was beginning to film, an Israeli guard in a Jerusalem prison gave a copy of ”Lolita” to Adolf Eichmann, who was awaiting trial. An indignant Eichmann returned the book two days later, calling it ”a very unwholesome book.” The sulphurous halo of Nabokov’s novel was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960 and it seems that Eichmann’s guard gave the book to him as an experiment—a sort of litmus test for radical evil: to see whether the real-life villain, he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents, would coldly, or even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov’s creation.
The incident nicely encapsulates the debates which have animated the book’s reception in the past 50 years. Many gifted readers have found ”Lolita” a beautiful and rending tale of love and loss. And many gifted readers have found it a shameless apology for sin and style irrespective of moral content.
A hint as to how best to read it is offered in a foreword to the novel. Therein ”John Ray Jr., PhD” explains how Humbert Humbert’s manuscript, titled ”Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male,” came into his possession and why he has agreed to see it into print. He warns that in reading one will be ”entranced with the book while abhorring its author.” The forward was written by none other than Nabokov himself (over the course of the novel this becomes clear—but not so clear that an English press as late as 1979 was fooled and published an edition with the foreword replaced by one commissioned from Nabokov enthusiast Martin Amis). What has so fascinated and divided readers is how one should react to the novel. Or, in other words, how to be ”entranced with the book while abhorring its author.”
The author in question, however, is not Nabokov, but his mesmerizing creation Humbert Humbert. In interviews and essays Nabokov was careful to underline that Humbert was a ”scoundrel” and a ”rogue.” But Nabokov was also careful to underline that Humbert was not only a scoundrel and a rogue. ”In his last stage he is a moral man,” wrote Nabokov of the turn in Humbert’s thinking which takes place at the end of the novel, ”because he realizes that he loves Lolita like any woman should be loved. But it is too late, he has destroyed her childhood.”
Lolita is the story of Humbert Humbert’s ”nymphelepsy”—and, more particularly, his love for a particular ”nymphet.” A nymphet is not just any young girl, and not just any lovely young girl. Discerning one, as Humbert ecstatically explains, requires an artistic sensitivity—and leads one to the heart of his undertaking.
”A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one,” Humbert tells us, ”will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!)…”
Humbert prides himself on this artistic sensibility, and more and more compares his love for Lolita to that of an artist for the elusive image he is trying to realize in a given work of art. With startling refinement and real cunning Humbert begins then to lead his readers down a dangerous path.
…
One of Lolita’s finest readers and first defenders, Lionel Trilling, wrote as early as 1958 that in reading the book, ”we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents…. we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.”
Humbert’s seductive force comes in large part from his freakish rhetorical gifts—and also in large part for one of the seductive comparisons he repeatedly evokes. Just as an artist is first and foremost responsible to his or her own inspiration, Humbert describes himself as first and foremost responsible to his passion. He is soon so consumed by the kindling of his own senses that despite his powers of perception and despite his sensitivity, he acts with callousness and coldness to the nymphet he claims to so ardently love. The lesson he learns he learns ”too late.”
It is this lesson learned too late which spurs him to a special undertaking—the writing of his ”confession.” Nabokov has Humbert compose a memoir in which he narrates not from the point of view of the regret and repentance which is his own at the time of writing, but from that of the euphoria and haunted rapture which preceded it. He writes from the perspective through which he had gradually persuaded himself that what he was doing to young Lolita could be explained, could be justified, was not so bad after all.
This device allows for the fine pattern of remorse running along the blade of his ”conspiratorial dagger,” as he cryptically calls it, to remain for a time invisible. When it ceases to be so, and when he ceases to recreate and relate his coldness for the sake of what he calls ”retrospective verisimilitude,” the reader can at last understand why he had chosen to call that dagger ”conspiratorial” in the first place.
Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire? ”Tum-tee-tum. And once more—TUM!,” wrote Nabokov in his 1934 novel ”Despair,” told from the perspective of an earlier murderer and madman who thinks himself an artist. ”I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April fool of someone. And a damned good fool I have made of someone. Who is he? Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror.”
Bertrand Russell once noted that there is nothing so useful to a democracy as the immunization against eloquence, and Humbert’s memoir should be seen in a similar light. What he ultimately tells his readers is: What I have done is monstrous, let no amount of eloquence ever convince you that such acts are anything but. Look at them for what they are. Look at them for the pain they cause.
Stated somewhat differently, the most brilliant American novel of the 20th century, now a round and ripe 50 years old, tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world of words—and that this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of words.
Leland de la Durantaye is an assistant professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted at 1:12 AM · Comments (0)

TOKYO - Copyright The Financial Times

Deaths exceeded births in Japan by 31,000 in the first six months of this year, raising the prospect the number of people in the world’s second biggest economy has started shrinking two years earlier than expected.

In the six months to June, the Health Ministry reported that the number of deaths totalled 568,671 against 537,637 births.

The ministry also said it was possible the full-year figure could fall. That would be two years before the population had been expected to peak, at 127m, in 2007.

Excluding the war years, when Japan suspended its population census, this was the first decline since records began. If current trends continue, the population will shrink for the rest of the century, with the severest estimates suggesting it could drop to 45m by 2100. The problems that a declining population may pose for Japan’s pension system, tax base and labour market are emerging as an important theme of next month’s general election. Immigration is negligible in Japan.

In an interview with the FT, Heizo Takenaka, economy minister, said changing demographics was Japan’s biggest challenge.

“From now on, the total population of Japan will start falling,” he said. “That means if we don’t create a system in which the private sector can carry more responsibility, the burden on taxpayers and on the state will become unsustainable.”

Mr Takenaka, who is also minister for postal reform, said privatising the post office, the world’s biggest financial institution, was a litmus test for whether Japan’s citizens understood the urgency of the challenge.

“This is a choice between big and small government,” he said, adding that in decisive moments of its history, such as after the war and following the oil shocks of the 1970s, Japan had shown a remarkable ability to embrace swift change.

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan has also stressed the population issue, saying a declining labour force that needs to support ever greater numbers of retirees will necessitate a root-and-branch overhaul of pension provision.

In its manifesto, the party proposes simplifying the pension system by merging several public schemes. It would also raise consumption tax - probably by three points to 8 per cent - to help pay for retired people. It is also proposing big cuts to state spending, particularly on public works.

The DPJ specifically addresses the task of encouraging couples to have more children. In parts of Tokyo, the birth rate has dropped to 0.7 children per woman, against 2.1 needed to maintain the population.

The opposition party is proposing a substantial increase in payments to families with children, regardless of income. It is also promising to improve funding for childcare, the scarcity of which is seen as a big obstacle to increasing births.

Last year, the number of Japanese men shrank for the first time, presaging a fall in the population as a whole.

Posted at 7:16 PM · Comments (0)

TOKYO

Deaths exceeded births in Japan by 31,000 in the first six months of this year, raising the prospect the number of people in the world’s second biggest economy has started shrinking two years earlier than expected.

In the six months to June, the Health Ministry reported that the number of deaths totalled 568,671 against 537,637 births.

The ministry also said it was possible the full-year figure could fall. That would be two years before the population had been expected to peak, at 127m, in 2007.

Excluding the war years, when Japan suspended its population census, this was the first decline since records began. If current trends continue, the population will shrink for the rest of the century, with the severest estimates suggesting it could drop to 45m by 2100. The problems that a declining population may pose for Japan’s pension system, tax base and labour market are emerging as an important theme of next month’s general election. Immigration is negligible in Japan.

In an interview with the FT, Heizo Takenaka, economy minister, said changing demographics was Japan’s biggest challenge.

“From now on, the total population of Japan will start falling,” he said. “That means if we don’t create a system in which the private sector can carry more responsibility, the burden on taxpayers and on the state will become unsustainable.”

Mr Takenaka, who is also minister for postal reform, said privatising the post office, the world’s biggest financial institution, was a litmus test for whether Japan’s citizens understood the urgency of the challenge.

“This is a choice between big and small government,” he said, adding that in decisive moments of its history, such as after the war and following the oil shocks of the 1970s, Japan had shown a remarkable ability to embrace swift change.

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan has also stressed the population issue, saying a declining labour force that needs to support ever greater numbers of retirees will necessitate a root-and-branch overhaul of pension provision.

In its manifesto, the party proposes simplifying the pension system by merging several public schemes. It would also raise consumption tax - probably by three points to 8 per cent - to help pay for retired people. It is also proposing big cuts to state spending, particularly on public works.

The DPJ specifically addresses the task of encouraging couples to have more children. In parts of Tokyo, the birth rate has dropped to 0.7 children per woman, against 2.1 needed to maintain the population.

The opposition party is proposing a substantial increase in payments to families with children, regardless of income. It is also promising to improve funding for childcare, the scarcity of which is seen as a big obstacle to increasing births.

Last year, the number of Japanese men shrank for the first time, presaging a fall in the population as a whole.

Posted at 7:16 PM · Comments (0)

Dacapo (Sept. 9)

“Tomoko-chan,” who comes across as a young lady of good breeding,
awaits
Hiroshi on the sofa, motionless and expressionless. The air
conditioning is
set to a cool 21 degrees, but Hiroshi still can’t keep from perspiring.
Does
his discomfort stem from nervousness? Or is it just revulsion at the
clammy
sensation of “Tomoko-chan” ‘s silicone skin?

“Where’s my libido when I need it?” Hiroshi moans.

A 21-year-old student, Hiroshi was enlisted by Dacapo to report on a
visit
to “LaLa,” a newly opened shop in Tokyo’s Akihabara district that rents
private rooms furnished with a bath, toilet and, one other item …
life-size female “mannequins.”

Businesses renting sex dolls have been springing up rapidly over the
past
two years, and may currently number over 100 in the Tokyo area alone.
Most
specialize in home delivery, but LaLa’s stable of 17 latex ladies do
their
entertaining on the premises.

“Tomoko,” whose proper designation is “Dutch wife,” boasts a solid
torso and
limbs as opposed to being inflatable. “She” stands 150 cm tall and
weighs 28
kg. To purchase one of her kind outright would cost 600,000 yen; but at
LaLa, the pleasure of her company may be obtained at the rate of 12,000
yen
for 90 minutes.

“On a really good day, we might get as many as 30 customers ,” the
store’s
manager tells Dacapo. “Our patrons range in age from teens to men in
their
60s. For the most part they appear to be quiet, timid types, who
probably
feel more at ease with a doll than a young chick.

“Some bring along shopping bags with a couple of extra costumes. I
suppose
they enjoy dressing up the dolls and taking snapshots.”

Upon entering LaLa, Hiroshi received an instruction sheet that reads,
“Your
doll will not make remarks or engage in ‘selfish’ activities, but won’t
say
anything else, such as ‘It hurts,’ either. Her body is more delicate
than
that of a real human. Bending the joints or fingers in an unnatural
manner
can result in breakage to the skin, so please handle her gently.”

After watching an erotic DVD to get himself in the proper frame of
mind,
Hiroshi set about to the task of seduction.

“After I undressed her, I was upset to see that her head hadn’t been
properly screwed on,” he grumbles.

Did the earth move, for Hiroshi at least?

“Well, I felt something,” he admits. “But it gave me something of a
guilt
trip, and I was asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ and I guess at
that
point I got completely turned off.”

Takuya, Hiroshi’s classmate, found his doll — a prim, bespectacled
type
dressed in a stewardess uniform and named Alice — a bit more
congenial.

“There was no problem in the missionary position, but with some of the
others we tried I had to hold her up, and since she was quite heavy my
arms
got tired. “I kept thinking of previous enjoyable experiences, and was
finally able to go all the way.”

Still, the dolls’ overall impression clearly leaves something to be
desired.

“It made me realize how futile it can feel to convey love that doesn’t
get
reciprocated,” Takuya philosophizes.

Considering that LaLa’s rates are the same as shops featuring real
females,
Dacapo concludes that the doll rental business, which requires extra
effort
on the part of customers, really has its work cut out.

The Japan Times: Aug. 28, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 1:34 AM · Comments (0)

A cosmic thinker from way back, which all by itself makes him a rarity among prominent public figures, he is also a man of the cloth, which endows his utterances with special gravitas. What gives his observations unusual resonance, moreover, is that he voices them on his very own television show, which commands a loyal and attentive audience of some one million souls.

Unlike many of his fellow preachers who confine themselves to more traditional admonishments of flawed morality and human foible, Mr. Robertson demonstrates scant reluctance to identify with admirable specificity the divine retribution that is destined to issue from sinful behavior. He has warned, for example, of natural disasters wreaking their havoc on Orlando, Fla., because of the congeries of gay visitors to Disney World. And, while there have been the usual meteorological explanations for the inordinate number of hurricanes that have lashed the state, we wonder.

Not surprisingly for a man who sought the presidency, Mr. Robertson has an abiding interest in affairs of state, and his views on that score can also be refreshingly unorthodox. Take his latest pronouncement on Hugo Chavez, the pesky president of Venezuela. As Mr. Robertson explained, Chavez is a bee in our bonnet, a chum of Fidel Castro and, with malice aforethought, is turning his oil-rich country into a “launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism” in our backyard. So why not just take out the bugger?

A man with a keen appreciation of balance sheets and income statements, Mr. Robertson pointed out that eliminating Mr. Chavez would be a “whole lot cheaper than starting a war” to get rid of the rogue. And he added reassuringly that a little assassination wasn’t apt to interrupt oil shipments.

Needless to say, the shilly-shalliers at the State Department were appalled at the straight-from-the-shoulder proposal and were quick to go public with a rousing denunciation of it as “inappropriate.” After consulting with Defense Department lawyers, Donald Rumsfeld somewhat regretfully opined that it would be illegal.

Predictably, Mr. Robertson’s suggestion prompted a paroxysm of harrumphing from lily-livered liberals and the like (if you don’t like, just leave it at from lily-livered liberals). Jesse Jackson urged the FCC to launch an investigation as it did after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during the half-time show at the Super Bowl on the grounds that “This is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ballgame.”

A close call, we’d say.

The fuss proved sufficiently discomforting for Mr. Robertson to cause him to recant. Which, frankly, we feel is a shame. Not that we believe dispatching Mr. Chavez is a particularly compelling priority. But the concept of effecting regime change on the cheap appeals to us.

Certainly, even the most cursory spectator of the global political scene can rattle off the names of at least a dozen no-good-niks who would be ideal candidates for the coup de grâce. And they don’t even have to be mass murderers or ethnic cleansers; blamed nuisances would do fine. And we needn’t worry too much about world opinion: We could always outsource the work. If the administration is right and everything is going to be hunky-dory in Iraq, there’ll be a lot of idle assassins hanging around street corners in Baghdad who’d be only too happy to pick up a few bucks. Or, we could insource the job to the Mafia, whose business, thanks to the zeal of prosecutors and the eagerness of capos to spill the fava beans, isn’t the killer it used to be.

Come to think of it, the approach is fraught with possibilities right here in the good old USA. It might be a quite useful device for our own polity as a kind of permanent term limit for especially deserving office holders. It also might prove an extremely efficacious tool for corporate governance as a means of getting rid of crooked CEOs, a quick and irrevocable way to enhance shareholder value (avoiding those costly golden handshakes, etc). And it holds particular promise for our own beloved Wall Street, where capital crimes are committed every day and the perpetrators live to crow about it.

Thank you, Mr. Robertson.

Copyright Barrons

Posted at 2:54 AM · Comments (0)

August 15, 2005

Remember Japan? Back in the early 1980s the Land of the Rising Sun was, once again, the world’s most feared invader. But instead of military might, the new Japan was rallying behind industrial muscle and corporate audacity. Icons such as the Rockefeller Center and MGM Studios were being scooped up like so many billion-dollar baubles. As Japanese cars and televisions flooded the market, Westerners marvelled at the country’s technological wizardry and its phalanx of tireless workers whose labour was only stopped short by karoshi — Japanese for death by overwork. Who could compete with that? At the time, it seemed, a new world was dawning and Japan would be its champion. It all seemed inevitable, right up until it fell apart.

Fast-forward 20 years and the world is facing a new Asian deluge. If Japan was a surging tide, then China is a tsunami. The globe’s most populous country turned manufacturing juggernaut has a one-two punch of low-cost labour and homegrown national champions taking the world by storm. Its economy, which has been growing above nine per cent for a decade, has already surpassed Japan’s in size, and is expected to overtake the U.S. by 2040. Its voracious appetite for energy and resources has sent commodity prices skyrocketing and its cheap manufactured goods power consumer spending around the globe. With its sheer drive for material success, after centuries of deprivation, China seems unstoppable. But is it? Or is it just history repeating itself?

At its apex, Japan’s economy crumbled like a house of cards. The yen, which had been kept weak to promote exports, was engineered upward to rein in fast growth, igniting a speculative real estate bubble. When it burst, the banks, which had lent money to companies based on their real estate equity, were left virtually bankrupt. Trillions in personal and corporate wealth disappeared overnight. The implosion revealed structural rot beneath the economy’s seemingly ironclad exterior. The upshot was 15 years of stagnation that Japan is only just now emerging from.

China is, in many ways, following in the footsteps of Japan’s early success. Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Mundell recently compared China’s ramp-up to Japan’s beginnings as a low cost manufacturer in the 1950s and ’60s. And now, like Japan was in the 1980s, China is focused on expanding into international markets and on developing its own technology for sale to the world.

But other similarities are more disturbing. Andy Xie, chief Asia economist with U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley, points to the US$350 billion in speculative “hot money” that has poured into China in recent years on the expectation that its currency, the renminbi (or yuan), would appreciate. Much of that money has been parked in real estate as the recently privatized housing market goes through an unprecedented boom. In Shanghai, prices skyrocketed by 28 per cent last year, with sleek condo towers, office high-rises, hotels and malls being thrown up at a breakneck pace. The vacancy rate officially stands at 2.7 per cent, but anecdotal evidence suggests up to 40 per cent of the new space sits empty.

Speculators just got their first whiff of the potential payoff after the Chinese government bowed last month to mounting international pressure to revalue the renminbi, abandoning its decade-old peg to the U.S. dollar. China’s central bank has pledged to keep a tight rein on the currency, which was tweaked a mere 2.1 per cent and will now trade within a narrow band against a basket of international currencies. But Bridgewater Associates, a U.S. asset manager, estimates that with the renminbi now unleashed, a 25- to 30-per-cent gain is “inevitable” over the next three years.

If currency traders are right, the revaluation heightens the risk of a massive exodus from real estate, as speculators look to cash in. Observers fear that could, in turn, push the country’s already shaky banking sector into a tailspin. “The revaluation of the renminbi enhances the possibility for a tremendous amount of property to hit the market, and prices will go into a free fall,” says Ken DeWoskin, a well-known sinologist, and a partner at U.S. accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in Beijing. “It’s the most significant crisis on the horizon.”

Still, many don’t believe China is headed for a Japanese-style collapse. “We talk about it behind closed doors,” says one Beijing-based adviser to the government, who preferred not to be identified. “But the consensus is, it won’t happen here.” There are plenty of differences between the two economies. Unlike Japan’s insular economy, China has become the leading destination for foreign investment, sucking in US$260 billion in the past five years. Foreign multinationals account for nearly 60 per cent of its exports. China also has a cheap and flexible workforce. And, unlike many other developing countries, it has virtually no external debt and a high savings rate.

Even with all those advantages, however, China is still vulnerable, in part because its phenomenal success has blinded many in the government and the ruling Communist party to rising economic and political risks. “Many of the new generation of leaders are overly confident,” the government adviser says. “They’ve gone from a planned economy to a market economy and they have never gone through a recession or severe economic downturn. It’s hard for them to imagine China could ever go through an economic curve like every other country in the world. They don’t appear to be bracing themselves for the real potential problems.”

And the problems, like everything in China, are mind-bogglingly huge. At their heart is a dysfunctional, corrupt and virtually bankrupt financial system. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the country’s banks have racked up as much as US$800 billion in bad loans, mostly doled out to weak state-owned enterprises that churn out cheap, inferior products in a thinly veiled effort to keep millions employed in the absence of a social safety net.

The government in Beijing has tried to clean up the banks’ books and present a semblance of financial order by offloading US$325 billion in bad debt to state-run asset management companies. But, like the banks, these groups are headed by Communist party officials, and they’ve shown little interest in disposing of the loans. Instead, they prefer to swap the bad assets among themselves at inflated prices financed by central bank loans. Reminiscent of Japan’s failure to settle ailing accounts in the 1990s, the Chinese asset managers have dumped less than a third of their bad debts since 1999, collecting just 20 cents on the dollar.

While all that debt languishes in murky obscurity, a new crop is being groomed. The government, anxious to lure more foreign investment and bulk up production capacity, has been on a frenetic building spree — investing in high-speed railways, power generation and state-of the-art airports. New steel mills, concrete plants and aluminum smelters have sprouted up like weeds, while five-star hotels gather dust in provincial backwaters alongside deserted golf courses.

The level of capital investment, equivalent to half of China’s gross domestic product, is not only highly inefficient, but unprecedented, says DeWoskin. “No other economy in the world has reinvested in the economy to such a degree. It’s a situation that is fundamentally not sustainable.” In addition to some US$500 billion in bad loans generated as of 2003, as much as another US$300 billion is in the pipeline, says Mike Harris, a partner at PwC in Beijing. “It’s pretty frightening if you think about it.”

So far, Beijing has solved its problems by throwing more money at them. Flush with a whopping US$711 billion in foreign currency reserves, the government recently spent US$60 billion bailing out three of the country’s biggest banks, and is expected to put up another US$15 billion to revive the moribund stock market, among the world’s worst performing exchanges and currently limping along at an eight-year low. More money is expected to flow to dozens of brokerages teetering on the edge of insolvency after dabbling in shady financing schemes.

But the bills keep mounting. Standard & Poor’s, the U.S. rating agency, estimates it would cost as much as US$190 billion just to clean up two of the country’s largest banks. Then there is some US$314 billion in provincial and local government debt, and mounting military budgets. Add another US$250 billion in rising petroleum and energy costs needed to feed China’s unbridled growth, and the stash of foreign currency starts to look “inadequate,” as DeWoskin says. “Pressure is building for some kind of adjustment,” he adds. “What we don’t know is if it’s imminent or if things can keep going for another 10 years.”

Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, has been predicting China’s financial downfall for years. Given the country’s already heavy fiscal burden, a slew of new non-performing loans coupled with a downturn in the economy could be the last straw. “The question is, when the economy goes through a downturn, how many loans are going to go bad?” says Lardy. “Will it be manageable, or a massive tsunami that the banks can’t handle?”

And there is little doubt that there will be a downturn eventually. The government is trying to hold things together until after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. But there are indications that the delicate balancing act of government-subsidized production is beginning to teeter under the strain of overcapacity and ballooning inventories. Foreign investment is down, costs are rising, and profits are being squeezed as consumer prices on everything from cellphones to air conditioners continue to drop.

Market watchers believe real growth going forward should be in the six- to seven-per-cent range. While that is still more than double what Canada can expect to see, it’s a sudden deceleration for China and a definite cause for concern to the government, observers say. (Although the official growth rate was 9.5 per cent in 2004, economists estimate the real number was somewhere between 11 and 15 per cent.) Such a slowdown opens up a whole new set of concerns for the ruling Communist party, whose grip on power is a result of two central precepts: creating wealth and keeping a lid on the always latent threat of social unrest. With 12 to 15 million people entering the workforce each year, the party needs to keep the economy humming at a minimum seven-per- cent growth. “China works on a bicycle theory,” explains Yuen Pau Woo, chief economist at the Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation. “You have to keep going forward. If you don’t, you fall off the bicycle and you may not be able to get back on again.”

To keep the economic wheels spinning and attract more foreign capital into its wobbly financial sector, Beijing has been working hard to clean up its four largest banks — adopting Western-style management and accounting practices in preparation for their debut on international stock markets. Foreign banks like HSBC and Bank of America, anxious to get in on China’s US$1.5 trillion in banked savings, have been buying in at every opportunity. But again, some see more pitfalls than potential.

Many of the banks’ balance sheets are inflated by dubious bonds that are not guaranteed by the government. So, if the economy does hit a soft spot and the banks are forced into bankruptcy, foreign investors would be left holding the bag for billions in losses. In the words of Elliot Wilson, a financial journalist with the Hong Kong-based Standard newspaper, investing in Chinese banks is “like a man betting his kid’s college fund on a three-legged horse.”

The real wild card, though, is corruption. The financial system is rife with tales of skulduggery involving billions of dollars and top bank officials. The former chairman of the China Construction Bank is serving a 12-year jail sentence for graft, and his successor stepped down in March, under investigation by the party for “violation of discipline.” Some of the more startling stories include a bank manager who disappeared with US$100 million in cash, and another scheme involving 69 people charged with stealing US$894 million in bank funds.

Many are hopeful the threat of an economic slowdown will force the party to speed up much-needed reforms, but others remain skeptical. The government is relatively untested when it comes to stick-handling delicate fiscal matters, and its ability to make quick, informed decisions is bogged down by a glacial adherence to consensus-building and a generation of leaders born of the immensely destructive Cultural Revolution.

That raises many frightening possibilities, not just for China but for all those investors who’ve pumped billions into its rickety institutions. “If the Chinese banks collapse, the whole world economy collapses,” Wilson warns. “The world economy is very dependent on China in ways we still don’t completely fathom, and we won’t for another five or 10 years.” We do, however, know this: when Japan arrived at its day of reckoning, the rest of the world escaped relatively unscathed, and the lessons learned faded quickly. Should the same fate befall China, the pain will be spread far and wide. It’s not something we’re likely to forget.

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Copyright - The International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2005

LONDON No one living in China is more daring than the maverick writer Yu Jie. He recently said of the memorial to Japan’s war dead: “We criticize the Yasukuni Shrine, but we have Mao Zedong’s shrine in the middle of Beijing, which is our own Yasukuni. This is a shame to me, because Mao Zedong killed more Chinese than the Japanese did. Until we are able to recognize our own problems, the Japanese won’t take us seriously.”
For China’s Communist Party, there are two first-degree thought crimes here. First, Mao’s huge portrait still looms over Tiananmen Square and China’s current leaders claim to be his heirs. Second, Beijing regularly condemns Japanese prime ministers for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine to venerate dead soldiers, including those hanged as World War II criminals. Anti-Japanese demonstrations in Chinese cities are encouraged by the government; any other public protest risks prompt and violent suppression. Yu Jie, therefore, stepped deliberately into China’s most dangerous political minefield.
What Yu stated is true. The Japanese behaved with uninhibited cruelty during their war in China from the late 1930s to 1945 and some estimates of Chinese deaths in those years approach 20 million. But because of Mao’s ideologically driven agricultural policies, 30 to 50 million Chinese are estimated to have starved to death between 1959 and 1961 alone; in their new biography of the Chairman, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday suggest that during his rule more than 70 million Chinese died - in peacetime.
Mao challenged his comrades, metaphorically, to touch the hind end of a tiger. Few took him up on this dare. Yu Jie does it regularly. Last year he and five others wrote in a Hong Kong magazine that Mao’s body should be removed from the enormous tomb in Tiananmen Square and shipped back to his birthplace. This “would elevate the status of Beijing into that of a civilized capital, and make it fit to stage a ‘civilized Olympics’ in 2008. We certainly do not want to see the farce of the Olympic flag flying over a city in which a corpse is worshiped.”
To dispute the Party’s view on such issues often attracts severe retribution. Yu Jie has tackled them all in his characteristically blunt way. On the nationwide demonstrations in the spring of 1989 and the June 4 killings in Tiananmen, he observed: “From that day onwards I insisted on being an independent and intelligent human being and vowed to fight lies. I became an adult overnight. That night, amid tears, I could see clearly what was good and evil, what was freedom and slavery, what was darkness and light. From then on, no one could lie to me and make a fool of me any more.”
In another one of his banned books, “Rejecting Lies,” Yu confronted those whom Tiananmen frightened into compliance. “Under the pressure of ideology and the temptation of market economy, intellectuals have not become the society’s pillar in the midst of the breakdown of moral values but have become the most thoroughly corrupt bunch of people.”
Yu claims that the Party encourages anti-Japanese outrage because it dreads mass discontent. “Philosophies such as Marxism-Leninism and Communism are entirely losing their attractiveness. With the gunshots in 1989, they have collapsed like soap bubbles. Being in this situation, the Chinese Communist Party is soliciting new concepts to unify the Chinese society. Nationalism or patriotism seems operable to fill the vacuum left by Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s Communism.”
Now 30, Yu started his defiance early. In 1997, when he was a graduate student at Beijing University, he attacked the Party for snuffing out the spirit of democracy that in the early 1920s had inspired many young Chinese. One of the founders of the Chinese branch of the writers’ union PEN, he champions other writers who touch the tiger’s backside. He is a Christian, he supports America’s war in Iraq and he wishes China had a spiritual leader like the Dalai Lama. He has been arrested and detained and his computer has been searched and confiscated.
Those who heard Yu Jie last year during his brief U.S. lecture tour wonder how long he will remain at large. But in 2000, after being turned down for a job at the China Writers’ Association, Yu said: “From this moment on, the one who lives in fear will not be me, it will be those fellows who hide in the dark corners. From this moment on, I will live out in the sunlight. I will live a fuller and happier life.”
(Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist specializing in Chinese affairs.)

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2005

HONG KONG South Korea has long had a habit of thinking ahead and investing heavily in the future. So its latest goal of driving up its birth rate is a signal to other countries in the region to consider the consequences of present fertility trends. Japan and much of Europe should do the same; they fret about their own woeful fertility but either take refuge in technical fixes to pension challenges or do nothing. They decline to penalize those who expect a pension but do not contribute to the workforce of the future.
For now, South Korea’s population is still much younger than Japan’s, which started its demographic transition a decade earlier. But unless its procreation campaign succeeds, it will be in the same position as Japan, or worse, by 2035. Japan’s population is already in decline.
Whether Korea can achieve its goal, however, is quite another matter. Korean sense of racial identity may be a spur to parenthood, but it has been of scant influence in an equally ethnocentric Japan. Unusually low fertility rates now seem the reality in a neo-Confucian society that is supposed to stress family values. The fertility of East Asian urban residents is now below Europe’s lowest levels.
The outcome for Northeast Asia as a whole will have a major impact on the balance of power within the region and vis-à-vis South Asia and Southeast Asia within two generations. While education, technology, political cohesion and resources are also crucial, demographics play a major role in power equations.
Southeast Asia is, as it always was, quite different from Northeast Asia. This can be partly traced to the greater customary equality of the sexes in matters of inheritance, economic opportunity and marriage rights, which pre-dated the arrival of Islam, Christianity and Confucius and still survives to some degree from Myanmar to Bali. The pro-male sex imbalances found in China are absent in Southeast Asia.
In the short term, too, demographics will play a huge part in determining relative rates of economic growth. That spells trouble for all of Northeast Asia and Singapore, where the percentage of working-age people is now close to its peak - the 19-and-under cohorts are getting smaller, but the number of over-60s is still modest.
Even in Thailand, already only 30 percent of the population is now under 20 years of age compared with 39 percent in Vietnam, where the sharp decline in fertility is quite recent. Thailand is a lot better off than China, Taiwan and Korea, all around 27 percent but far short of Indonesia’s 39 percent, Malaysia’s 42 percent and India’s 43 percent. Youth is scarcest in Hong Kong - a mere 21 percent of the population is under 20 years old.
If today’s outlook is grim for societies long used to imagining themselves as youthful, tomorrow’s is worse. Even in Thailand, the fertility rate (births per woman of child-bearing age) is under the replacement level. As for Northeast Asia, Hong Kong is at the bottom of the table, with a rate of just 0.9, but the rest of the region and Singapore are little better. Japan’s low fertility has long been known, but Korea’s at 1.2 is now even lower, slightly worse than Taiwan’s. All their rates are now lower than Russia’s.
China’s fertility is slightly higher, but its future situation is almost certainly worse than the raw number - 1.7 - suggests, due to the 15 percent excess of boys over girls in the youngest groups and to the likelihood that any easing of the one-child policy will be offset by urbanization. Fertility rates in major Chinese cities are exceptionally low - 0.8 in Shanghai.
Could it be that after centuries of being oppressed, women in these newly industrialized Confucian societies have finally acquired economic independence and are rebelling against tradition? It may not be mere coincidence that Japan and Korea, countries where the subservient role of women has long been most apparent, now have by far the lowest fertility rates, the city-states excluded. In East Asia, educated women in Singapore are showing a marked reluctance to marry. The same applies in Hong Kong, which imports brides from the mainland, and Taiwan, which imports them from Vietnam and elsewhere.
Looking ahead, Korea’s problem might be temporarily relieved by reunification with the North, where despite food shortages, fertility is around 2. But otherwise, societies face either radical decline or radical change in birth rates. Even if immigration were socially acceptable in Japan and Korea, it would have to be on a massive scale - assuming that the goal is eventual population stability, Japan would need half a million immigrants a year to make up for its birth shortfall.
Demographic projections are notoriously unreliable. But the issue for East Asia now is whether it responds to some alarming facts by raising its fertility rate just as it previously responded to excessive population growth with declines that now look to have been too dramatic. Those declines helped spawn economic miracles, but the price of shifting from one extreme to the other has yet to be paid.

Posted at 11:01 PM · Comments (0)

25 August 2005
The Asian Wall Street Journal
(c) 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

This summer, I took a research team to Beijing to document police abuse against petitioners for an upcoming Human Rights Watch report. In pairs and small groups, over the course of two weeks, the victims straggled into our various meeting rooms, hidden around the city. Some were on crutches after beatings in detention, while others had lost fingers to torture. Many had the blank gaze acquired over long months of imprisonment. Together, they formed a river of internal refugees fleeing state violence. In thick local dialects, they recounted experiences of police violence, including attacks by local police who came to Beijing to prevent them petitioning.

Recently, China has announced a new program aimed at solving these problems: the state will send these petitioners back to meet with local police chiefs. The program is either naive or cynical: it is like sending sheep to meet with wolves.

To be fair, in some cases, police chiefs are honest officials who act fairly. But others are the same police chiefs formerly ordered by local officials to beat petitioners, torture them, imprison them, and stop them from getting to Beijing in the first place. In a few cases — and imagining these meetings boggles the mind — they will be the very police officers who are the subjects of the original complaints.

Without basic protections against retaliation, this new program could open the door to a raft of new abuses. China must engage in thorough police reform as part of any long term solution to its dysfunctional petitioning system.

There is no question that the petitioning system, a uniquely Chinese cultural-legal institution, needs some fixing. Each year, tens of thousands of farmers and others throng Beijing in the hope that some national official will intercede in their local cases. Many are victims of official corruption, forced resettlement, and police brutality. These “petitioners,” are exercising an ancient Chinese right, protected in national law, that allows anyone to submit a complaint to the government.

Many petitioners have tried their local courts first and failed to find justice. Petitioning in Beijing is the court of last resort. However, few find satisfaction there either. Many spend their life savings while waiting for an official reply to their appeals, and wind up encamped in a shantytown of Dickensian squalor known as the “petitioners’ village” where they live on scraps scavenged from the streets. Though the labyrinthine system fails many, there are few other options under China’s weak legal system, and so the numbers of petitioners continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2005, the State Council Petitions Bureau in Beijing reported an increase of more than 90% in the numbers of letters and visits compared to the same period last year.

However, petitioners complaining in Beijing can make provincial authorities look bad to their supervisors in the capital. Thus, provincial governments send plainclothes police and thugs to Beijing, where they lie in wait for petitioners from their home province. When they find petitioners, these officers — known as “retrievers” — often beat or threaten them. Sometimes, they bundle petitioners into cars and take them back home. Some are released there, while others are thrown into detention without trial.

One man we met from Henan province in central China had been petitioning for decades and been “retrieved” many times. His saga began when a local official hired thugs to kill his father over a land claim. Finding no justice in Henan, he petitioned in Beijing. There he was grabbed by provincial “retrievers” who permanently crippled his two middle fingers, and then took him to a detention center in Henan — in fact an unused army barracks. They kept him there to cook for them for a while, but after a blizzard shut down the unheated facility, the police told him he was free to go. He immediately returned to Beijing to petition, and said he had been seized in the same way and beaten multiple times. He no longer dares to leave the petitioners’ village.

His tale was extreme, but not unusual. Petitioners are often imprisoned in local detention centers for exercising their legally-guaranteed right to petition. One petitioner in her sixties told us that when she demanded to know why she was being imprisoned, “The officers said, `You’ve done nothing illegal. This is to stop you from petitioning.’”

Ironically, and tragically, many of the petitioners thus mistreated are petitioning over police abuse in the first place. We interviewed several parents who began petitioning after sons died in police custody.

It is commendable that the Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang, is ready to take action on the petitioning problem. Mr. Zhou recently announced that he would require police chief to meet with petitioners from their region. Almost immediately, he reported high success rates in resolving petitioners’ cases. But in the context of widespread police abuse, this should give pause for thought. Exactly what does Minister Zhou mean by “resolved”? How many cases have been resolved by leaving petitioners battered in jail cells or working 18-hour days in reeducation-through-labor camps?

Mr. Zhou should tell China and the world exactly what concrete steps his ministry will take to investigate and hold officials and police accountable for retaliation against petitioners. Then the whole police force should be retrained, each last officer.

Such measures are critical if there is ever to be an end to the petitioning problem. Some petitioners told our research team that they have nothing left to lose. Anything less than thorough reform will leave Beijing without a dam against a swelling river of battered, traumatized, and angry rural petitioners.

—-

Ms. Davis is a New York-based writer and author of “Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders” (Columbia University Press, 2005).

Posted at 6:50 PM · Comments (0)

September/October 2005

Summary: No country can affect China’s fortunes more directly than the United States. Many potential flashpoints — such as Taiwan, Japan, and North Korea — remain, and true friendship between Washington and Beijing is unlikely. But their interests have grown so intertwined that cooperation is the best way to serve both countries.
WANG JISI is Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University and Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China. This essay is an expanded and revised version of an article originally published in Zhongguo Dangzheng Ganbu Luntan, a journal of the Central Party School.

AFTER 9/11

The United States is currently the only country with the capacity and the ambition to exercise global primacy, and it will remain so for a long time to come. This means that the United States is the country that can exert the greatest strategic pressure on China. Although in recent years Beijing has refrained from identifying Washington as an adversary or criticizing its “hegemonism” — a pejorative Chinese code word for U.S. dominance — many Chinese still view the United States as a major threat to their nation’s security and domestic stability.

Yet the United States is a global leader in economics, education, culture, technology, and science. China, therefore, must maintain a close relationship with the United States if its modernization efforts are to succeed. Indeed, a cooperative partnership with Washington is of primary importance to Beijing, where economic prosperity and social stability are now top concerns.

Fortunately, greater cooperation with China is also in the United States’ interests — especially since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The United States now needs China’s help on issues such as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, the reconstruction of Iraq, and the maintenance of stability in the Middle East. More and more, Washington has also started to seek China’s cooperation in fields such as trade and finance, despite increased friction over currency exchange rates, intellectual property rights, and the textile trade.

Although there is room for further improvement in the relationship, the framework of basic stability established since September 11 should be sustainable. At least for the next several years, Washington will not regard Beijing as its main security threat, and China will avoid antagonizing the United States.

THE LONELY SUPERPOWER

To understand the forces that govern U.S.-Chinese relations, it helps first to understand U.S. power and Washington’s current global strategy. Here is a Chinese view: in the long term, the decline of U.S. primacy and the subsequent transition to a multipolar world are inevitable; but in the short term, Washington’s power is unlikely to decline, and its position in world affairs is unlikely to change.

Consider that the United States continues to lead other developed countries in economic growth, technological innovation, productivity, research and development, and the ability to cultivate human talent. Despite serious problems such as swelling trade and fiscal deficits, illegal immigration, inadequate health care, violent crime, major income disparities, a declining educational system, and a deeply divided electorate, the U.S. economy is healthy: last year, U.S. GDP grew an estimated 4.4 percent, and this year the growth rate is expected to be 3.5 percent, much greater than the corresponding figures for the eurozone (2.0 percent and 1.6 percent). Barring an unexpected sharp economic downturn, the size of the U.S. economy as a proportion of the global economy is likely to increase in the years to come.

Many other indexes of U.S. “hard power” are also on the rise. The U.S. defense budget, for example, has increased considerably in recent years. In 2004, it hit $437 billion, or roughly half of all military spending around the world. Yet as a percentage of U.S. GDP, the figure was lower than it was during the Cold War.

Further bolstering U.S. primacy is the fact that many of the country’s potential competitors, such as the European Union, Russia, and Japan, face internal problems that will make it difficult for them to overtake the United States anytime soon. For a long time to come, the United States is likely to remain dominant, with sufficient hard power to back up aggressive diplomatic and military policies.

From a Chinese perspective, the United States’ geopolitical superiority was strengthened in 2001 by Washington’s victory in the Afghan war. The United States has now established political, military, and economic footholds in Central Asia and strengthened its military presence in Southeast Asia, in the Persian Gulf, and on the Arabian Peninsula. These moves have been part of a global security strategy that can be understood as having one center, two emphases. Fighting terrorism is the center. And the two emphases are securing the Middle East and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The greater Middle East, a region stretching from Kashmir to Morocco and from the Red Sea to the Caucasus, is vital to U.S. interests. Rich in oil and natural gas, the region is also beset by ethnic and religious conflicts and is a base for rampant international terrorism. None of the countries in the area is politically stable, and chaos there can affect the United States directly, as the country learned on September 11.

On the nonproliferation front, the United States’ main concerns are Iran and North Korea, two states that are striving to develop nuclear technology and have long been antagonistic toward Washington. In 2004, the United States carried out the largest redeployment of its overseas forces since World War II in order to meet these challenges.

NOT INVULNERABLE

Despite its many advantages, the United States is not invincible. The war in Iraq, for example, resulted in international isolation of a sort that Washington had not faced since the beginning of the Cold War. The invasion was strongly condemned by people all over the world and explicitly opposed by the great majority of nations. Washington split with many of its traditional allies, such as Paris and Berlin, which refused to take part in the operation. And tensions with Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world, increased dramatically.

Since then, the extent of armed resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq has exceeded the Bush administration’s expectations. Meanwhile, revelations of prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel in Iraq and elsewhere have undermined the credibility of U.S. rhetoric on human rights and further damaged the United States’ image in the world. U.S. “soft power” — the country’s ability to influence indirectly the actions of other states — has been weakened. The United States also faces serious competition and disagreement from Europe, Japan, and Russia on many economic and development-related issues, and there have been disputes on arms control, regional policies, and the role of the United Nations and other international organizations.

Nonetheless, the points in common between these powers and the United States in terms of ideology and strategic interests outweigh the differences. A pattern of coordination and cooperation among the world’s major powers, institutionalized through the G-8 (the group of leading industrialized countries), has taken shape, and no great change in this pattern is likely in the next five to ten years. To be sure, some of the differences between the United States and the EU, Japan, Russia, and others will deepen, and Washington will at times face coordinated French, German, and Russian opposition, as it did during the war in Iraq. But no lasting united front aimed at confronting Washington is likely to emerge.

Meanwhile, many developing countries now boast higher growth rates than those found in the industrialized world, and they have enhanced their role in global affairs by strengthening themselves and coordinating their stances on major international issues. Rich countries, however — especially the United States — still occupy dominant positions in the UN, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other global institutions. Moreover, they continue to maintain the contemporary international order and rules that serve their economic and security interests.

All of the changes described above have provided China with new, albeit limited, opportunities for maneuver. So long as the United States’ image remains tainted, China will have greater leverage in multilateral settings. It would be foolhardy, however, for Beijing to challenge directly the international order and the institutions favored by the Western world — and, indeed, such a challenge is unlikely.

EYE ON ASIA

There is one region where the United States is most likely to come into close contact with China, leading to either major conflicts of interest or real cooperation (or both): in Asia and the Pacific. Divining the direction of relations between the two countries therefore requires a comprehensive analysis of the forces in the region. Of all the recent developments in Asia, China’s rise is attracting the most attention at the moment. But several other important developments are occurring simultaneously.

Thanks to a period of internal reform, Japan has recovered from the doldrums of the 1990s and is reinforcing its status as Northeast Asia’s most powerful economy. Meanwhile, India’s economy is growing very rapidly, and New Delhi has sought rapprochement with Islamabad and improved relations with Washington and Beijing. The Russian economy is growing fast as well, due in large part to the surge in world energy prices. As a result of these and other forces, most Asia-Pacific countries are growing closer diplomatically, and economic cooperation in eastern Asia is speeding up. Two worrisome security problems remain, however: the North Korean nuclear program and the question of Taiwan.

Among all the nations in the region, Japan has the biggest effect on the Chinese-U.S. relationship. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S.-Japanese security alliance has strengthened, not weakened (as China once hoped it would). Unlike some other traditional U.S. allies, Tokyo has sent troops to support the occupation of Iraq and given substantive reconstruction assistance to Iraq and Afghanistan. In return, Washington has praised Tokyo’s international role and endorsed (at least diplomatically) Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The prospect of conflict between the two allies, which many in the media once predicted, seems to have disappeared from the scene.

In sharp contrast, Tokyo’s ties to Beijing have cooled significantly. A series of recent irritants have exacerbated a relationship already strained by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine (where Japan’s war dead, including a number of war criminals, are commemorated). These incidents have included the accidental intrusion of a Chinese submarine into Japanese territorial waters in November 2004; a visit by former Taiwanese leader and independence activist Lee Teng-hui to Japan in December 2004; Japan’s ongoing publication of textbooks that downplay its World War II atrocities; and, this spring, anti-Japan demonstrations in a number of major Chinese cities. As such cases show, the historical conflicts between China and Japan and the mutual antagonism of their peoples can easily become political problems. Unless the issues are handled with care, they can evolve into serious crises.

Rather than play a helpful role, the United States has pushed China and Japan further apart. Beijing fears that the consolidation of the U.S.-Japanese alliance is coming at its expense and that the growing closeness is motivated by the allies’ common concern about the increase of China’s power. As the “China threat” theory gains followers in Japan, right-wing forces there are becoming more assertive by the day and turning increasingly toward the United States as their protector. Japan has also used the United States to exchange military intelligence with Taiwan; indeed, Japanese right-wing forces no longer shrink from offending Beijing by making overtures to pro-separation forces in Taipei.

Japan has also failed to respond warmly to China’s sponsorship of more institutionalized economic cooperation in eastern Asia. As its reluctance suggests, Tokyo is wary of Beijing’s growing role in the region and does not want to cooperate with any attempts to create regional structures that would exclude the United States. Hard-liners in Washington may think that the United States benefits from a souring of the Chinese-Japanese relationship. In the long run, however, conflict between Beijing and Tokyo helps no one, since it could destabilize Asia’s existing economic and security arrangements, many of which benefit the United States.

In the field of international security, the primary focal point in Chinese-U.S. relations is the North Korean nuclear issue. On this question, the Bush administration has little choice but to act cautiously, relying on the six-party talks to exert pressure on Pyongyang and using various mechanisms (such as the U.S.-sponsored Proliferation Security Initiative) to stop North Korea from exporting nuclear materials or technology. China, in its own way, has tried to dissuade North Korea from developing nuclear weapons but so far has declined to support multilateral blockades or sanctions on Pyongyang. If North Korea ever publicly, explicitly, and unmistakably demonstrates that it does possess nuclear weapons, the policies of the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia — all of which favor a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula — will have failed. The United States might then call for much tougher actions against North Korea, which would increase tension and narrow China’s options. The result could be new friction between China and the United States and a serious test of their relationship.

If, on the other hand, the six-party talks are resumed, tensions between the United States and North Korea may ease, and China’s role will then be more favorably recognized. Should that occur, the countries involved in the process might even consider expanding the six-party mechanism into a permanent Northeast Asian security arrangement, a development that would serve the interests of all the countries concerned and one that China should favor. Under the current circumstances, however, such a possibility is slim. The more likely outcome is that tensions between Washington and Pyongyang will persist, although without an actual war breaking out.

Meanwhile, at a time when political relations between China and the United States are basically stable and economic and trade links are expanding, Taiwan remains a major source of unease. War between China and the United States over Taiwan would be a nightmare, and both sides will try hard to avoid it. Despite their differences, there is no reason the two sides should have to resort to force to resolve the matter. Yet some people in Taiwan, looking out for their own interests and supported by outsiders — notably parts of the U.S. defense establishment and certain members of the U.S. Congress — continue stubbornly to push for independence, ignoring the will of most Taiwanese. It is a mistake for Americans to support such separatists. If a clash occurs, these parties will be responsible.

China views the status of Taiwan as an internal matter. But only by coordinating its U.S. policy with its policy toward Taiwan can Beijing curb the separatist forces on the island. Despite U.S. displeasure at China’s passage of an antisecession law in March 2005, policymakers in Washington have reiterated their opposition to Taiwan’s independence and viewed favorably the spring 2005 visits by Taiwanese opposition leaders to the mainland, which eased cross-strait relations. Nonetheless, Washington has now asked Beijing to talk directly to Taipei’s ruling party and its leader, Chen Shui-bian. To improve matters, Chinese and U.S. government agencies and their foreign policy think tanks should launch a sustained and thorough dialogue on the issue and explore ways to prevent separatist forces from making a rash move, dragging both countries toward a confrontation neither wants.

LONG-TERM INTERESTS

The Chinese-U.S. relationship remains beset by more profound differences than any other bilateral relationship between major powers in the world today. It is an extremely complex and highly paradoxical unity of opposites. It is not a relationship of confrontation and rivalry for primacy, as the U.S.-Soviet relationship was during the Cold War, but it does contain some of the same characteristics. In its pattern of interactions, it is a relationship between equals. But the tremendous gap between the two countries in national power and international status and the fundamental differences between their political systems and ideology have prevented the United States from viewing China as a peer. China’s political, economic, social, and diplomatic influences on the United States are far smaller than the United States’ influences on China. It is thus only natural that in their exchanges, the United States should take the offensive role and China the defensive one.

In terms of state-to-state affairs, China and the United States cannot hope to establish truly friendly relations. Yet the countries should be able to build friendly ties on nongovernmental and individual levels. Like all relations between states, the Chinese-U.S. relationship is fundamentally based on interests. But it also involves more intense, love-hate feelings than do the majority of state-to-state ties. The positive and negative factors in the links between China and the United States are closely interwoven and often run into one another.

As this complex dynamic suggests, trying to view the Chinese-U.S. relationship in traditional zero-sum terms is a mistake and will not guide policy well; indeed, such a simplistic view may threaten both countries’ national interests. Black-and-white analyses inevitably fail to capture the nuances of the situation. If, for instance, the United States really aimed to hamper China’s economic modernization — as the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer has argued should be done — China would not be the only one to suffer. Many U.S. enterprises in China would lose the returns on their investments, and the American people would no longer be able to buy inexpensive high-quality Chinese products. On the other hand, although Americans’ motives for developing economic and trade ties with China may be to help themselves, these ties have also helped China, spurring its economic prosperity and technological advancement.

This prosperity and advancement will naturally strengthen China’s military power — something that worries the United States. Indeed, this issue represents a paradox at the heart of Washington’s long-term strategy toward Beijing. Unless China’s economy collapses, its defense spending will continue to rise. Washington should recognize, however, that the important question is not how much China spends on its national defense but where it aims its military machine, which is still only a fraction of the size of the United States’ own forces. The best way to reduce tensions is through candid and comprehensive strategic conversations; for this reason, military-to-military exchanges should be resumed.

China faces a similar paradox: only a U.S. economic decline would reduce Washington’s strength (including its military muscle) and ease the strategic pressure on Beijing. Such a slide, however, would also harm China’s economy. In addition, the increased U.S. sense of insecurity that might result could have other consequences that would not necessarily benefit China. If, for example, Washington’s influence in the Middle East diminished, this could lead to instability there that might threaten China’s oil supplies. Similarly, increased religious fundamentalism and terrorism in Central and South Asia could threaten China’s own security, especially along its western borders, where ethnic relations have become tense and separatist tendencies remain a danger.

The potential Chinese-U.S. conflict over energy supplies can be seen in a similar light. Each country should be sensitive to the other’s energy needs and security interests worldwide. China is currently purchasing oil from countries such as Venezuela and Sudan, whose relations with the United States are far from amicable. Washington, meanwhile, is now thought to be eying Central Asian oil fields near China’s border. Both Beijing and Washington should try to make sure that the other side understands its intentions and should explore ways to cooperate on energy issues through joint projects, such as building nuclear power plants in China.

History has already proved that the United States is not China’s permanent enemy. Nor does China want the United States to see it as a foe. Deng Xiaoping’s prediction that “things will be all right when Sino-U.S. relations eventually improve” was a cool judgment based on China’s long-term interests. To be sure, aspirations cannot replace reality. The improvement of Chinese-U.S. relations will be slow, tortuous, limited, and conditional, and could even be reversed in the case of certain provocations (such as a Taiwanese declaration of independence). It is precisely for this reason that the thorny problems in the bilateral relationship must be handled delicately, and a stable new framework established to prevent troubles from disrupting an international environment favorable for building prosperous societies. China’s leadership is set on achieving such prosperity by the middle of the twenty-first century; with Washington’s cooperation, there is little to stand in its way.

www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002—2005 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

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August 24, 2005
Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, Aug. 23 - There is a growing uneasiness in the air in China, after months of increasingly bold protests rolling across the countryside.

For reasons that range from rampant industrial pollution to widespread evictions and land seizures by corrupt local governments in cahoots with increasingly powerful property developers, ordinary Chinese seem to be saying they are fed up and won’t take it any more.

Each week brings news of at least one or two incidents, with thousands of villagers in a pitched battle with the police, or bloody crackdowns in which hundreds of protesters are tear-gassed and clubbed during roundups by the police. And by the government’s own official tally, hundreds of these events each week escape wider public attention altogether.

No one is ready to predict that this is the beginning of any great unraveling of an authoritarian state that has, over the last two decades, largely brought social peace and a reprieve from demands for political change by delivering breakneck economic growth.

But the response by the Chinese authorities, a mixture of alarm and seeming disarray, is a clear indication that whatever is brewing here is being taken with utmost seriousness at the summit of power.

Last week, for example, the government announced it was setting up special police units in 36 cities to put down riots and counter what the authorities say is the threat of terrorism.

With the exception of infrequent incidents involving Uighur separatists in the remote western region of Xinjiang, terrorism is all but unheard of in China. On the evidence, it would seem the authorities are most concerned about what Zhou Yongkang, the public security minister, told Reuters last month were the 74,000 mass incidents, or demonstrations and riots, that occurred in 2004, an increase from 58,000 the year before, and only 10,000 a decade ago.

Other signs of mounting concern over this unrest are just as telling. This week, The Liberation Army Daily quoted a notice by the armed forces warning soldiers that they would be “severely penalized” for taking part in petitions or demonstrations. The statement appeared to be prompted by a series of recent protests by veterans over their pension benefits at a People’s Liberation Army office in Beijing.

News of the antiriot brigades coincided with an order to police chiefs nationwide to meet with “petitioners” lodging complaints about this or that issue. The order seems to be an attempt to nip localized discontent in the bud before it can turn into outright protest or disorder.

The entire campaign appears to have been kicked off with a strongly worded recent editorial, published in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, under the headline “Maintain Stability to Speed Development.” The commentary warned citizens to obey the law, saying threats to social order would not be tolerated.

In the last two weeks, the demonstrations have come to Shanghai, a showcase city that is among the country’s most tightly policed, and where public protests are relatively rare.

Day after day recently, the angry complaints of citizens could be heard in the heart of downtown here, especially across the street from the elegant exhibition center where city government was in session. In one protest, middle-aged residents invoked rebellious slogans from their youth during the Cultural Revolution, reportedly saying things like “to rebel is just” as they denounced summary evictions to make way for high-rise developers and demanded fair compensation.

On another day, in the same spot, a separate group of elderly residents, also angry about evictions, chanted the name of the city’s party secretary, saying, “Chen Liangyu, step down!” Nearby, a mother and her children, whom she has been unable to place in local schools, hoisted a sign whose bold characters read, “Why do we need to bear the consequences of government non-performance?”

A half-block away, restaurant workers massed to protest their dismissal by what they said were hired gangsters in favor of cheaper out-of-town employees. Taxi drivers, meanwhile, embittered over a steep increase in gasoline protests, have been discussing a mass work stoppage for Sept. 1.

While Beijing focuses on the need for more policing and a more accountable local government, many Chinese identify official corruption as the biggest source of their woes. Many political analysts say the Chinese system of government, based on a monopolization of power by the Communist Party, inhibits transparency and prevents the development of the kinds of checks and balances that would help limit corruption and give citizens an outlet for their anger, along with a means for redressing grievances.

“There are a great many socioeconomic factors to stimulate protest, such as the increasing gap between rich and poor and many land and environmental factors,” said Wu Guoguang, a former government adviser and People’s Daily editorialist who now teaches political science at the University of Victoria, in Canada. “But the masses are angry basically because of abuse of power by party officials. If the government were clean and efficient, things would be much calmer. But the perception is that the officials don’t want to pursue the state’s interests, so much as pursue their own interests - both legal and illegal.”

By contrast, in Japan, an outbreak of severe nervous system disorders in Minamata during the 1950’s was traced to industrial dumping of mercury compounds into a local river basin. Citizens sued and obtained compensation, along with the enforcement of strict new environmental guidelines.

In China, cases of dangerous industrial pollution are rife, even if their full human toll is not yet known. But local authorities often side with industrial interests, and the courts provide little relief.

“What the government has used mostly is administrative means to promote what it calls a ‘harmonious society,’ which means making security officials meet with petitioners, or forcing people found responsible for various things to resign,” said Mao Shoulong, an expert in public policy at People’s University in Beijing. “These approaches can solve some problems, but they create other ones. The reliance on the government has become ever larger, and this creates a huge administrative burden, with the government becoming a firefighter, rushing from problem to problem without ever really solving anything.”

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They order these things differently in France. Back in June, when the British tabloids were offered the chance to buy a pre-publication copy of the new Harry Potter book, the botched handover that ensued was like something out of a Ray Winstone film. Rottweiler-toting guards waved guns around as the police swooped and the presses churned. But Angelo Rinaldi got the French literary scoop of the summer during a stroll on his lunch break.

Rinaldi, literary editor of Le Figaro, dropped his bombshell on Thursday. While sauntering through Paris, he says, he came upon a dog-eared paperback lying on a bench, covered in greasy fingerprints. Some nameless youth had scribbled ‘What on earth is this? I didn’t get it’ on the flyleaf. A quick flick through revealed the book to be La possibilite d’une “le, the next book by the infamous Michel Houellebecq, France’s most inflammatory novelist and the foremost contender for the establishment’s top prize, the Prix Goncourt. Nettled at not having received an advance copy, Rinaldi slated the book in his column, and the well-oiled Houellebecq publicity machine was forced to grind into action a month early.

Houellebecq, probably the bestselling contemporary French author outside France, may very well be stung by having his book described as ‘science fiction in the hands of a pissed-up chemist’ and his prose style denounced as ‘a leaky kitchen tap, dripping away tasteless liquid with no plumber in sight’. But his publishers certainly will have been prepared; indeed, French literary gossip implies that they engineered the leak. Certainly no one believes Rinaldi’s story that he is the lucky victim of the bookcrossing.com craze, in which participants pass on copies of favourite books by setting them free in public places. Every Houellebecq book until now has sold on the controversy it generated, and the new one ” a futuristic saga of cloning, anomie and oral sex ” will be no exception.

A 47-year-old, nondescript boozehound who once programmed computers for the French government, Houellebecq is an unlikely choice as either a literary lion or sacrificial lamb. To his admirers, he is the torchbearer for a tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire; to his detractors, he is a pedlar of sleaze and shock, who relies on the political incorrectness of his pronouncements for his place in the pantheon. What none of them would contest is that, for whatever reason, he has hit a nerve. His thesis, first promulgated in Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994, published in English as Whatever, that the sexual revolution of the Sixties created not communism but capitalism in the sexual market, that the unattractive underclass is exiled while the privileged initiates are drained by corruption, accidie and excess ” has since found both antagonists and devotees not only in France, but worldwide.

Houellebecq was born in 1958 in La Reunion, a French colony off East Africa. His father was a mountain guide, his mother an anaesthetist: as his website gloomily states, ‘they lost interest in his existence pretty quickly’. His childhood would have psychologists whooping: at six, Houellebecq was packed off to a dismal suburb of Paris and brought up by his paternal grandmother, while his mother headed off to lead the hippy lifestyle.

He was a good student, and in 1980 he graduated in agricultural engineering, got married and had a son; then he got divorced, got depressed and got on with writing poetry. His first poems appeared in 1985 in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue. Six years later, in 1991, he published a potted biography of the horror writer H P Lovecraft, a teenage passion, with the prophetic subtitle ‘Against the World, Against Life’. Rester vivant: methode (To Stay Alive) appeared the same year, and was followed by his first proper collection of poetry. Meanwhile, Houellebecq signed up as a computer programmer at the Assemblee Nationale in Paris. In 1994 he brought out his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte, which chronicled the accidie of a sexually frustrated, terminally jaundiced computer programmer in the civil service.

Les particules elementaires (Atomised), 1998, his second book, divides some of these autobiographical elements equally between two brothers. Plateforme (Platform), the third, mounts a vigorous attack on Islam, the religion his mother adopted. Les particules elementaires came just in time to break a drought in French literature that had lasted for decades. Houellebecq’s book, which was, as one critic wrote, not so much published as detonated, went straight for the jugular of the liberal establishment with its thesis that the sexual and social liberation of the 1968 revolutions had directly caused the death of love in contemporary society. The fury this caused among the ageing revolutionaries ensured that the book sold 300,000 copies in France within months.

When it was translated, English readers found themselves just as divided. Houellebecq’s jaundiced anthropologist’s eye, allied with the rigour of his construction and his ruthless judgements on human motivation, had him pronounced the Camus of a new generation. Quietly enough, since then, Houellebecq has become something of a multimedia phenomenon in France. In 1999 he worked on the adaptation of Extension du domaine de la lutte for the screen; the next year he issued a CD of himself reading his poems. Lanzarote (2000) was interleaved with photographs he had taken while on holiday in the Canary Islands. His public might be forgiven for thinking this odd, since he is famously reticent in person. Though friendly with writing contemporaries such as Frederic Beigbeder and Florian Zeller, he declines most interviews and can barely be tempted out of his house.

In the autumn of 2001 he had a disastrous publicity tour for Plateforme, cancelled seven days before 9/11, when he denounced Islam as ‘la religion la plus con’ in an interview with the magazine Lire. Drunk and belligerent, he justified his characters’ condemnation of radical Islam with the judgement that it was ‘the stupidest religion in the world’, declaring, to boot, that ‘when you read the Koran, it’s appalling, appalling’. He was taken to court for inciting racial hatred. Half the writers (even some he had lampooned) in France turned out to speak in defence of a man who said he had never confused Arabs and Muslims ” that he was speaking of a religion rather than of a people. The case was thrown out but he retreated to Ireland to write.

What the palaver over Plateforme served largely to obscure was that it was not as good as its predecessor. Lanzarote, a novella hastily translated into English after the success of Platform, proved little more than a dry run for the conceits of that novel. If Houellebecq was not actually blocked and coasting on his reputation, it looked like it.

In person he is serious, mournful, almost naive, which sits ill with the force and flash of the prose he writes. When last seen, Houellebecq was living on the remote Beara Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland, with his second wife and an ancient collie that came with the house. Although his imperfect English is apparently not a problem locally, he asks that all interviews be conducted in French: since not many journalists can manage this, he usually concedes to talk in English, which delivers the pregnant pauses, abstract comments and long silences that play directly to our conception of the French intello. He almost never sees his son, who is now in his twenties, and he drinks heavily. Occasionally, if some enterprising editor sends out a pretty reporter, he makes a gloomy pass. This is no more than his acolytes expect, since at least a third of a Houellebecq book consists of graphic descriptions of sexual conquest. And yet both a documentary in 2001 and a collection of essays and jottings that appeared in 2003 portray him as happily married, indifferent to praise and unambitious of fame. He is, tout court, a bit of a mystery.

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Sunday, August 21, 2005 - Copyright The Washington Post

JAPONISME

Cultural Crossings Between Japan and the West

Photos
The Allure of Japanese Art
Two new books “Japonisme” and “The Origins of L’Art Nouveau” examine how van Gogh, Manet, Whislter and art dealer Siegfried Bing were seduced by Japanese art.
By Lionel Lambourne

Phaidon. 240 pp. $69.95

THE ORIGINS OF L’ART NOUVEAU

The Bing Empire

Edited by Gabriel P. Weisberg, Edwin Becker and Evelyne Possémé

Mercatorfonds. 295 pp. $69.95

The celebrated Parisian critic Edmond de Goncourt probably said something like “Would you like to come up and see my Japanese prints?” as a come-on to his many lady friends. What we know for sure is that they were seen by some of the seminal artists and writers of his day: Edouard Manet, Gustave Flaubert, Edgar Degas, to name a few. In Japonisme, Lionel Lambourne quotes extensively from Goncourt’s Journal and confirms how influential he was in bringing the craze for Japanese art to Paris: “Rodin, who is full of fawnishness, asks to see my Japanese erotics, and is full of admiration before the women’s drooping heads, the broken lines of their necks, the rigid extensions of arms, the contractions of feet, all the voluptuous and frenetic reality of coitus, all the sculptural twining of bodies melted and interlocked in the spasm of pleasure.” Such commentary helps us see a direct link between Japanese art and Rodin’s sculptures; more recently, Goncourt’s Journal helped justify the ample inclusion of shunga (literally “spring pictures”) in a show at the Grand Palais in Paris last fall. That popular exhibition, “Images du Monde flottant” (Images of the Floating World), demonstrated yet again the durability of Goncourt’s artistic tastes. “Japonisme brought to the West a new coloration,” he wrote, “a new system of decoration, and … a poetic fantasy in the creation of the art object.”

Closer to home, for those planning to take in the current exhibition “East Meets West: Hiroshige at the Phillips Collection” (through Sunday, Sept. 4), Lambourne’s book will provide what the visitor will not see and read there: a full discussion of japonisme and, more specifically, which Japanese prints influenced which Western artists. The Phillips show juxtaposes Hiroshige’s multi-colored woodblock series “The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido” with art collected by Duncan Phillips.

Japonisme is filled with firsthand observations from a slew of artists such as Renoir and Monet. The author pinpoints the relationship between James McNeill Whistler’s oil paintings, especially his “Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony,” and Torii Kiyonaga’s work. A woodcut print of a group of Japanese courtesans entertaining a customer is juxtaposed with Whistler’s painting of Western women dressed in kimonos: The composition and the perspective, with its view of the water, were clearly inspired by Kiyonaga’s print, which, in fact, Whistler owned.

According to Lambourne, former head of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the word japonisme was coined in 1872 by Philippe Burty, a collector and author, “to designate a new field of study of artistic, historic and ethnographic borrowings from the arts of Japan.” After two-and-a-half centuries of isolation, Japan had become an object of curiosity to the rest of the world. The Japanese exhibitions at the Paris World’s Fairs of 1867 and 1889 were important opportunities to show off some of the nation’s art. Japanese officials must have been astounded to discover that what impressed critics and artists in Paris was the humblest form of their art — the woodblock print — which back home could be bought for the price of a box of candy. Vincent van Gogh, an avid collector and admirer of Japanese artists, would have felt a kinship with Hokusai (creator of the masterful “Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji”) had he known how little money Hokusai made during his lifetime.

Among the notable items shown in Japonisme is an oil painting titled “The Duchess” (formerly known as “The Blue Dress”), by the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens. The figure of a pensive-looking young woman in flowing royal blue dress parallels ingeniously a gilded Japanese screen with a rustic scene in the background. In its composition and introduction of Eastern exoticism, the painting is reminiscent of Manet’s famous portrait of Emile Zola (also reproduced in this book).

The Origins of L’Art Nouveau is a catalogue raisonné of an exhibition that will open in Barcelona next month (Sept. 6 until Jan. 29, 2006). It has already traveled to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich. The organizers acknowledge their debt to an earlier exhibition that was shown in Richmond, Va., in 1986, “Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900”; Gabriel P. Weisberg, who organized that show, is one of this catalogue’s contributors.

Siegfried Bing (1838-1905), born into an affluent Jewish merchant family, left Germany in 1854 to work for his father’s porcelain-manufacturing business in France. After his father’s and brother’s deaths, Bing used his expertise in ceramics and trading “to participate in the mania for Japanese curios.” He eventually traveled to Japan, where his brother-in-law was consul for the German embassy in Tokyo, and there established ties to export a variety of Japanese art objects. Partly to promote his business, Bing launched a magazine, Le Japon Artistique , and organized exhibitions all over Europe. He even hired van Gogh to promote the magazine. Bing didn’t pay him much but, according to the artist’s own accounts, van Gogh was pleased just to be surrounded by Bing’s vast collection of Japanese prints.

What put Bing on the artistic map was the opening of his Parisian gallery, L’Art Nouveau. Art nouveau originated with William Morris and his pre-Raphaelites, in Vienna’s Secessionists, in Brussels among Victor Horta and others, all turning away from rigid classical designs and finding inspiration in nature — in the shapes of flowers, birds and insects. Bing was the natural catalyst to unite his passion for japonisme and his skill in selling and manufacturing with the disparate art movements sprouting in various European cities. Although he cannot be considered the sole founder of this art movement, he was certainly a leader.

Bing’s gallery, which he called a permanent collection, opened on Dec. 26, 1895 (at 22 rue de Provence). His mission was “to strive to eliminate what is ugly and pretentious in all things that presently surround us in order to bring perfect taste, charm and natural beauty to the least important utilitarian objects.” The exhibition and this book bring together some of the furniture and jewelry produced in his workshops; the Tiffany vases, paintings and sculptures he acquired; and items imported from Japan. Perhaps the most intriguing item in the collection is a pendant in gold, green and blue created by Siegfried’s son, Marcel. Crowned with a tiny ruby and wings of some exotic bird, the gilded image of a woman with long, flowing, wavy hair possesses the poetics of a Japanese print along with the qualities his father had described in the quotation above. Young Bing obviously learned much from the man.

(Those who cannot travel to Barcelona to see this exhibit can console themselves with the lingering memory of the fabulous, far more comprehensive exhibition five years ago at the National Gallery here in Washington: “Art Nouveau: 1890-1914.” You can still revisit that one in a book of the same name edited by Paul Greenhalgh and published by Abrams.) ·

Kunio Francis Tanabe is art director and a senior editor of Book World.

Posted at 10:38 AM · Comments (0)

A letter to the IHT - MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2005

Japan and the war

By reducing China’s wartime grievances with Japan to mere “bickering” about the past triggered by their new power rivalry, David Lague, in an otherwise fine article, has got cause and effect backward (“In China, new competition rekindles old anger,” Aug. 15).

The Chinese after World War II said no to revenge and reparations on the historical judgment, shared by many Americans at the time, that the Japanese people had been lead into the war by a military cabal and were therefore innocent, indeed fellow victims. The growing affirmation today of long discredited wartime goals by Japan’s elected leaders and prominent intellectuals (no longer just the right fringe) is therefore disturbing not only to Asians. Most importantly it destroys the emotional, political, ethical and face-saving minimum required by the Chinese nation to engage Japan seriously despite the absence of postwar compensation or any really convincing apology. That minimum - the admission, at least, that its goals were wrong - is no more than Europe has asked and consistently received from the Germans.

Americans should move beyond their pollyannaish expectation that the two Asian giants will make up on the cheap over World War II, given a nudge from us. We should also rethink our glib assumption that it necessarily would work to benefit our own national interest. It is patronizing to ask the Chinese to swallow their unrequited wartime pain in a way we would never dream of asking the Poles, Israelis or Russians to do. And patronizing to the Japanese as well, implying that they are capable of nothing better.

Ivan P. Hall, Berlin

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Copyright The Financial Times August 22 2005 20:17

If anyone doubts that the balance of power in the Pacific is changing, they should consider this week’s Chinese-Russian military exercises.
It is hard to imagine an event more discomfiting for Washington than the first combined show of force by an ex-superpower and a future superpower that have buried their differences and discovered a common interest in challenging the US, the only superpower of today.
The mutual suspicion that bedevilled Sino-Soviet relations in the cold war has not entirely disappeared. But China’s Communist leaders and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, are wary of the spread of democracy on their borders and have a shared fear of encirclement by the US and Nato. Beijing and Moscow have jointly demanded a US withdrawal from military bases in central Asia.
Russia has weapons to sell. China, which is modernising its armed forces, has the money to buy them. The exercises in Vladivostok and China’s Shandong province are billed as a UN-style peace mission. In fact, the drills, involving nearly 10,000 troops, allow China to practise an amphibious assault of the kind that could be used one day against Taiwan, while Russia gets to show off long-range bombers it might sell to the Chinese air force.
From a strictly military point of view, the US has no immediate reason to worry. Its technology is years ahead. And the US has its own allies: yesterday, US and South Korean forces began their annual exercise, based on a simulated North Korean attack and said to be the world’s biggest drill in computerised command and control.
The situation on the Korean peninsula, however, illustrates how rapidly Washington’s influence in east Asia is waning. Surprisingly few South Koreans share US alarm about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes. On the contrary, opinion polls show that most young South Koreans would side with Pyongyang and against the US in a war.
The number of US troops stationed in South Korea is being cut by a third to about 25,000 as part of a global reorganisation of US forces and the drive for “strategic flexibility”. This makes military sense, but there is a political imperative as well: South Korea does not want US troops based on its territory to be used in any operation that might offend Beijing.
Like most countries in east Asia, including Australia, South Korea is being drawn into China’s economic orbit. There is pessimism in Washington about the six-party talks on North Korea involving China, the US, Japan and Russia as well as the two Koreas. The suspended fourth round of talks is due to restart next week, but only Japan can be relied on to take a hard line on Pyongyang, and then mainly because the Japanese are incensed by North Korea’s past kidnappings of Japanese citizens.
Even in Japan, Washington’s most important Pacific ally, the outlook for the US is beginning to look cloudy. Junichiro Koizumi, prime minister and friend of George W.?Bush, has called an election next month. The main issue is economic reform, but to the left of Mr Koizumi is the Democratic Party of Japan, which has pledged to withdraw Japanese forces from Iraq if it wins; to his right are nationalist politicians as anti- American as they are anti-Chinese.
The US is casting around for new friends in Asia and courting India. Washington has even relaxed a ban on military exercises with New Zealand, imposed two decades ago to punish the country for its stand against nuclear weapons.
It will not be enough. Washington’s problem in Asia is that while its military superiority is overwhelming, its regional diplomacy is weak, partly because of the distraction of the war in Iraq.
When US officials or politicians do intervene in Asian affairs, the emphasis is not on democracy but on terrorism or on protecting American industry from Chinese competition. This has left the US out of tune with Asian peoples as well as governments. The US is enthusiastic enough about human rights and democracy to annoy presidents Putin and Hu Jintao, but not bold enough to inspire the ordinary people who should be its natural allies. For all the power of the US Navy, American influence in the Asia-Pacific is in decline.

Posted at 1:25 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005
—

The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin. Robert
Lawrence Kuhn. : Crown, 2005, 709 pp.$35.00

There are several ways to read The Man Who Changed China, an officially
sanctioned portrait of Jiang Zemin, China’s recently retired top leader,
written by the American investment banker Robert Lawrence Kuhn. Indeed, the
biggest challenge of this book is figuring out exactly how to approach it.

The most obvious way is as a biography. But although the book gives a
detailed account of Jiang’s public life, it fails to provide deeper insights
into his personality. Instead, it recycles commonly known information: that
Jiang is a social conservative, that he is a political reformist, and that he
likes science and engineering. The wooden narrative gets nowhere near the
aims of true biography.

One might also approach The Man Who Changed China as history. But the book’s
main claim — that Jiang is responsible for China’s remarkable transition
from disintegrating underachiever in 1989 to emerging superpower today — is
not substantiated. Kuhn does not define how China has changed since 1989; he
makes no attempt to refute alternative explanations for China’s boom, such as
the role of structural forces or of über-reformer Deng Xiaoping; and he
provides only smatterings of inside evidence to show how Jiang’s actions led
to particular outcomes. The claim that Jiang changed China is plausible. But
it is not one that this book proves.

Alternatively, one might read this book for the occasional behind-the-scenes
look at Chinese politics. When Jiang was elevated to the weakened position of
party chief in 1989, his sister recalls, “We certainly didn’t celebrate. His
appointment wasn’t worth celebrating.” His chief mentor, Wang Daohan, warns
of the “many complications and contradictions” of politics in
Beijing, “especially all the subtle conflicts between different interest
groups.” And the book fascinatingly describes several personal telephone
calls Jiang was forced to make to obtain political information or order
policy changes. Still, although Sinologists will hold these gems in trembling
hands, for the lay reader they are hardly worth hundreds of pages of agitprop.

There is, however, one way to approach this book profitably: as an
autobiography. The Man Who Changed China is valuable because it provides
insight into both how Jiang sees himself and how the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) sees itself. It is, in other words, a text that reflects the
preoccupations and worldview of its subject. Beginning in 2001, a secret
state propaganda team oversaw the writing of the book. Ten percent of the
English version was censored for the Chinese edition, but 90 percent remained
the same: the book’s main intended market was China itself (where it appeared
simultaneously in Chinese and quickly sold a million copies). This is the
image that Jiang and China’s new leaders want their people to see. How then
do they style themselves, and what does this mean for China’s future?

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

To write his biography, Mao Zedong chose Edgar Snow, a member of the U.S.
Communist Party; Jiang chose Kuhn, a member of the U.S. business elite. An
investment banker with a zeal for science, high culture, and business, Kuhn
personifies the new ideology that has swept through China since 1989. China’s
state propaganda team even chose to leave the name of Kuhn’s Chinese
collaborator out of the book to emphasize the American financier’s
authorship. Nothing better symbolizes Jiang and his cohort’s transition to a
right-wing developmental dictatorship; every year, they carefully chip away
at their socialist heritage.

Accordingly, the book focuses on Jiang’s pragmatism and his reluctance to
take part in Mao’s political campaigns. This, however, is nonsense. Jiang was
an avid participant in the anti-rightist purges of the 1950s (as was Deng),
and he rode out the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution by cheering on the Red Guards
(as did China’s current leader, Hu Jintao). But credibility in China today
depends on distancing oneself from that radical leftist era, so Jiang and
other present-day Chinese leaders burnish their connections to the pre-1949
CCP, which enjoys great prestige as an upright, anti-imperialist brigade.
Again, in Jiang’s case, this portrayal is largely inaccurate. The book
repeats two “facts” that have been seriously questioned by independent
researchers in China: first, that Jiang was adopted by the widow of his
uncle, a Communist martyr, in 1939 (Jiang seems to have arranged this
adoption retroactively after the Communists won the civil war in 1949); and,
second, that he joined the underground CCP in 1946 (he probably did not join
until after 1949, prior to which he was not a party activist but a general
student activist).

Nonetheless, the vision is clear. What was once a utopian party seeking to
change the pre-1949 past is today a practical party seeking continuity with
it. Today’s CCP portrays itself as the inheritor of the remarkable long-term
capitalist boom that was initiated with the start of China’s republican
period in 1912 (and almost ruined by the party’s 1956-76 flirtation with
Stalinism). Beijing’s historic 2005 reconciliation with Taiwan’s Kuomintang
Party, which authored that boom, had far more symbolism on the mainland than
across the strait. Kuhn’s dry descriptions of Jiang’s year-to-year activities
repeatedly feature watchwords such as “science,” “consensus,” “pragmatism,”
and “revitalization” — this is a China picking up the pieces from the Qing
dynasty, not smashing them again.

Eager to maintain their pragmatic façade, China’s leaders now typically deny
that they ever engage in politics. Reading between the lines in The Man Who
Changed China, however, proves otherwise. The book directs some barbs at
former premier Zhu Rongji — “unpredictability, occasional impetuousness, and
inexhaustible capacity to rub people the wrong way” — and only faintly
praises Hu. Yet every time he purges an opponent or elevates an acolyte,
Jiang depicts himself as acting solely in the national interest. The book
argues, for example, that Jiang deserves credit for his peaceful handover of
power to Hu during 2002-4, the first time that the party changed leadership
without purges or bloodshed. But at the same time, the book endorses accounts
of the succession published in the West by party insiders suggesting that
Jiang did everything in his power to disrupt the process. Indeed, Kuhn shows
that Jiang worked meticulously to ensure that the transition favored him in
all respects, never considering his tactics a hindrance to Hu, much less
unseemly “politics.” In Kuhn’s rendering, Jiang tarries in handing over his
military post because Hu is inexperienced; he purges Li Ruihuan, a liberal
member of the Politburo Standing Committee, to avoid policy shifts; and so on.

The gap between self-perception and reality is clearest in Jiang’s dealings
with Taiwan. Jiang views himself as a dove, even though he oversaw a massive
military buildup against the island. The book’s key example of Jiang’s
supposed peace-loving nature is his reaction to President Bill Clinton’s 1995
decision to grant a travel visa to Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui, despite
telling Jiang he would not. “Even the president of a great, powerful nation
can tell a lie in your presence,” Jiang reportedly tells Chinese
diplomats. “The United States will have to pay a price.” Deng, dying, directs
Jiang to handle the matter “rationally,” but also not to let Taiwan “run
away.” Jiang responds by “test” launching two sets of missiles into the seas
off Taiwan in late 1995 and early 1996, drawing in a U.S. battle fleet — and
bringing China and the United States the closest they have come to war over
the issue. Yet Chinese hard-liners consider Jiang’s actions a sign of
weakness: a military officer pledges to “rebuild Taiwan from scratch,” and
two well-known party “liberals,” Qiao Shi and Li Ruihuan, mock Jiang for
his “soft line.” Within the hall of mirrors of party politics, Jiang’s
actions toward Taiwan appear restrained, even conciliatory.

Another discrepancy between the outside account and the view from within CCP
headquarters concerns China’s relations with North Korea. Kuhn portrays
Beijing’s tepid support for Pyongyang as due to structural more than
historical or personal reasons. Although domestic credibility is indeed at
stake — “decades of Chinese propaganda [have] promoted the North Korean
cause” — the structural fear is that a weakened North Korea would collapse
or go fully nuclear, and either outcome would threaten China. Knowing that
China is caught in a bind, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il regularly extorts
aid. Kuhn quotes an unnamed insider as saying that Jiang’s attempts to push
Pyongyang usually backfired: “If Jiang called [Kim], he might hang up.”
Beijing thinks it is getting no credit for attempting to defuse such a
difficult situation. Outside observers might blame it for creating the
problem in the first place — China, after all, encouraged the war that
divided the peninsula. But Beijing sees itself as a victim of this crisis,
not its author.

The development of closer, more equal relations between China and the United
States is arguably the one positive element of the Jiang era that can
rightfully be laid at his doorstep, and Kuhn devotes several sections to it.
Jiang is portrayed as singularly concerned with the relationship, even in the
face of the nationalistic rage of China’s disgruntled youth and the
unremitting criticism of remnant CCP Stalinists. Believing that the road to
China’s great-power ambitions runs through Washington, Jiang made a bet to
err on the side of good relations: he paid a fence-mending visit to the
United States in 1993; he decided that Hu would appear on television in his
place to address the nation after the U.S. bombing of China’s Belgrade
embassy in 1999; and he quickly settled the crisis over a stranded U.S. spy
plane on Hainan Island in 2001.

Despite Jiang’s efforts, there is no evidence that Hu currently shares this
vision, and every indication that he favors an Asia-centered strategy
instead. The Jiangist philosophy may ultimately loom as the path not taken,
but it will remain the dominant countervision if Hu’s more standoffish
approach begins to fail.

CRACKS IN THE MIRROR

Despite the books on “the China threat,” “the China boom,” and “the China
century” now pouring off the presses, the media occasionally contain hints —
even muffled cries of terror — indicating that some senior leaders in
Beijing may not be so confident about their country’s future. In a March 2005
interview with Der Spiegel, China’s deputy minister of the environment, Pan
Yue, warned of “a political crisis” if uncontrolled economic growth
continues, noting bluntly that the “miracle will end soon.” The warning
signs — environmental damage, rural insurrection, worsening corruption, and
millenarian movements such as the Falun Gong — are everywhere. But
expressing such sentiments above the din of CCP propaganda is politically
dangerous because the party’s rule is built almost entirely on the promise
that the somewhat imagined “miracle” will continue.

Kuhn is nonetheless allowed to offer a few such cautions. He quotes Jiang’s
wife as saying that the files on her husband’s desk always dismayed
her: “Explosions here, rioting there. Murders, corruption, terrorism —
little that was nice.” Kuhn is even permitted to slip in a warning from Jiang
himself. As he edits the communiqué of the 2002 16th National Congress of the
CCP (during which he ultimately steps down as party chief), Jiang asks
drafters to heighten the “sense of insecurity” in the document, rather than
let it blather on as usual about the party’s achievements. “Don’t think the
good times will last forever,” Jiang tells the drafters as he covers the
second-to-last paragraph in red ink. Here is an excerpt from the resulting
paragraph, published in the official press:

In the face of a world that is far from being tranquil and the formidable
tasks before us, all Party members must be mindful of the potential danger
and stay prepared against adversities in times of peace. We must be keenly
aware of the rigorous challenges brought about by ever-sharpening
international competition as well as risks and difficulties that may arise on
our road ahead.

Those are the words of a man who sees China more clearly than the fans and
fearmongers abroad — the same people who thought that Brazil, Russia, and
Japan were going to take over the world. Although The Man Who Changed China
overall seeks to portray China’s cultural and national confidence, it raises
more warning signs than one would expect.

Kuhn says that Jiang fears democracy as a threat to growth and national
stability, but there are also signs that he and his successors see the
writing on the wall. “A premature democracy would reallocate resources to
political debate and thereby sacrifice mid- and long-term economic and social
benefits for short-term political freedoms,” Kuhn writes, essentially
speaking for Jiang. The word “premature” is revealing. Jiang’s views are
presented only at the end of the book and only obliquely, but they display
the loss of faith in dictatorship that has usually prefigured elite-led
transitions to democracy. “There are far more variables in the social
sciences than there are in engineering,” Jiang is quoted as saying, with
philosophical gravity. “Therefore social sciences are more complicated. The
more I learn, the more I realize how much we have yet to learn. As for
political issues, they are more complicated still.” Kuhn then editorializes
that China’s post-Jiang leaders “will react more analytically and less
emotionally to historically encumbered issues,” such as “the changes still
needed in China’s governance and the Communist Party.”

There is much in the official worldview of China’s leaders that is horrific,
and Kuhn dutifully and unapologetically details Jiang’s more odious opinions:
that the thousands of people summarily executed every year in China are
merely “criminals” deserving punishment, despite the serious flaws in China’s
judicial process; that left to his own devices, the Dalai Lama would create a
slave society in Tibet, and China’s brutal invasion and occupation of Tibet
is comparable to the Union army’s march on the Confederacy; and so on. But
the virtue of The Man Who Changed China is that it provides a near-perfect
representation of this worldview. Read this book not to understand China or
its politics, but to understand the mindsets of China’s leaders — from the
inside out.

Posted at 1:13 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 22, 2005

TOKYO — For the first time in recent history, Japan’s political opposition is playing a major role in shaping government.

For most of the past 60 years, Japanese politics was dominated by a single group — the Liberal Democratic Party. Its opponents — ranging from Communists to parties backed by religious groups — were a weak and motley crew whose main role was to yelp when the LDP did anything they saw as too drastic.

Over the past decade, however, some of those opposition groups have unified and gained legitimacy, posing a serious threat to the LDP in coming September elections for Japan’s Lower House of Parliament. And though the latest polls suggest the Democratic Party of Japan — the main opposition group — won’t gain an outright majority, analysts say it could get close, meaning it stands to increase its numbers significantly. If that happens, Japan will edge closer than it ever has to a true two-party system.

“We’ve been working bit by bit toward this day for years, and now, finally, we’ll have a change in government,” DPJ leader Katsuya Okada, 52 years old, said earlier this month.

The implications reach beyond the coming vote. A stronger, healthier opposition — and an eventual seizure of power by the DPJ — could change Japan’s approach to everything from the economy to the war in Iraq. In a recent manifesto, the DPJ says it wants to slash government spending, withdraw Japanese troops from Iraq by December and bolster Japan’s national pension fund by raising the consumption tax. Meanwhile, the DPJ’s growing sway with voters — particularly in metropolitan areas — is making the LDP revise its own platform and campaign strategies to attract a wider range of supporters.

On Friday, Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, gave details of the LDP’s official platform for the coming elections, citing the continued pursuit of postal privatization as the top priority.

In the decades following its founding in 1955, the LDP held well over 50% of the seats in Japan’s Lower House, which is the more powerful side of Parliament. It has fallen out of power only once — for just under a year starting in 1993. The LDP maintained its dominance through a system of pork-barrel politics benefiting numerous special-interest groups — from construction companies to beauticians — which in turn cast votes for the LDP on election day. The party has also had exclusive access to Japan’s powerful bureaucrats.

LDP rule worked during heady economic times when there was plenty of money to fund the politicians’ pork. But when the bursting of a land-price and stock bubble in the early 1990s sent the economy into a tailspin, politicians ran short on funds to distribute, while voters became increasingly unhappy with the old system. In 1993, a coalition of eight opposition parties was able to grab power. Although the coalition collapsed after a few months and the LDP returned, its dominance has been waning, and in recent years it has stayed in power only by cobbling together its own coalitions.

Japan’s opposition camp, meanwhile, has continued to coalesce. One spur was a 1996 change in Japan’s election system and campaign-finance laws that effectively rewarded cooperation among the opposition parties. The DPJ was founded the same year.

The DPJ is also benefiting from a shift in the way Japanese citizens vote, analysts say. With the LDP’s influence over special-interest groups waning, voters have become harder for the ruling party to mobilize. Floating voters increasingly decide the outcome of Japanese elections, and the DPJ has just as good a chance of snagging them as the ruling party does.

The turmoil surrounding September’s election is giving the DPJ its biggest chance to gain power yet. Earlier this month, Mr. Koizumi dissolved the Lower House and called the elections after his pet project — a bill to privatize the post office — was defeated by conservative members of the LDP. Mr. Koizumi has expelled the LDP politicians who voted against the plan and is fielding new candidates to run against them.

Yet it won’t be easy for the DPJ. Political analysts say a big problem is the DPJ’s lackluster leader, Mr. Okada. The sleepy-eyed politician doesn’t have Mr. Koizumi’s fire. And his platform is a multi-issue goulash compared with Mr. Koizumi’s campaign, which is focused sharply on continuing to fight for postal overhaul. Yukio Edano, a DPJ strategist, says Mr. Okada wants to campaign on issues, not personality. “He’s not much fun as a friend, but he’d be a good prime minister,” Mr. Edano says.

The official platforms of both parties ahead of the September election are similar in many respects. In the LDP announcement on Friday, Mr. Koizumi echoed Mr. Okada’s promises to shrink government, saying he will open up government enterprises to the private sector and cut costs spent on civil-service personnel. Mr. Koizumi also reiterated the importance of Japan’s security alliance with the U.S.

Mr. Okada, however, emphasizes the importance of smoothing ties with China and South Korea — two countries with which Japan’s relationship has been strained.

Support for Mr. Koizumi and his party is running high. A recent survey of 1,914 people by Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper showed that 37% plan to support the LDP in the coming election versus 16% who plan to vote for the DPJ.

Still, many analysts say recent trends bode well for the DPJ in the long term. In July’s Tokyo assembly elections — considered a bellwether for the nation’s political mood — the DPJ upped its representation to 35 seats from 19, while the LDP failed to achieve its targeted 51-seat gain. “Japan is moving toward having a choice of governments,” says Steven Reed, a professor of political science at Japan’s Chuo University.

Posted at 12:57 AM · Comments (0)

Published: August 20 2005 03:00 Copyright The Financial TImes
After meandering through the urban sprawl of Tokyo, it’s easy to come away with the impression that the Japanese are not keen on architectural conservation. The demolition in the 1960s of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel of 1923 is but one example of how the city has wiped out character and history only to replace it with blindingly bland concrete boxes.

But concerned visitors need only turn to Kyoto for comfort. Here, they will find kyo machiya, traditional Japanese wooden townhouses (literally translated as city craftsmen’s houses) dating from the Edo period (1603-1867) to the beginning of the Showa (1926-1989).

These buildings are rare now, of course, some having been sacrificed for more modern housing and many more destroyed in earthquakes and fires over the centuries. Still, they serve as salient symbols of a fading Japanese style and culture, a unique aesthetic with personality and a legacy that Kyoto residents are realising they must preserve.

Constructed of wood, earth, paper, and stone - natural materials chosen to blend harmoniously with Kyoto’s surroundings and adapt to its subtropically hot summers and freezing cold winters - kyo machiya are invariably tan or brown. Other signature features built to suit the area’s climate are dark lattice (koshi), bay windows with wooden lattice (degoshi) and windows in the shape of an insect cage (mushikomado). No more than 5.4 metres wide - taxation was based on street frontage - with a compensating length of roughly 20 metres, their long rectangular footprint explains why they’re popularly called “eels’ beds”.

Some elements of the kyo machiya are common to most traditional Japanese houses. There is a strong Chinese influence, but the overriding template is the shoin-zukuri style of residential architecture, honed in the Muromachi period (1333-1573). Interiors are versatile because Japanese houses initially didn’t have separate rooms.

When people began attributing functions, such as eating and sleeping, to specific areas, they opted against stiflingly permanent walls in favour of sliding panels that would filter sunlight and provide privacy. In winter they’re closed and heat comes from a hibachi brazier, around which the family gathers. In summer, they’re replaced by screens of natural, woven reeds that allow cool air through.

“Room” size is based on the tatami, a soft straw floor mat covering about 190cm by 95cm that the Japanese have used as a unit of measurement since the Middle Ages. (The rest of the world didn’t adopt a standardised way to compare building size until after the second world war.) Two tatami equals a tsubo, which is used to describe the dimensions of a space. A tsubo-niwa, for example, is a compact inner garden measuring 3.3 sq m.

But the kyo machiya takes the Japanese preference for clean lines (clean and beautiful are the same word in Japanese) to a new level. From a boxy interior layout (rooms are literally one after the other) to the spartan, linear furnishings of screens, panels, windows and doors, the houses seem to echo the pristine geometry-within-geometry of origami.

In one house I visited, the black fabric borders of each individual tatami created a striking facsimile of a tan and black Mondrian. The only departure from the linear was paintings of birds, mountains, chariots found on a fusuma (opaque, paper-covered screen). After the front “room”, there was a long and dark kitchen - placed one segregating step down from the house - containing an ancient but powerful ceramic wood-burning oven, two wooden pails to fetch water from the in-kitchen well, a mahogany breakfront with storage compartments, and an elongated “cathedral” ceiling with skylights engineered to draw hot air out during summers.

The “backyard” had a stone floor surrounded by pine trees, Japanese laurels, camellias and nandins. My host, Naka san, a sprightly octogenarian in traditional blue yukata, overcame our language barrier to explain that he follows the ancient practice of spraying water on the stone, which results in evaporation that causes his bamboo plants to rustle reassuringly.

Surveying the hushed elegance of this and other kyo machiya, one can’t help but marvel at Japan’s history of creating striking but serene architecture. The remaining example are still used as both residences and places of business, with the front room serving as a shop (selling kimonos or tea pots, perhaps) and the back as a warehouse.

And, thankfully, there is now a concerted preserv ation movement under way in Kyoto, with craftsmen being trained to repair these simple houses just as they would Japan’s most precious ancient temples - with traditional methods and materials honed over the ages.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

To get a glimpse of Japan’s rural past, one must bypass the visual debris of modern factories, cars, telephone poles and wires, commercial signs and even the unfortunate rice paddies abutting the motorway, and explore hidden towns, such as Miyama-cho.

The name Miyama means beautiful mountain (cho means town) and this rustic hamlet, with a population of 5,000, is nestled in the northern Kitayama Mountains between Kyoto and the Sea of Japan, in the centre of one of the remotest parts of Kyoto prefecture.

With two sizeable rivers and numerous small streams, the valley is surrounded by steep, 900-metre-high green mountains (the Ashiu, a rare preserve of virgin forest).

Within it stand clusters of thatched-roof houses (kayabuki yane) that pay homage to the fading Japanese tradition of a simple life lived off the land. Covered in grass that becomes mossy in spring and holds snow in winter, they also blur the line between between nature’s landscape and man’s architecture.

It wasn’t long ago that all of Japan was predominantly rural, with communities generating food through farming and fishing and joining together for activities such as house-building.

Now, it is only in remote corners such as Miyama-cho, away from the hustle-bustle of the big cities, where the idea of nature as home and home as nature still holds.

Miyama-cho boasts 250 thatched roof houses, the most in the whole of Japan, all dating back to the Edo period (1603-1867). Unlike those in the English countryside, for example, the size of these roofs significantly overwhelms the actual houses, practically obscuring their brown wooden sides. There is no baby-bonnet curvature either. Instead the roofs are angular, with a considerable triangular peak, more like those found in Cambodia. This enhances the sense of disproportion. The grass used for the thatching is kayatate, and it is piled up and dried for a least a year in the hamlet’s fields.

In spring, moss dots the rooftops with artistic clumps, while winter snow makes them look like chocolate cake sprinkled with powdered sugar.

However the thatching is prized for more than its aesthetic effect. It is also a sound-muffler (useful, given Japan’s significant annual rainfall) and a tremendous insulator that is twice as efficient as the modern, inorganic variety. The light weight of the dried grass is another plus for those who have to carry it to the building site.

Under their big roofs, the houses have lattice doors, a square-ish footprint with a four-room arrangement – elevated a little higher than the ground outside the house – and straw and earth walls.

The Japanese say spirits reside in the mountains and perhaps it is the energy flowing from Ashiu that has inspired the people of Miyama-cho to become more focused on maintaining their rural lifestyle and their thatched houses over the last couple of decades. (After all, there is a Japanese saying: “If the roof remains, tradition will not be forgotten”.)

With generous assistance from the national government, the town has been making strides both in preserving the architecture, improving access to the materials used in them and teaching a new generation of young builders the specialised skills needed to make and repair them. These are impressive feats, given the considerable shortage of grass and of roofers in the country, and the fact that it does take a village to properly thatch one.

When the time comes for one to be raised or replaced, some 200 volunteers are called into action via radio. They work – clad in traditional indigo-blue cotton clothes – under the careful guidance of a professional, stitching twisted straw twine with a fat wooden needle, tying beams and rafters together with bindings of rice-straw rope and so on. The aim is to guarantee that the resident of the house will have a roof over his head within a weekend – yet another lovely old Japanese custom.

Posted at 1:05 AM · Comments (0)

Where did all the gyaru (trashy girls) go? With their carroty tans, shoveled-on makeup and bleached hair, the kogaru (high gals), ganguro (black faces) and yamamba (ogresses) were a style phenomenon the likes of which may never be seen again.

Mari Noguchi, owner of used clothing store Queue

Though a few stragglers persist in sporting the look, the demise of Alba Rosa — the fad’s emblematic brand — makes this an appropriate time to close this odd chapter of Japanese fashion history.

With its hibiscus motif and fluorescent colors, Alba Rosa was the must-have label at the height of the kogaru craze from 1998 to 2001, when you would see its logo at every turn in Shibuya. Established in 1975, the brand had been doing well among free-spirited gals and guys into something that said: I’d rather be in Hawaii.

Those gyaru boom years also saw the business turn to megabucks with over 60 stores nationwide carrying its merchandise. It still has nine of its own stores, seven franchises and some 40 stockists, but on August 28, the brand will be taken off the shelves and its stores will close forever.

The long gyaru seen on a recent Senta Gai recce to be sporting Alba Rosa.

It is a spectacularly rapid demise. In 2004, sales were 6 billion, yen yielding a 918 million yen operating profit. Figures for 2005 are not yet available, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Alba Rosa has drifted way off the Tokyo fashion radar; a trip down to Shibuya’s gyaru drag Senta Gai turned up one lone sighting — a bag faintly embroidered with the hibiscus logo, whose owner expressed only mild consternation at the brand’s demise.

The reaction was somewhat more animated at Queue, a secondhand store which, until recently, dealt almost exclusively in Alba Rosa clothing and accessories. “I’m devastated,” screeched owner Mari Noguchi, who says she has been collecting the brand since its inception 30 years ago and started Queue to recoup some of the huge sums she was shelling out on its products.

It all started going downhill last summer, she explains with a long face. “The senta-guys [male yamamba who take the look to comical extremes] started wearing it as a kind of uniform. The brand’s supposed to be about a healthy, outdoors look and they were ruining the image. The president was furious and ordered everything to be made too small or too feminine for them to wear, but that drove away existing customers and by then it was too late anyway, the damage was done.”

Noguchi says she’ll miss her beloved Alba Rosa, but that she is diversifying into different brands and her customers are doing the same. She is, however, looking forward to the six-day “best-of” bonanza to be held Aug. 22-28, when the brand will offer limited editions of classic pieces from the past 30 years.

Can she offer any clues as to where all the gyaru went? “O-ne-kei [big sister style],” she says, adding that prissy, conservative outfits like Burberry Blue Label and Clathas are increasingly popular.

The gyaru look may have been in dubious taste, but it was provocative, rebellious and uniquely Japanese. With most mainstream fashion in Japan either demure secretary style or copies of trashier European catwalk gear from China and Korea, it almost seems like a return to orange tans and silver hair would be welcome … almost.

The Japan Times: Aug. 21, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 12:50 AM · Comments (1)

Copyright The New York Times

SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 2005

MINNEAPOLIS Niger’s famine has too many familiar characteristics. One of the poorest countries in the world is in a deadly crisis - one foreseen and ignored until the cost of intervention had jumped from $1 per child to $80, according to the United Nations.
Many people have died and more will die in the coming weeks and months because rich countries failed to respond in time. United Nations agencies first appealed for money and food in November, but governments have only started to respond seriously in the last few weeks.
It does not have to be this way. Swift, smart reforms to outdated U.S. food-aid programs could help prevent such crises rather than cleaning up after them.
In a study I did this year with Kathleen McAfee, a geographer at the University of California, Berkeley, we concluded that the U.S. food-aid system has two main problems - ones that other major donor countries have already taken steps to solve.
First, almost all the aid is in the form of food produced in the United States. The government buys food from American commodity traders. The food is fortified, bagged and shipped by American companies. This approach usually results in costs well over market rate for food, handling and transport. The emphasis on using American commodities and companies is grossly inefficient and means that food is slow to arrive where it is needed. It also prevents the establishment of local food systems.
Most other major donors, particularly those in the European Union, give money instead of food. This frees agencies like the UN World Food Program to buy food from farmers near the affected country - farmers who are often very poor - and to send the food quickly where it is most needed.
To its credit, the Bush administration proposed designating an additional $300 million for food to be bought from local or regional sources this year, but Congress rejected the proposal.
The second major problem is that America sells some of its food aid. It is the only country other than South Korea to sell food aid (albeit for less than commercial prices) or give it to intermediaries that then sell it. Private American aid organizations receive American food aid and sometimes sell the food at local markets to raise money for their other aid programs in the country. Governments of recipient countries also sell food aid at local markets to raise money. The result is a subsidized sale that creates unfair competition for local farmers and commercial traders.
The current system ensures that U.S. food aid falls far short of its potential. While it saves lives, it could save many more. And most important, the system fails to strengthen food production and systems of food distribution in vulnerable countries. If America wants its contributions to tackle the root causes of hunger, then the U.S. government needs to make immediate changes to the food-aid system.
It should move to cash-based aid and phase out sales of food aid. The United States also needs to work with other donors and local governments to establish regional reserves in the most vulnerable parts of the world so that local authorities and private agencies can respond to crises quickly.
The government should make multi-year guaranteed donations to the World Food Program so that the agency has the financial reserves to allow it plan its responses to emerging crises.
America should also simplify its food aid system, which currently consists of six different programs administered by two agencies.
The best food aid is flexible, timely, responsive and provides a buffer for tragic food shortfalls caused by devastation from disease, war or nature, while strengthening food production and distribution in the countries and regions it is trying to help.
Food-aid donations from the United States to Niger, recently doubled with a pledge to reach $13 million in 2005, could save many more lives if we change the way we spend the money. We should work not only to prevent every death we can in Niger today, but also to ensure that the children and grandchildren of those affected by this crisis can look back on it as an exception rather than a norm.
(Sophia Murphy is the director of the Trade Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis.)

Posted at 1:56 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 2005

HONG KONG Russia’s and China’s current joint military exercises are not so much a symbol of trust and friendship between the two as a symptom of American overstretch. The two are reminding the United States of the limits of its unilateral global power.
The exercises are also a way for each country to deliver a message to the other, as well as to their Northeast Asian neighbors.
The U.S. military presence in Central Asia was an inevitable outcome of the Sept. 11 attacks and for a while was tolerated by Russia and China, both eager to see the ouster of the Taliban and a check to archaic Islamism.
But even if the America withdraws from elsewhere in Central Asia, the prospect of a permanent U.S. presence in Afghanistan is viewed as somewhat provocative given Russia’s long-held obsession with its southern frontier and China’s well-justified long term concerns about its hold on its non-Han western lands.
The question for the United States must be whether it has sufficient long-term interest in this region to justify a presence that has clearly helped incite this show of force and friendship by Russia and China.
To be sure, America has some interest in the oil and other resources of the Central Asian republics, and in a ground as well as naval presence close to Iran. But the strains on U.S. capabilities, now that the budget deficit is running close to record levels, should raise the question of whether it might not be better to leave well alone and let Russia and China compete against each other for influence, particularly in Kazakhstan and Iran.
Russia’s interests in Iran and all the Central Asian republics, and China’s interests in contiguous Central Asia, are natural and permanent.
China has been stepping up its efforts to build friendly relations with Uzbekistan and Kyrgystan regardless of their troubled domestic politics and to offer itself as preferred outlet for Kazakh oil and gas. But there are frictions too, over water as well as ethnic issues. The nominally Muslim Turkic Central Asians know they have to play off their giant neighbors if the historically expansionist instincts of both are to be kept at bay.
Landlocked Central Asia may also be a distraction from America’s much greater interests in the Western Pacific (and to a lesser extent the Indian Ocean). The Chinese-Russian exercises are a reminder of the missed opportunities of a real rapprochement between Russia and Japan. While China has been prepared to make some minor border concessions for diplomatic purposes, the interests of Moscow and Tokyo in much closer cooperation remain stymied by nationalist posturing over their Kurile Islands dispute.
Given Japan’s interest in not seeing China gain control of Taiwan and the South China Sea, the prospect of China acquiring more advanced military equipment from Russia points up the failure of Japanese diplomacy to advance beyond Cold War mentality. The underlying reality of Northeast Asian strategic positions is that Russia and Japan are both on the defensive against the rising powers of China and South Korea. China, meanwhile, is reminding Russia as well as the United States and Japan of the importance it attaches to defeating “separatism” - Taiwan, that is.
How much advanced weaponry the Russians are prepared to supply to China remains an open question. The participation of Russian strategic bombers and advanced fighters in these exercises may be as much a reminder to China of Russian technological prowess as a warning to the United States and its allies that Russia is still a military power to be reckoned with, in Asia as well as Europe.
Russia and China began the exercises with a flurry of rhetoric, claiming comradeship over the defeat of Japan 60 years ago.
Ironically, however, the exercises come exactly 100 years after Russia was driven from China, not by the Chinese but by Japan, advancing through Korea and across the Yalu river into Russian-occupied Manchuria. Mutual suspicions remain.
The Russians, in particular, fear that China may eventually want to roll back further their Far East frontier.
A new Great Game between the powers may be emerging in Central Asia. As U.S. strategists contemplate the meaning of Chinese-Russian exercises, perhaps they should be asking whether the United States wants or needs to be a player there - or whether it should focus its gradually declining influence on keeping peace and the balance of power in the Western Pacific.

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Howard W. French- The International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2005
SHANGHAI What sort of power does China aspire to be? With that very question in mind, the outside world watches this country with amazement, and often enough, too, with twinges of discomfort.

Those who fret most about China’s rise, though, seem to ignore some very basic, and as yet unanswered, questions. No matter how fast its economy grows, can a country make a successful transition to great-power status without real friendships, without associating itself meaningfully with any global ideal, or without bearing a more generous share of humanity’s burdens?

Outside observers who fail to take such questions into account are not alone. At least since Deng Xiaoping declared China should “lay low at a time of adversity,” the country’s leaders have seemed seduced by the anachronistic notion that their country, which boasts one of the world’s most vigorously globalizing economies, can best advance by keeping its head down and simply worrying about its own internal development.

This kind of thinking is a 180-degree reversal of the approach taken by Mao Zedong during the early decades of Communist rule. But though it is presented as modern and most of all pragmatic by a party nowadays run by colorless engineers, the “China first” ethos is actually a throwback to the blinkered, inward-looking style of the more distant past, one whose smug insularity squandered China’s economic and technological lead over the West.

Today, no nation of any import seems likely to copy China’s model of government, nor even, despite its many successes, China’s supposed economic miracle. But that doesn’t mean that any bid by Beijing for a larger mission in the world is a waste of time, much less that it is doomed to failure.

At its most influential, China has always represented an alternative to the West. Under Mao, many poor nations eagerly drew inspiration from this country, sometimes based on a naïve appreciation of Chinese realities, but also because China was perceived as being on their side, from their struggles against colonial rule to their struggles for development in a global economy that appeared meanly skewed against the poor.

Unless one is talking trade, with rare exception, China is absent from the lives of these countries today. The global rush, amid intense press scrutiny, to aid the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami seemed to prod Beijing to action, perhaps not wanting to be absent from the lists of major countries making large donations. But if proof were needed that there has been no change in outlook, no new internationalist reflex formed, China has been largely invisible amid reports of famine that is devastating Niger and threatening several other countries in West Africa.

A few years ago, perhaps, the Chinese could still have claimed convincingly that Africa is so far away that it shouldn’t rank as a serious concern here. Today, however, China’s state companies are scouring the continent for business as they never have before, including Sudan in the midst of a genocide, and if Africa looms large on the map for oil or trading profits, it stands to reason it should also count for something in more human terms.

The failure of China’s vision in such moments doesn’t hurt just Africans, or people in the world’s other weak nations. Ultimately, having such a large free rider weakens the global system, too.

But what is least appreciated here is how much the wasting of opportunities to reach out hurts China itself.

Polling done here recently by the China Youth and Children Research Center shows that most Chinese feel theirs is a country without friends - only enemies, real and potential. Sadly, these same surveys show Chinese attach no importance to international friendships. Whether at the individual level, or for the nation as a whole, getting rich quick, it seems, is all that matters.

“We can’t be a country that just does business,” said Wang Xiaodong, a widely followed writer here on China’s place in the world and who conducted the poll. “We must develop relationships besides economic and trade ties with other countries - including stronger military projection. But for the majority of the people, all they want to do is to develop the economy, and for them, anyone who thinks of anything else is foolish.”

Here again, Africa provides an instructive example. The world’s most effective treatment for malaria, a disease that kills over a million people a year - mostly in Africa - is a derivation of sweet wormwood, an ancient Chinese remedy. Yet today, it is a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Novartis, that makes and distributes the drug at cost, after buying the active ingredients from China.

When it is thought of at all, Mao’s engagement with the third world is usually dismissed here nowadays as revolutionary romanticism: a poor China squandering precious resources in a foolish and premature bid for superpower status. But Mao, who sent medical teams and road- and railroad-building brigades to the third world, would certainly have understood the political value in giving a Chinese drug to the world to cure a scourge the West had never been able to master.

Today, China is closer than it has ever been to superpower status, but its leadership, having renounced the past, is reduced to empty-sounding slogans, things like “peaceful rise,” and “harmonious society.” Meanwhile, they are ceding the question of universal values to the West, whose own imperfect record suggests some competition couldn’t hurt.

“If things continue like this into the future, with no change, I don’t think China will be able to become a real power,” said Shi Yinghong, a professor of international relations at People’s University, in Beijing. “Its ideological and moral influence in the world will be quite limited. People will think you have never realized any greater values, things which have relevance not only to China, but also outside of China.”

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

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Though it hasn’t been scientifically proven, there appears to be a definite link between summer heat and summer funerals. In my neighborhood, the onset of o-neppa (heat wave), followed by those negurushii yoru (restless nights) sets off a string of o-soshiki (funerals) at the local temple. Almost always, these are for the elderly, the generation of seventy-fives and over whose children and relatives gather at the kokubetsushiki to tell each other that at least the demise was a o-daioujyou (‘the great departure’ to the beyond following a life has been lived to the very end).

Just the other day, Saito-san’s mother died in her sleep at the grand old age of 91. Saito-san described her passing as o-medetai (felicitous).

Japanese summers are tinged with a shadow of darkness and from a very early age we learn that natsuyasumi (summer vacation time) is not simply about fun and games in the sun.

In addition to the frequent o-soshiki there’s o-shusenkinenbi (the anniversary that marks Japan’s surrender in WWII) on August 15, preceded by the genbaku kinenbi (the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) on August 6 and 9, respectively. Shusenkinenbi is also a day when many schools have the tokobi (going to school day), when schools demand that the students drop whatever they may be doing elsewhere, grab their schoolbags and come to school.

There are no classes, just a series of lectures from kochosensei (the principal) about the importance of keeping temptation at bay, to train the body and mind, and to refrain from having too much of a good time.

During junior high school, we were told to wear our sukuru mizugi (school-approved bathings suits) at the beach and public pools, and that it was best to keep the number of appearances at such places down to three times during an entire summer.

Imagine the festering resentment over how kids in the US and Europe got close to three solid months of summertime fun, while we in this Far Eastern archipelago got a measly five weeks full of woe, obligations and warnings against too much pleasure, not to mention the piles of natsuyasumi no shukudai (summer homework). It was, to put it briefly: Zurui (Not fair)!

As we grow older however, we come to understand the logic behind such arrangements. After all, once a Japanese child becomes an shakaijin (a member of adult society) it’s nearly impossible to wrangle more than a few days off for summer vacation and those days are more often or not designated for family duties or funerals.

The rest of the summer is devoted to retaining one’s sanity in the all-encompassing heat while dealing with a workload that somehow seems to increase, even as the nation is slowing down. In any case, it’s best to resign oneself to the fact that summers in Japan are not conducive to fun.

That said, over the years I’ve come to embrace the particular peculiarities of Nihon no Natsu (Japanese Summer). Every August, something in the brain triggers memories of all those afternoons spent running on the school tracks under a blazing sun (extra-curricular sports practices were held throughout summer), sweat dripping from our pores and into our eyes making us weep. Or the feeling of the pressure on the lungs from swimming so many laps at the school pool (summertime school pool attendance was, and still is, mandatory).

There was also that wonderful feeling of hard-won fatigue at the end of all that physical exertion, coupled with the gorgeous taste of kakigori (shaved ice desserts) eaten on the way home; the coolness of a temple during a summer funeral and the scent of powerful incense, and finally, the long, frantic nights spent on mountains of summer homework, just before they were due on Sept. 1 when we all went back to school (not that it felt like we’d ever really left the place).

“Natsu wa kenkona kokoro to kyojinna karada wo tsukuru tame ni aru” (Summers are for creating healthy minds and bodies full of strength) said the principal, one fine day in August many years ago. I can almost believe it.

Please send your comments or suggestions about the Bilingual pages to bilingual@japantimes.co.jp

The Japan Times: Aug. 18, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

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Thursday, August 18, 2005; C01

If you could pick one photograph that tells the story of Africa, what would
that one photo show?

Would it try to capture the origin of humanity, wildlife, famine, despair,
genocide? Would it try to juxtapose sorrow and political corruption,
incredible wealth against incredible poverty, birth against death by AIDS,
the ugliness of war or the simple beauty of a land called the first and last
place on Earth?

If you had the job to decide — if you were leading National Geographic
magazine, famed for its photographs — what single shot could capture the
complexity of that continent, tell its history and its future?

The new editor of Geographic decided it couldn’t be done in one photograph,
and so for the first time since 1959, the magazine has a cover with no
picture.

Instead, the September cover is simply a white background with the word
“Africa” in brown ink, followed by a statement: “Whatever you thought, think
again.”

And in another Geographic rarity, the editor decided to dedicate the entire
issue to one topic. Only a handful of issues have been on a single subject
in the magazine’s 117-year history.

Chris Johns, the magazine’s new editor in chief, spent 17 of his 30 years as
a photographer covering Africa. He said his goal with the issue was to
highlight the complexity of the continent, its stories of renewal and
ingenuity as told by Africans, stories that would serve as a balance to the
daunting headlines of disease, poverty, war and extinction.

“Africa is not just a place; it’s a million places. It’s a million voices,”
Johns said in an interview yesterday. “We felt no one photograph could
capture the mystery, the diversity and the surprise of Africa as it moves
forward. Our issue is a very forward look at Africa.”

Johns took over as editor in January, and the September issue is the first
produced completely under his leadership. The magazine’s team of editors
wanted to be provocative, he said.

“This is our coming-out party to some degree,” he said. “I could say,
‘Africa: Whatever you think, think again.’ That could be applied to National
Geographic. We could say, ‘Whatever you think, think again.’ “

Johns said he wants to make the magazine, which he estimates is read each
month by 44 million people throughout the world, a must read. “We want you
to find stories that are relevant, [that] you can apply directly to your
life. Surprising, in-depth, contextual stories that help us make good
decisions about the future.”

This issue focuses on Africa “because Africa is one of the most hopeful
continents in the world. It is a continent with a bright future and a great
tradition of storytelling.” Johns said he believes Africa has the potential
to fix itself and serve as a model for sustainable development.

Johns put together a team of writers and photographers who traveled the
length of the continent, covering stories about the environment, oil,
culture, wildlife and AIDS. They returned with thousands of images and
stories.

The issue includes a tale from biologist J. Michael Fay of the Wildlife
Conservation Society, who set out with writer David Quammen and photographer
George Steinmetz to trace the “Human Footprint” and document the impact of
humans on African land. They spent six months flying over Africa, covering
21 countries and taking more than 100,000 photographs to document the
changes in the ecosystem. Their Cessna 182 was equipped with a camera that
shot high-resolution photos every 20 seconds. They captured the sprawling
grave sites of AIDS victims in South Africa, slums in Nairobi, hippos
thirsty for water in Tanzania, a herd of lechwe in Zambia. They documented
the disappearance of wildlife and discovered that little remains of wild
Africa.

“Degradation is a continuum,” Fay said at a news conference yesterday. “In
virtually every ecosystem we visited, humans have colonized the landscape.
Very few places are wild. The places to find wildlife are in protected
areas. This is a good indicator of how deeply human species has penetrated
the continent.”

One of the first photographs in the issue shows an elephant walking right
through the lobby of a lodge in Zambia. The lodge had recently been
remodeled, blocking the elephants’ traditional path to a favored mango tree.
The remodeling didn’t stop the elephants for long; they just lumbered
through the lobby, the most direct path to the tree.

“Though the image is whimsical at first glance, it points to a profound
issue: Both elephants and people have laid routes across Africa, many of
them crisscrossing one another,” the caption says. “Now it’s up to us humans
to figure out how to coexist in these shared spaces.”

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2005

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

NEW YORK When Deng Xiaoping opened up China’s economy more than 25 years ago, the prevailing view in much of the West was that his reforms signaled the beginning of the end for the country’s authoritarian regime.
This prediction was not specific to China. Conventional wisdom at the time held - and to some extent still holds - that market liberalization is the most reliable path to democracy. Economic openness, it was reasoned, leads to the emergence of an educated and entrepreneurial middle class that over time, will start to demand more and more control over its own fate.
But something went wrong in China, Russia and other states where authoritarian regimes loosened the economic reins. Economic growth arrived but liberal democracy is still nowhere is sight. The reason is simple but disturbing: A new and more sophisticated breed of autocrat has discovered a strategy that permits them to enjoy the benefits of economic growth while postponing - often for decades - the emergence of authentic competitive democracy.
To understand how this strategy works, it helps first to understand how political competition emerges in the first place. To effectively pursue political power, citizens have to engage in “strategic coordination”: activities such as disseminating information, recruiting and organizing party members, selecting leaders, raising funds and holding meetings and demonstrations.
Economic growth has traditionally been thought to promote democratization by making strategic coordination easier, as communications technology improves, news media become more diverse and the citizenry more educated. But in recent years some savvy regimes have learned how to cut the cord between growth and strategic coordination, allowing the former without having to worry about the latter.
Their trick is to ration carefully the subset of public goods that facilitate political coordination, while investing in others that are essential to economic growth. The “coordination goods” that they need to worry about consist of things such as political and civil rights, press freedom and access to higher education. “Standard public goods” include public transportation, primary and secondary education, and public health; all of which contribute to economic growth and pose relatively little threat to the regime.
Examples abound of how autocrats limit coordination goods. Consider China’s long history of restricting access to the Internet and other media. Or Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has placed all national television networks under strict state control and eliminated elections for regional leaders. Or Venezuela, where last year President Hugo Chávez pushed through a law allowing him to ban news reports of violent protests and to suspend the broadcasting licenses of media outlets that violate any of a long list of broadly phrased regulations.
How well does this coordination suppression strategy work? We recently examined the provision of both coordination goods and standard public goods in about 150 countries from 1970 to 1999. Several findings are particularly noteworthy.
First, the suppression of coordination goods keeps autocrats in power. An autocrat who both permits freedom of the press and civil liberties reduces the chances that he will survive for another year by about 15 to 20 percent.
Second, today’s autocrats tend to suppress coordination goods much more consistently than they do other public goods. Some old-fashioned tyrants, especially in Africa, still suppress all public goods. But a growing proportion of the world’s authoritarian regimes have adopted a more sophisticated brand of oppression.
Third, the greater the suppression of coordination goods in a given country, the greater the lag between the onset of economic growth and the emergence of liberal democracy.
What should Western governments make of these findings? First, they should recognize that promoting economic growth is not nearly as effective a way to promote democracy as was once believed. By limiting coordination goods, oppressive incumbents can have it all: a contented constituency of rich elites who benefit from economic growth; plenty of resources to cope with economic and political shocks; and a weak, dispirited political opposition.
Second, the World Bank and other donor organizations should broaden the set of conditions that they attach to loans to developing states, and start requiring that recipients increase basic civil liberties, political rights and other coordination goods. This does not mean placing less emphasis on economic growth or the provision of standard public goods. Both kinds of goods are necessary conditions for the realization of real democracy.
The third lesson concerns the Middle East. It is tempting to view the elections in Iraq, Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon and the subsequent elections, the announcement that local elections will be held in Saudi Arabia, and the promise of more competitive elections in Egypt as signaling a new democratic dawn in the region. But this is unrealistic.
Such structural reforms by themselves tend to be more symbolic than real in autocratic states. Policy makers seriously interested in measuring democratic progress in the region should focus on the availability of coordination goods: on the number and variety of truly independent media outlets, for example, or on how easy (and safe) it is to hold a large antigovernment demonstration.
These are the kind of freedoms that make real democracy possible. Until they appear, the United States, the European Union, aid agencies and other donors and must keep exerting pressure for change.
(Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is the chair of the Department of Politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. George W. Downs is a professor of politics and dean of social sciences at New York University. This article is based on an upcoming essay in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.)

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2005

SINGAPORE The world’s attention has been focused on China in the past month because of the aborted bid by China National Offshore Oil Corp. to take over the American company Unocal, and the July 21 “repeg” of China’s currency, the yuan. But three other recent developments are much more important, because they provide subtle signals that a major debate has started within the Beijing leadership on China’s social, economic, cultural and political future.

On July 28, the People’s Daily ran a front-page commentary warning Chinese citizens to obey the law, saying that any threats to social stability would not be tolerated by the authorities. This editorial could have been aimed to deter anti-Japanese protests in the period leading up to commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War. But curiously, and significantly, it omitted the term “harmonious society” - President Hu Jintao’s populist catch-phrase for the effort to correct the lopsided excesses and widespread corruption resulting from China’s rapid development. Moreover, the editorial surprised many by its stance that widening inequality is an inevitable phase of development.

On Aug. 3, the Culture Ministry’s Web site announced that Beijing would bar new foreign television channels from entering China and step up censorship of imported programming, in order to “safeguard national cultural safety.” This announcement, backed up by a statement from the official Xinhua News Agency, could be perceived as a further tightening of popular culture in an effort to keep out liberal Western materials that could be politically and socially dangerous for Beijing.

Then on Aug. 5, Health Minister Gao Qiang was quoted in the China Daily criticizing China’s hospitals for being greedy and putting profit ahead of their social function, thus adding to the burdens on patients and undermining the image of medical personnel and public health departments.

These three statements are an indication that the authorities no longer refuse to discuss China’s growing social instability in public. Key officials in the Chinese government have lately expressed their concern about this instability, in the face of an increasing number of public protests and a widening rich-poor gap in a country that is still officially Communist.

The People’s Daily commentary is particularly significant, as it signals a debate among China’s leaders on whether to allow continuous rampant growth and economic liberalization, or to promote greater equality and redistribution in China, which historically has been wracked by social upheaval.

The People’s Daily commentary echoes liberal economists and politicians who argue for a continuous push toward “kai fang,” or opening up, of China’s economy and society along the lines of World Trade Organization tenets. Their argument is based on the fact that if the Chinese economy does not produce at least 8 percent growth per annum (based on at least $40 billion of annual foreign direct investments), the urban unemployment problem could rise to levels that would jeopardize social stability.

This liberal school, which hitched onto the WTO bandwagon under the patronage of former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, believed China should aim to become a developed economy in 50 years’ time. The People’s Daily commentary reflects this school of thought, which considers that a widening revenue gap - and hence some inequality - is indispensable in pursuing economic development.

China’s “socialist economists,” on the other hand, have begun to criticize China’s current rampant development, questioning the need to accumulate more than $700 billion of foreign reserves at a time when social imbalances are increasing at an alarming rate.

Senior officials within the State Council, Finance Ministry and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have begun to warn of the need for a more social approach to maintaining stability, emphasizing social justice - including the authorities’ battle against corruption - and redistribution to dampen widening disparities. The health minister’s criticism of the public service’s “profit-chasing” ethos is a reflection of this school of thought.

The Culture Ministry’s regulations, for their part, indicate that the authorities may encourage a more nationalistic, less liberal, less Western cultural model.

These signals point to the tension that currently underlies Chinese society. There is clearly a growing contradiction between the ideological tenets of the Communist Party and Deng Xiaoping’s philosophy that “to grow rich is glorious.” This ideology-versus-economics debate will ultimately determine the direction of China in the next decades, as social tensions increase in a society that is revolutionizing much faster than Western societies have in the past century.

This growing debate could accelerate in the lead-up to the 17th Party Congress in autumn 2007, at which President Hu and his team are expected to fully consolidate their power. Potential rivals of Hu could exploit this debate to challenge his power, especially if the Chinese economy falters or social stability deteriorates.

This socio-ideological debate is critical not only for China but also for the rest of Asia, where a new socioeconomic model of development may emerge to “complement” the continent’s expected rise this century.

As the winds of change sweep through China, it is this philosophical and social debate - and not the yuan revaluation or the Unocal debacle - that will ultimately determine the direction of China’s economy and society, as well as its “peaceful rise” and its continuous social revolution.

Asia and the world should pay more attention to this fundamental debate, which could also determine the outcome of Hu’s political position at the 17th Party Congress and hence the ultimate stability of Asia’s rising dragon.

(Eric Teo Chu Cheow, a business consultant and strategist, is council secretary of the Singapore Institute for International Affairs.)

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08/08/2005, Volume 010, Issue 44

The sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima seems to be shaping up as a subdued affair—though not for any lack of significance. A survey of news editors in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, first among the top one hundred stories of the twentieth century. And any thoughtful list of controversies in American history would place it near the top again. It was not always so. In 1945, an overwhelming majority of Americans regarded as a matter of course that the United States had used atomic bombs to end the Pacific war. They further believed that those bombs had actually ended the war and saved countless lives. This set of beliefs is now sometimes labeled by academic historians the “traditionalist” view. One unkindly dubbed it the “patriotic orthodoxy.”

But in the 1960s, what were previously modest and scattered challenges of the decision to use the bombs began to crystallize into a rival canon. The challengers were branded “revisionists,” but this is inapt. Any historian who gains possession of significant new evidence has a duty to revise his appreciation of the relevant events. These challengers are better termed critics.

The critics share three fundamental premises. The first is that Japan’s situation in 1945 was catastrophically hopeless. The second is that Japan’s leaders recognized that fact and were seeking to surrender in the summer of 1945. The third is that thanks to decoded Japanese diplomatic messages, American leaders knew that Japan was about to surrender when they unleashed needless nuclear devastation. The critics divide over what prompted the decision to drop the bombs in spite of the impending surrender, with the most provocative arguments focusing on Washington’s desire to intimidate the Kremlin. Among an important stratum of American society—and still more perhaps abroad—the critics’ interpretation displaced the traditionalist view.

These rival narratives clashed in a major battle over the exhibition of the Enola Gay, the airplane from which the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, at the Smithsonian Institution in 1995. That confrontation froze many people’s understanding of the competing views. Since then, however, a sheaf of new archival discoveries and publications has expanded our understanding of the events of August 1945. This new evidence requires serious revision of the terms of the debate. What is perhaps the most interesting feature of the new findings is that they make a case President Harry S. Truman deliberately chose not to make publicly in defense of his decision to use the bomb.

When scholars began to examine the archival records in the 1960s, some intuited quite correctly that the accounts of their decision-making that Truman and members of his administration had offered in 1945 were at least incomplete. And if Truman had refused to disclose fully his thinking, these scholars reasoned, it must be because the real basis for his choices would undermine or even delegitimize his decisions. It scarcely seemed plausible to such critics—or to almost anyone else—that there could be any legitimate reason that the U.S. government would have concealed at the time, and would continue to conceal, powerful evidence that supported and explained the president’s decisions.

But beginning in the 1970s, we have acquired an array of new evidence from Japan and the United States. By far the most important single body of this new evidence consists of secret radio intelligence material, and what it highlights is the painful dilemma faced by Truman and his administration. In explaining their decisions to the public, they deliberately forfeited their best evidence. They did so because under the stringent security restrictions guarding radio intercepts, recipients of this intelligence up to and including the president were barred from retaining copies of briefing documents, from making any public reference to them whatsoever at the time or in their memoirs, and from retaining any record of what they had seen or what they had concluded from it. With a handful of exceptions, they obeyed these rules, both during the war and thereafter.

Collectively, the missing information is known as The Ultra Secret of World War II (after the title of a breakthrough book by Frederick William Winterbotham published in 1974). Ultra was the name given to what became a vast and enormously efficient Allied radio intelligence organization, which secretly unveiled masses of information for senior policymakers. Careful listening posts snatched copies of millions of cryptograms from the air. Code breakers then extracted the true text. The extent of the effort is staggering. By the summer of 1945, Allied radio intelligence was breaking into a million messages a month from the Japanese Imperial Army alone, and many thousands from the Imperial Navy and Japanese diplomats.

All of this effort and expertise would be squandered if the raw intercepts were not properly translated and analyzed and their disclosures distributed to those who needed to know. This is where Pearl Harbor played a role. In the aftermath of that disastrous surprise attack, Secretary of War Henry Stimson recognized that the fruits of radio intelligence were not being properly exploited. He set Alfred McCormack, a top-drawer lawyer with experience in handling complex cases, to the task of formulating a way to manage the distribution of information from Ultra. The system McCormack devised called for funneling all radio intelligence to a handful of extremely bright individuals who would evaluate the flood of messages, correlate them with all other sources, and then write daily summaries for policymakers.

By mid-1942, McCormack’s scheme had evolved into a daily ritual that continued to the end of the war—and is in essence the system still in effect today. Every day, analysts prepared three mimeographed newsletters. Official couriers toting locked pouches delivered one copy of each summary to a tiny list of authorized recipients around the Washington area. (They also retrieved the previous day’s distribution, which was then destroyed except for a file copy.) Two copies of each summary went to the White House, for the president and his chief of staff. Other copies went to a very select group of officers and civilian officials in the War and Navy Departments, the British Staff Mission, and the State Department. What is almost as interesting is the list of those not entitled to these top-level summaries: the vice president, any cabinet official outside the select few in the War, Navy, and State Departments, anyone in the Office of Strategic Services or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or anyone in the Manhattan Project building the atomic bomb, from Major General Leslie Groves on down.

The three daily summaries were called the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, the “Magic” Far East Summary, and the European Summary. (“Magic” was a code word coined by the U.S. Army’s chief signal officer, who called his code breakers “magicians” and their product “Magic.” The term “Ultra” came from the British and has generally prevailed as the preferred term among historians, but in 1945 “Magic” remained the American designation for radio intelligence, particularly that concerning the Japanese.) The “Magic” Diplomatic Summary covered intercepts from foreign diplomats all over the world. The “Magic” Far East Summary presented information on Japan’s military, naval, and air situation. The European Summary paralleled the Far East summary in coverage and need not detain us. Each summary read like a newsmagazine. There were headlines and brief articles usually containing extended quotations from intercepts and commentary. The commentary was critical: Since no recipient retained any back issues, it was up to the editors to explain how each day’s developments fitted into the broader picture.

When a complete set of the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary for the war years was first made public in 1978, the text contained a large number of redacted (literally whited out) passages. The critics reasonably asked whether the blanks concealed devastating revelations. Release of a nonredacted complete set in 1995 disclosed that the redacted areas had indeed contained a devastating revelation—but not about the use of the atomic bombs. Instead, the redacted areas concealed the embarrassing fact that Allied radio intelligence was reading the codes not just of the Axis powers, but also of some 30 other governments, including allies like France.

The diplomatic intercepts included, for example, those of neutral diplomats or attachés stationed in Japan. Critics highlighted a few nuggets from this trove in the 1978 releases, but with the complete release, we learned that there were only 3 or 4 messages suggesting the possibility of a compromise peace, while no fewer than 13 affirmed that Japan fully intended to fight to the bitter end. Another page in the critics’ canon emphasized a squad of Japanese diplomats in Europe, from Sweden to the Vatican, who attempted to become peace entrepreneurs in their contacts with American officials. As the editors of the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary correctly made clear to American policymakers during the war, however, not a single one of these men (save one we will address shortly) possessed actual authority to act for the Japanese government.

An inner cabinet in Tokyo authorized Japan’s only officially sanctioned diplomatic initiative. The Japanese dubbed this inner cabinet the Big Six because it comprised just six men: Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, Army Minister Korechika Anami, Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, and the chiefs of staff of the Imperial Army (General Yoshijiro Umezu) and Imperial Navy (Admiral Soemu Toyoda). In complete secrecy, the Big Six agreed on an approach to the Soviet Union in June 1945. This was not to ask the Soviets to deliver a “We surrender” note; rather, it aimed to enlist the Soviets as mediators to negotiate an end to the war satisfactory to the Big Six—in other words, a peace on terms satisfactory to the dominant militarists. Their minimal goal was not confined to guaranteed retention of the Imperial Institution; they also insisted on preservation of the old militaristic order in Japan, the one in which they ruled.

The conduit for this initiative was Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato. He communicated with Foreign Minister Togo—and, thanks to code breaking, with American policymakers. Ambassador Sato emerges in the intercepts as a devastating cross-examiner ruthlessly unmasking for history the feebleness of the whole enterprise. Sato immediately told Togo that the Soviets would never bestir themselves on behalf of Japan. The foreign minister could only insist that Sato follow his instructions. Sato demanded to know whether the government and the military supported the overture and what its legal basis was—after all, the official Japanese position, adopted in an Imperial Conference in June 1945 with the emperor’s sanction, was a fight to the finish. The ambassador also demanded that Japan state concrete terms to end the war, otherwise the effort could not be taken seriously. Togo responded evasively that the “directing powers” and the government had authorized the effort—he did not and could not claim that the military in general supported it or that the fight-to-the-end policy had been replaced. Indeed, Togo added: “Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians’ mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender.”

This last comment triggered a fateful exchange. Critics have pointed out correctly that both Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew (the former U.S. ambassador to Japan and the leading expert on that nation within the government) and Secretary of War Henry Stimson advised Truman that a guarantee that the Imperial Institution would not be eliminated could prove essential to obtaining Japan’s surrender. The critics further have argued that if only the United States had made such a guarantee, Japan would have surrendered. But when Foreign Minister Togo informed Ambassador Sato that Japan was not looking for anything like unconditional surrender, Sato promptly wired back a cable that the editors of the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary made clear to American policymakers “advocate[s] unconditional surrender provided the Imperial House is preserved.” Togo’s reply, quoted in the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary of July 22, 1945, was adamant: American policymakers could read for themselves Togo’s rejection of Sato’s proposal—with not even a hint that a guarantee of the Imperial House would be a step in the right direction. Any rational person following this exchange would conclude that modifying the demand for unconditional surrender to include a promise to preserve the Imperial House would not secure Japan’s surrender.

Togo’s initial messages—indicating that the emperor himself endorsed the effort to secure Soviet mediation and was prepared to send his own special envoy—elicited immediate attention from the editors of the “Magic” Diplomatic Summary, as well as Under Secretary of State Grew. Because of Grew’s documented advice to Truman on the importance of the Imperial Institution, critics feature him in the role of the sage counsel. What the intercept evidence discloses is that Grew reviewed the Japanese effort and concurred with the U.S. Army’s chief of intelligence, Major General Clayton Bissell, that the effort most likely represented a ploy to play on American war weariness. They deemed the possibility that it manifested a serious effort by the emperor to end the war “remote.” Lest there be any doubt about Grew’s mindset, as late as August 7, the day after Hiroshima, Grew drafted a memorandum with an oblique reference to radio intelligence again affirming his view that Tokyo still was not close to peace.

Starting with the publication of excerpts from the diaries of James Forrestal in 1951, the contents of a few of the diplomatic intercepts were revealed, and for decades the critics focused on these. But the release of the complete (unredacted) “Magic” Far East Summary, supplementing the Diplomatic Summary, in the 1990s revealed that the diplomatic messages amounted to a mere trickle by comparison with the torrent of military intercepts. The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan’s armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender. Ultra was even more alarming in what it revealed about Japanese knowledge of American military plans. Intercepts demonstrated that the Japanese had correctly anticipated precisely where U.S. forces intended to land on Southern Kyushu in November 1945 (Operation Olympic). American planning for the Kyushu assault reflected adherence to the military rule of thumb that the attacker should outnumber the defender at least three to one to assure success at a reasonable cost. American estimates projected that on the date of the landings, the Japanese would have only three of their six field divisions on all of Kyushu in the southern target area where nine American divisions would push ashore. The estimates allowed that the Japanese would possess just 2,500 to 3,000 planes total throughout Japan to face Olympic. American aerial strength would be over four times greater.

From mid-July onwards, Ultra intercepts exposed a huge military buildup on Kyushu. Japanese ground forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of four. Instead of 3 Japanese field divisions deployed in southern Kyushu to meet the 9 U.S. divisions, there were 10 Imperial Army divisions plus additional brigades. Japanese air forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of two to four. Instead of 2,500 to 3,000 Japanese aircraft, estimates varied between about 6,000 and 10,000. One intelligence officer commented that the Japanese defenses threatened “to grow to [the] point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one (1) which is not the recipe for victory.”

Concurrent with the publication of the radio intelligence material, additional papers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been released in the last decade. From these, it is clear that there was no true consensus among the Joint Chiefs of Staff about an invasion of Japan. The Army, led by General George C. Marshall, believed that the critical factor in achieving American war aims was time. Thus, Marshall and the Army advocated an invasion of the Home Islands as the fastest way to end the war. But the long-held Navy view was that the critical factor in achieving American war aims was casualties. The Navy was convinced that an invasion would be far too costly to sustain the support of the American people, and hence believed that blockade and bombardment were the sound course.

The picture becomes even more complex than previously understood because it emerged that the Navy chose to postpone a final showdown over these two strategies. The commander in chief of the U.S. fleet, Admiral Ernest King, informed his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945 that he did not agree that Japan should be invaded. He concurred only that the Joint Chiefs must issue an invasion order immediately to create that option for the fall. But King predicted that the Joint Chiefs would revisit the issue of whether an invasion was wise in August or September. Meanwhile, two months of horrendous fighting ashore on Okinawa under skies filled with kamikazes convinced the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, that he should withdraw his prior support for at least the invasion of Kyushu. Nimitz informed King of this change in his views in strict confidence.

In August, the Ultra revelations propelled the Army and Navy towards a showdown over the invasion. On August 7 (the day after Hiroshima, which no one expected to prompt a quick surrender), General Marshall reacted to weeks of gathering gloom in the Ultra evidence by asking General Douglas MacArthur, who was to command what promised to be the greatest invasion in history, whether invading Kyushu in November as planned still looked sensible. MacArthur replied, amazingly, that he did not believe the radio intelligence! He vehemently urged the invasion should go forward as planned. (This, incidentally, demolishes later claims that MacArthur thought the Japanese were about to surrender at the time of Hiroshima.) On August 9 (the day the second bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki), King gathered the two messages in the exchange between Marshall and MacArthur and sent them to Nimitz. King told Nimitz to provide his views on the viability of invading Kyushu, with a copy to MacArthur. Clearly, nothing that had transpired since May would have altered Nimitz’s view that Olympic was unwise. Ultra now made the invasion appear foolhardy to everyone but MacArthur. But King had not placed a deadline on Nimitz’s response, and the Japanese surrender on August 15 allowed Nimitz to avoid starting what was certain to be one of the most tumultuous interservice battles of the whole war.

What this evidence illuminates is that one central tenet of the traditionalist view is wrong—but with a twist. Even with the full ration of caution that any historian should apply anytime he ventures comments on paths history did not take, in this instance it is now clear that the long-held belief that Operation Olympic loomed as a certainty is mistaken. Truman’s reluctant endorsement of the Olympic invasion at a meeting in June 1945 was based in key part on the fact that the Joint Chiefs had presented it as their unanimous recommendation. (King went along with Marshall at the meeting, presumably because he deemed it premature to wage a showdown fight. He did comment to Truman that, of course, any invasion authorized then could be canceled later.) With the Navy’s withdrawal of support, the terrible casualties in Okinawa, and the appalling radio-intelligence picture of the Japanese buildup on Kyushu, Olympic was not going forward as planned and authorized—period. But this evidence also shows that the demise of Olympic came not because it was deemed unnecessary, but because it had become unthinkable. It is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs in this circumstance. Japanese historians uncovered another key element of the story. After Hiroshima (August 6), Soviet entry into the war against Japan (August 8), and Nagasaki (August 9), the emperor intervened to break a deadlock within the government and decide that Japan must surrender in the early hours of August 10. The Japanese Foreign Ministry dispatched a message to the United States that day stating that Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration, “with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.” This was not, as critics later asserted, merely a humble request that the emperor retain a modest figurehead role. As Japanese historians writing decades after the war emphasized, the demand that there be no compromise of the “prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler” as a precondition for the surrender was a demand that the United States grant the emperor veto power over occupation reforms and continue the rule of the old order in Japan. Fortunately, Japan specialists in the State Department immediately realized the actual purpose of this language and briefed Secretary of State James Byrnes, who insisted properly that this maneuver must be defeated. The maneuver further underscores the fact that right to the very end, the Japanese pursued twin goals: not only the preservation of the imperial system, but also preservation of the old order in Japan that had launched a war of aggression that killed 17 million.

This brings us to another aspect of history that now very belatedly has entered the controversy. Several American historians led by Robert Newman have insisted vigorously that any assessment of the end of the Pacific war must include the horrifying consequences of each continued day of the war for the Asian populations trapped within Japan’s conquests. Newman calculates that between a quarter million and 400,000 Asians, overwhelmingly noncombatants, were dying each month the war continued. Newman et al. challenge whether an assessment of Truman’s decision can highlight only the deaths of noncombatant civilians in the aggressor nation while ignoring much larger death tolls among noncombatant civilians in the victim nations.

There are a good many more points that now extend our understanding beyond the debates of 1995. But it is clear that all three of the critics’ central premises are wrong. The Japanese did not see their situation as catastrophically hopeless. They were not seeking to surrender, but pursuing a negotiated end to the war that preserved the old order in Japan, not just a figurehead emperor. Finally, thanks to radio intelligence, American leaders, far from knowing that peace was at hand, understood—as one analytical piece in the “Magic” Far East Summary stated in July 1945, after a review of both the military and diplomatic intercepts—that “until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion can not be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies.” This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945.

The displacement of the so-called traditionalist view within important segments of American opinion took several decades to accomplish. It will take a similar span of time to displace the critical orthodoxy that arose in the 1960s and prevailed roughly through the 1980s, and replace it with a richer appreciation for the realities of 1945. But the clock is ticking.

Richard B. Frank, a historian of World War II, is the author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.

© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserve

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Copyright The Los Angeles Times

ASK RICHARD IDRO IF HE HAD MALARIA as a child, and you will begin to grasp the toll this disease takes on sub-Saharan Africa. Patiently, as though explaining breathing to a visiting Martian, he will answer, “Everybody got malaria.”

Growing up in northwestern Uganda, Idro and his nine brothers and sisters had malaria “over and over,” especially after the war that toppled strongman Idi Amin destroyed their home and sent them to a crowded refugee camp. But Idro’s worst brush came when he was just a year old and lapsed into a coma from cerebral malaria, the most severe form. His mother prayed he would pull through.

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The oft-told story of his survival inspired Idro to become a pediatrician when he grew up. Today, he is studying to add a doctorate to his medical degree, specializing in cerebral malaria at the Kenya Medical Research Institute.

The story of malaria in the 30 years since Idro’s recovery isn’t nearly as uplifting. The mosquito-borne parasite has grown resistant to the drug that cured him. Malaria’s mortality rate is higher today than it has been in decades.

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Even in tropical Africa, where the Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit the parasites thrive, everybody doesn’t have to get malaria.

Historically, vaccines have been responsible for reining in some of the world’s worst diseases. In an earlier editorial, we urged the United States and other wealthy nations to speed progress by committing in advance to a $4-billion purchasing fund, to be tapped only if an effective vaccine is developed. This innovative, market-based complement to the “push” of grants would “pull” more biotech firms and their armies of scientists into the search by guaranteeing a payoff for success.

But sub-Saharan Africa’s dying children can’t wait years for a vaccine. Here too the world’s wealthy nations can help, by creating a similar fund to pay for an exciting but expensive drug compound made from a Chinese herb.

Good herb, bad name

The wormwood plant does not have good PR. When God wants to curse a people in the Old Testament, he threatens to feed them with wormwood and gall. The Book of Revelation says that a star called Wormwood will strike the Earth at Armageddon and poison the waters. So it’s a little surprising that a wormwood species, Artemisia annua, holds a key to curing the deadly, ancient plague of malaria.

Artemisia’s beneficial properties might never have been discovered were it not for Mao Tse-tung. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered Chinese scientists to investigate ancient herbal remedies. In the 1970s, an archeological dig unearthed ancient texts, including recipes for herbal cures that may be as much as 2,000 years old. One of them identified artemisia as a cure for fevers; the scientists investigated and discovered that an agent extracted from the plant, artemisinin, was as effective at killing malaria parasites as existing drugs such as chloroquine. The discovery didn’t come a moment too soon, because the parasites were becoming resistant to chloroquine.

The newest malaria miracle cure is best used as a cocktail with other drugs, called artemisinin combination therapy. But ACT costs more than legions of Africa’s rural poor can afford. And without a market of consumers able to buy it, farmers outside China have little incentive to start growing the artemesia plant, while scientists aren’t encouraged to invest in finding a synthetic substitute and manufacturers have no motivation to increase production of the finished drug.

What is needed is a global purchasing pool, separate from the one proposed to spur investment in vaccine research. Rather than guaranteeing a future market for a potential vaccine, the second fund would be tapped now to pay for an already existing cure.

The Washington-based Institute of Medicine, an independent organization that advises the U.S. government on health policy, last year proposed just such a plan. In a report written by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, it called on international organizations and world leaders to contribute $300 million to $500 million a year to a centralized procurement agency to buy ACTs at competitive prices, then resell them at lower prices to public and private distributors in countries battling malaria.

Instead of today’s market price of $2, ACT would cost consumers about 10 cents — the same as the no-longer-effective but still ubiquitous chloroquine. We’d advocate doubling the pool to $1 billion to spur production and subsidize the price of insecticide-treated bed nets as well, delivering a one-two punch against the parasites and the mosquitoes that transmit them.

Existing aid programs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have built-in limits on long-range commitments and can’t provide the certainty required to boost drug or net production and get enough of these lifesaving tools into the hands of those who so desperately need them. A well-managed procurement agency could, while freeing other aid programs to fund the labor-intensive education drives that are key to making sure both drugs and nets are used properly. Yet the Institute of Medicine plan has attracted little notice from the world’s leaders, who don’t seem to understand the urgency: Even with new tools, the window for rolling back malaria’s mounting toll is alarmingly narrow.

The human cost

At the district hospital in Kilifi, the Kenya Medical Research Institute’s home on the coast, Idro makes the rounds of the intensive-care pediatric unit. The rains are late this year, and the unit is calm compared with the height of malaria season, when it admits 10 new cases a day while the regular ward admits three times that many. Still, infants and toddlers lie two to a cot, swaddled in the vivid cotton kangas that women along the coast use as skirts and to strap infants to their backs. Nurses are in such short supply that mothers stay to tend their children, sleeping on the floor by the bed at night. Malaria accounts for up to 40% of hospital admissions, taking its toll in lost days of school and work and lost chances to break poverty’s grip. With cerebral malaria, about one in 10 children who survive have paralysis, epilepsy, speech impairments, blindness or behavioral problems that range from inattention to aggression.

“When a child who was playing until yesterday, then got convulsions, and the next day is dead, it’s devastating,” Idro said. “And when a child has cerebral damage, sometimes we don’t know how to tell the mothers this child will not be the same.”

Even a new, effective drug won’t work miracles for those children, at least not instantly. Getting the right drugs at the right time and in the right dosage is hampered by poverty, isolation and a lack of understanding about what causes malaria.

The best hope of staving off serious complications or death in children under 5, who have not yet developed any immunity to malaria, is to seek treatment within the first 24 hours of the onset of fever, chills or other symptoms.

But parents who live on $1 or less a day and must mete out pennies often wait to see if a child’s fever is passing. Sometimes they will have only enough money to buy a single pill when multiple doses are needed, which hastens the parasite’s development of resistance by weakening but not killing it. The convulsions of cerebral malaria are still seen in some quarters as a sign the child has been bewitched, and parents will turn to a local healer.

Village medicine

Local health ministries and international aid organizations are finding ways to overcome these barriers. Most Africans buy drugs without a prescription from a mud-hut shop rather than from a doctor or clinic. The Kenya Medical Research Institute runs a program that trains shopkeepers to dole out advice. The institute also works with herbal healers to refer ill children for treatment, a process made easier when a local witch doctor’s own child came down with convulsions and he turned to the district hospital for help.

In Uganda, the nonprofit African Medical and Research Foundation is recruiting volunteers in remote villages to dispense free drugs day or night and to monitor their use. But as in most of Africa, the drug they are dispensing, a combination of chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, is losing its effectiveness.

The new therapy, ACT, is designed to stave off resistance. Artemisinin is combined with another anti-malarial drug, which doubles the chances of killing the parasites and lessens the likelihood that any would survive to develop resistance. The drug cocktail is packaged as a single pill to ensure that both are taken.

An international push and subsidy for the combination pill would both encourage its use and discourage the use of the herbal remedy alone. Parts of Asia now use just artemisinin to treat malaria. Should the parasites become resistant to it, which is inevitable if such use continues, that resistance will spread around the globe, just as resistance to chloroquine did. The miracle cocktail won’t work miracles any longer. And the best promise to halt and even reverse malaria will be gone until someone like Richard Idro, working long hours in his laboratory, develops a new miracle drug or a vaccine. Tomorrow’s Richard Idro may not grow up to be that researcher. When he gets malaria, he may not survive.

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WASHINGTON (Kyodo) The United States paid money and gave other benefits to former members of a Japanese germ warfare unit two years after the end of World War II to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.
It has been known that the Allies offered to waive war crime charges at the tribunal for officers of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 in exchange for experiment data.

But the latest findings reveal Washington’s eagerness to obtain such data even by providing monetary rewards, despite the horrific nature of the unit’s activities, in an attempt to beat the Soviet Union in the arms development race.

Historians believe that some 3,000 people died in the experiments conducted in China by the unit led by military doctor Shiro Ishii before and during the war.

The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today, based on an initial salary comparison for central government employees now and then.

The two declassified documents were found in the U.S. National Archives by Keiichi Tsuneishi, a professor at Kanagawa University and an expert on biological and chemical weapons.

One of the top secret documents was a “report on bacteriological warfare” compiled for the chief of staff of the Far Eastern Commission, dated July 17, 1947. It was compiled by Brig. Gen. Charles Willoughby, head of the G2 intelligence unit of the Occupation forces in Japan.

The other was a letter dated July 22, 1947, that Willoughby sent to Maj. Gen. S. J. Chamberlin, director of intelligence of the U.S. War Department General Staff, to illustrate the need for continued unrestricted use of confidential funds to obtain such intelligence.

In the documents, Willoughby described the achievements of his unit’s investigations, saying the “information procured will have the greatest value in future development of the U.S. BW (bacteria warfare) program.”

Citing a U.S. War Department specialist in charge of the investigation, Willoughby wrote in the report that “data on human experiments may prove invaluable” and the information was “only obtainable through the skillful, psychological approach to top-flight pathologists” involved in Unit 731 experiments.

The U.S. provided money, food, gifts, entertainment and other kinds of rewards to the former Unit 731 members, according to the report.

“All of these actions did not amount to more than (150,000 yen to 200,000 yen), netting the (United States) the fruit of 20 years’ laboratory tests and research,” the report says.

Willoughby described the cost as a “mere pittance” in his letter to Chamberlin.

“I contend that with new restrictions on the use of (confidential) funds we shall find it successively more difficult to induce these people to disclose information,” Willoughby wrote.

Kanagawa University’s Tsuneishi said it had been thought that the U.S. had gathered the information by making unit members choose between cooperating and facing war crime charges, “but it has become clear that this was done by winning (unit members’) hearts with money and rewards.”

The documents reveal that the two sides — the United States which had initially overlooked the existence of the human experiments and Japan which had been trying to hide the truth — “ended up trading information through monetary benefits without any regard for their behavior,” Tsuneishi said.

The Japan Times: Aug. 15, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

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08/15/2005

The Asahi Shimbun
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Monday sought to repair damaged relations with Asian nations by expressing Japan’s heartfelt apologies for causing “tremendous damage and suffering” through its colonial domination and past military aggression.

The statement, which was timed to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, covered many of the basic points addressed 10 years ago by then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama.

Koizumi’s statement for the first time made direct reference to China and South Korea. It calls for their cooperation in seeking to maintain regional peace and development.

Koizumi’s past visits to war-related Yasukuni Shrine sent relations with China and South Korea spiraling to their lowest ebb.

Government officials clearly hoped that the statement, along with Koizumi’s decision not to visit Yasukuni on or around Aug. 15, would help to mend the chilly ties with Japan’s Asian neighbors.

Because of the sensitivity of those relations, work on the statement’s wording continued until just before its release, according to sources.

Yasukuni is not the only issue that has bedeviled relations with China and South Korea. Issues related to perceptions of history and textbooks approved by the government that critics say whitewash Japan’s military aggression have also played a major role.Monday’s statement touched on Murayama’s address in 1995 marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Koizumi did the same when he addressed the Asia-Africa Conference in Indonesia in April.It says in part: “Japan, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. Japan squarely faces these facts of history in a spirit of humility. And along with expressing once again feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology, we also express our sincere feelings of condolence to all the victims of the last war both in Japan and abroad.”

The statement also touched on Japan’s path as a pacifist nation in the postwar era and emphasized the importance of a future-oriented outlook to achieve regional security and development based on mutual understanding and trust.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda explained the significance of the latest statement at his regular morning news conference Monday.

“The latest statement is a reconfirmation of the government’s thinking until now on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II,” Hosoda said. “Therefore, it is similar to the Murayama statement (of 1995) as well as the Bandung (Indonesia) speech by Koizumi.”

Whether the statement helps to improve ties with China and South Korea will depend greatly on how Koizumi acts in the future.

While Asian nations welcomed Murayama’s apology 10 years ago, they have become more distrustful of Japan in the interim partly due to verbal gaffes by Cabinet ministers. But it is the issue of Koizumi’s repeated visits to Yasukuni, more than any other, that has derailed Japan’s relations with its neighbors.

Yasukuni is controversial because 14 Class-A war criminals are memorialized there along with the nation’s war dead.Koizumi also appeared to hope to get political mileage out of Monday’s statement in connection with the Sept. 11 Lower House election.

Koizumi has vowed to make postal privatization the focus of the election and stressed he would not make his Yasukuni visits an issue in the campaign. Having said that, Koizumi needed to clarify his basic stance on Asian diplomacy in the runup to voting.

The statement also includes wording that Koizumi has used in the past to justify his visits to Yasukuni.

The statement begins with the wording, “On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, I believe once again that the peace and prosperity that we now enjoy are due to the precious sacrifices made by many individuals who reluctantly gave their lives in the war. I also have a new resolve to never again take our nation down the path of war.”(IHT/Asahi: August 15,2005)

Posted at 6:22 PM · Comments (0)

Koya Azumi leans over the living-room table at his home outside Tokyo on a warm afternoon, stirring coffee. Birds twitter outside, but otherwise there is only silence. It is a tableau of serenity, of peace.
But then, speaking softly, Azumi, a retired professor of sociology at the International Christian University in Tokyo, begins to recount his youthful memories of Japan at war, and his reflections on the prospects for peace in our time. His father was a career bureaucrat in the Home Ministry of the central government, and when the war ended in 1945 he was just 14.

‘When Pearl Harbor happened on Dec. 8, 1941 [Dec. 7, local time Hawaii], I was scared, afraid that Japan might not win the war, and that my family and I might be killed. At the same time, we all had a sense of excitement, and, at first, all the news was good news.

Then, when I was attending an elementary school in Ikebukuro, my train was delayed at Tokyo Station one Saturday afternoon. I think that was the first bombing by American airplanes. In mid-1943, we moved into the governor’s mansion in Utsunomiyamy father was appointed governor of Tochigi Prefecture, and stayed there when he was called back to Tokyo in late 1944.

The war was making itself felt at my school in Utsunomiya, too. A military man was assigned to each middle school to train students. I remember our school’s military officer telling us what he had done in China. The accepted idea was that the Chinese were not really people — they were less than human, so we could justify doing atrocious acts to them. He had himself tortured a Chinese man.

Why? Why did he do such a thing? It’s interesting to realize that he felt free enough to tell us what he himself had done in China — a war crime! And I was just appalled.

Still, the atmosphere was such that he was beyond criticism. It was all brainwashing.

Social institutions are man-made, including the institution of the Emperor. I can say that now that I have become a social scientist and witnessed how Japan has changed in the last 60 years. When I’m watching TV and see students in North Korea loudly expressing their loyalty to their leader, Kim Jong Il, I am reminded of Japan during the war.

Later my middle school became a factory, and we had fewer and fewer classes. A nearby aircraft factory they sent workers to supervise us as we made parts for their aircraft. We also had to dig air-raid shelters outside.

Then, one night, Utsunomiya was bombed. It was stormy, so we couldn’t even hear the warning sirens. All I remember are colorful things, fluttering in the sky. They looked like pieces of cloth floating down, burning.

It was raining like mad, and I got in a shelter in the yard with my mother, older sister and two younger brothers. We could hear B-29s. I could hear things falling. Hissing sounds, then bombs hitting the ground — bam, bam, bam!

Perhaps 100 meters away from us was a house surrounded by rice paddies. The rice paddies were ablaze from incendiary bombs.

The next morning I walked around to see what had happened, and in the schoolyard I saw bodies piled up. It was horrible. Overnight, the town was completely flattened, except for a few stone warehouses.

Amazingly, though, none of my relatives died during the war, and we didn’t lose a thing. Of course, not everybody was so lucky. A classmate was killed by a low flying American plane. He was on a train coming to school and was hit by the plane’s gunfire: batt-batt-batt-batt-batt! American planes were simply attacking the enemy, just as Japanese soldiers would attack enemy trains or people, I suppose.

We all welcomed the end of the war. We were so relieved! What can I say? Too bad Japan lost.

We moved back to Tokyo, where, in early 1946, my father was purged from public office by the Occupation forces, as were all wartime governors.

Although they say Japanese nationalism is coming back, I think if you ask any young Japanese man, ‘Would you be willing to give up your life for your country?’ — I bet 98 percent would say ‘no.’

Or if you ask, ‘Would you be willing to give up your life for the Emperor?’ I think you would get a unanimous response of ‘no.’

Sixty years ago, 70 years ago, you’d have got a unanimous ‘yes.’

The Japan Times: Aug. 14, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 1:35 AM · Comments (0)

August 14, 2005
Copyright The New York Times

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
THE Film Forum’s bracingly sanguinary “Summer Samurai” series is, among other things, a useful reminder that before Chinese martial artists became iconic figures for Western action-movie aficionados, stern, unsmiling Japanese swordsmen were pretty much all we knew about Eastern styles of violence and the rigorous codes that governed them. We learned much of this, of course, from the peerless Akira Kurosawa, five of whose pictures (including the greatest of them all, the 1954 “Seven Samurai”) are in this 15-film series. But for many of Film Forum’s patrons, I suspect, the revelation of the four-week extravaganza, which starts Friday, will be the fiercely beautiful work of Masaki Kobayashi. His two movies here, “Harakiri” (1962) and “Samurai Rebellion” (1967), are amazing: stirring, subversive and, beneath their dauntingly severe surfaces, sneakily lyrical.

What Kobayashi’s films are not is conspicuously action-packed, at least by the standard of slash-‘em-ups like Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (1961) and Kihachi Okamoto’s “Sword of Doom” (1966) and “Kill!” (1968), all of which are being screened in the series. Both “Harakiri” and “Samurai Rebellion” are slow-burn movies, in which everything builds to a climactic bloodletting, and the point of the violence is not so much its kinetic exhilaration as its tragic inevitability. Travis Bickle, the ticking time bomb of “Taxi Driver,” might well recognize the profoundly alienated warrior heroes of Kobayashi’s pictures as his ancestors.

But the internal conflicts of Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai), the hero of “Harakiri,” and Isaburo (Toshiro Mifune), the hero of “Samurai Rebellion,” are, if anything, more acute than even those of the frustrated young urban loner Travis. These men, in middle age, are facing the realization that everything they believe in is conspiring to betray them: that the social order to which they have been loyal all their lives feels no loyalty toward them. And the lofty, spiritual-seeming principles of their samurai code, which demand unwavering obedience to authority, are no help at all when authority, as is its habit, turns capricious and cruel. Although this is a tough call, it’s at least arguable that living, as Kobayashi’s heroes do, in an absurd universe is actually more deranging than living in the bankrupt, crime-infested, sanitation-challenged New York of the 1970’s.

The dire events of “Harakiri” (showing Sept. 4 to 6) take place in 1630, in the early days of centralization under the Tokugawa shogunate: the power of local feudal lords is diminishing and the samurai whom they once employed to fight their constant battles are now largely unnecessary. Some of these masterless samurai, the movie tells us, have developed a perverse but apparently reliable con: the unemployed warrior presents himself at the house of an established clan and, pleading desperation and disgrace, asks for a place to commit suicide honorably (i.e., with proper observance of the precisely codified ritual). The clan, it’s hoped, will deny the request and give the poor man a job, or, failing that, throw a little money his way and tell him to go disembowel himself somewhere else.

At the beginning, hollow-eyed Tsugumo turns up at the headquarters of the Iyi clan with just such a request, and the Iyi brain trust - hardliners who consider the suicide con shameful - prepare to oblige him. Before Tsugumo will do the deed, though, he insists on telling a story. It concerns a younger samurai who, likewise taken at his word by the stiff-backed Iyi honchos, was compelled to kill himself, very painfully, with a dull bamboo sword. (Kobayashi shows the gruesome act in flashback, and although the scene is elegantly staged, you may feel, as this horror unfolds, that you’ve never been more grateful a movie was shot in black and white.)

Tsugumo, it turns out, has an agenda beyond self-slaughter or simple extortion, and that agenda - not unheard of in this genre - is revenge. Or, at least, satisfaction: some acknowledgment by the Iyi clan that their treatment of the young samurai (the hero’s son-in-law, we learn) was, for all the righteous invocations of honor and tradition, purely barbarous.

After nearly two hours of philosophical debate and mournful flashback narration, “Harakiri” ends the only way it can, with a bloodbath. The climactic battle, a brilliantly choreographed dance of rage and exhaustion, is as exciting as any action-movie addict could wish, but it provides few of the usual vicarious thrills of consummated vengeance. There is, rather, a melancholy, held-breath stillness to the whole sorry spectacle: even at its violent end the movie continues to hover, as it has from its opening scenes, between resignation and cold fury.

“Samurai Rebellion” is a bit less highly regarded than “Harakiri” (which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival), but Film Forum has given it pride of place in this series: “Rebellion” is the opening film, and will play for a full week (Friday through Aug. 25). It deserves the honor: if it is a slightly less intense, less scarily focused picture than “Harakiri,” it is also, I think, a subtler one. Set a century later, “Rebellion” depicts a society that appears more settled but is, as the hero discovers, no less treacherous and no more forgiving of perceived transgressions.

Isaburo, a master swordsman, is in every other respect a placid and utterly ordinary family man, with a job, a couple of sons and a wife by whom he is, he ruefully admits, henpecked. Most of the drama, until very near the end, is domestic, revolving around the sorts of issues that might arise in a Yasujiro Ozu film, where they would be resolved, with tight smiles and quiet tears, over endless cups of tea.

Kobayashi’s world, however, is one in which household arrangements can be dictated by forces even more unyielding than those of social convention - in which Isaburo’s clan can demand that the faithful samurai’s eldest son marry one of the lord’s cast-off mistresses, and then, years later, demand with equal insistence that she be returned to the palace. So Isaburo and his son, who has come to love his wife, have to strap on their swords and make a stand.

There’s probably less swordplay in “Rebellion” than there is in “Harakiri,” but the humbler context of this drama makes the violence seem even more shocking, the depredations of authority even more pointlessly malign. And you feel, in Mifune’s superbly nuanced performance, that Isaburo has to work harder than doomed Tsugumo does to make sense of what’s happening to him - to fight his way toward something better than the suicidal resignation that seems the only road out of this skewed moral landscape.

The greatness of these movies is so unambiguous that you’re bound to wonder why Masaki Kobayashi isn’t better known, and I have no good answer for that. The Film Forum series should provide him some belated justice, and if that doesn’t do the trick, the Criterion Collection DVD releases of “Harakiri” (this month) and “Samurai Rebellion” (in October, in a samurai-movie boxed set that also includes, among others, Okamoto’s giddy “Kill!”) surely will.

He was a remarkable director, and the proof is in the delicately controlled style of these anti-authoritarian martial-arts pictures. Every shot is impeccably composed, every camera movement smooth and serene, every cut logical and exact. The filmmaking itself is supremely orderly without being oppressive. That’s an impressive achievement, and in this context a terribly moving one. The clarity of art, Kobayashi’s movies say, is everything. It’s the way out that his noble samurai, for all their skill and faith and courage, couldn’t find.

Posted at 1:23 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - - Foreign Affairs, July/August 2004

Summary: Washington need not worry about China’s economic boom, much less respond with protectionism. Although China controls more of the world’s exports than ever before, its high-return high-tech industries are dominated by foreign companies. And Chinese firms will not displace them any time soon: Beijing’s one-party politics have bred a timid business culture that prevents domestic firms from developing key technologies and keeps them dependent on the West.
George J. Gilboy is a senior manager at a major multinational firm in Beijing, where he has been working since 1995, and a research affiliate at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

THE PHANTOM MENACE
China’s sudden rise as a global trading power has been greeted with a curious mixture of both admiration and fear. Irrational exuberance about the country’s economic future has prompted investors to gobble up shares of Chinese firms with little understanding of how these companies actually operate. Meanwhile, overestimates of China’s achievements and potential are fueling fears that the country will inevitably tilt global trade and technology balances in its favor, ultimately becoming an economic, technological, and military threat to the United States. These reactions, however, are equally mistaken: they overlook both important weaknesses in China’s economic “miracle” and the strategic benefits the United States is reaping from the particular way in which China has joined the global economy. Such misjudgments could drive Washington to adopt protectionist policies that would reverse recent improvements in U.S.-China relations, further alienate Washington from its allies, and diminish U.S. influence in Asia.
In fact, the United States and China are developing precisely the type of economic relationship that U.S. strategy has long sought to create. China now has a stake in the liberal, rules-based global economic system that the United States worked to establish over the past half-century. Beijing has opened its economy to foreign direct investment (FDI), welcomed large-scale imports, and joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), spurring prosperity and liberalization within China and across the region.
China’s own choices along the road to global economic integration have reinforced trends that favor the continued industrial and technological preeminence of the United States and other advanced industrialized democracies. In its forced march to the market, Beijing has let political and social reforms lag behind, with at least two critical — and unexpected — consequences. First, to forestall the rise of a politically independent private sector, the Chinese government has implemented economic reforms that strongly favor state-owned enterprises (SOEs), granting them preferential access to capital, technology, and markets. But reforms have also favored foreign investment, which has allowed foreign firms to claim the lion’s share of China’s industrial exports and secure strong positions in its domestic markets. As a result, Chinese industry is left with inefficient but still-powerful SOEs, increasingly dominant foreign firms, and a private sector as yet unable to compete with either on equal terms.
Second, the business risks inherent in China’s unreformed political system have bred a response among many Chinese managers — an “industrial strategic culture” — that encourages them to seek short-term profits, local autonomy, and excessive diversification. With a few exceptions, Chinese firms focus on developing privileged relations with officials in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hierarchy, spurn horizontal association and broad networking with each other, and forgo investment in long-term technology development and diffusion. Chinese firms continue to rely heavily on imported foreign technology and components — severely limiting the country’s ability to wield technological or trading power for unilateral gains.
China, in other words, has joined the global economy on terms that reinforce its dependence on foreign technology and investment and restrict its ability to become an industrial and technological threat to advanced industrialized democracies. China’s best hope for overcoming its technological and economic weaknesses lies in a renewed focus on domestic political reform. Thus, rather than lapse into shortsighted trade protectionism that could undermine current favorable trends, Washington should pursue a policy of “strategic engagement.” Not simply engagement for its own sake, strategic engagement would explicitly acknowledge the advantages of U.S. technological, economic, and military leadership and seek to reinforce them, in exchange for increased prosperity and more security for China — the more so now that China has a compelling economic interest in domestic political reform.

OPEN AND OPENING
Recent debates about U.S-China trade overlook the fact that the U.S. economic relationship with China is largely favorable and that it is conducted largely on U.S. terms. In particular, the focus on China’s currency as a source of unfair trade advantage is misplaced, as economists Jonathan Anderson of UBS and Nicholas Lardy and Morris Goldstein of the Institute for International Economics have shown. Even a moderate appreciation of the yuan would make little difference to most U.S. firms and workers. Meanwhile, the currency issue obscures the significant economic and strategic benefits the United States now enjoys in its relations with China.
According to Morgan Stanley, low-cost Chinese imports (mainly textiles, shoes, toys, and household goods) have saved U.S. consumers (mostly middle- and low-income families) about $100 billion dollars since China’s reforms began in 1978. (Cheaper baby clothes from China helped U.S. families with children save about $400 million between 1998 and 2003.) U.S. industrial firms such as Boeing, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Intel, and Motorola also save hundreds of millions of dollars each year by buying parts from lower-cost countries such as China, increasing their global competitiveness and allowing them to undertake new high-value activities in the United States. In an effort to save 30 percent on its total global sourcing costs, Ford imported about $500 million in parts from China last year. General Motors has cut the cost of car radios by 40 percent by building them from Chinese parts. And although global sourcing can cause painful employment adjustments, the process can also benefit U.S. workers and companies. A recent independent study sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America found that outsourcing to countries such as China and India created a net 90,000 new U.S. jobs in information technology in 2003 and estimated that outsourcing will create a net 317,000 new U.S. jobs by 2008.
China is not just an exporter; it imports more than any other state in northeastern Asia. Although it had a $124 billion trade surplus with the United States in 2003, it had significant trade deficits with many other countries: $15 billion with Japan, $23 billion with South Korea, $40 billion with Taiwan, and $16 billion with the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Most significantly, China is a large and growing market for domestically consumed imports (ordinary trade that excludes imported goods that are processed and reexported). Chinese imports for domestic consumption rose to $187 billion in 2003, from $40 billion in the mid-1990s. Discounting the processing and reexport trade, China ran a $5 billion trade deficit in 2003, compared to a $20 billion surplus just five years earlier. In industries it classifies as “high tech,” including electronic goods, components, and manufacturing equipment, China has averaged a $12 billion annual deficit for the last decade.
Unlike other U.S. trading partners in Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, which spurned U.S. imports and investment for decades, China is also a large, open market for U.S. products. Although total U.S. exports have stagnated in recent years, U.S. exports to China have tripled in the last decade. They increased by 28 percent last year alone (whereas overall U.S. exports went up by only 5 percent). In particular, China has become a staple market for advanced U.S. technology products. According to U.S. government data, U.S. aerospace exports to China were valued at more than $2 billion in 2003 — about 5 percent of total U.S. aerospace exports and nearly as much as comparable exports to Germany. U.S. firms exported $500 million of advanced manufacturing equipment to China in 2003, more than they exported to France. And U.S. chip makers exported $2.4 billion of semiconductors to China in 2003, the same amount they exported to Japan.
Furthermore, China allows foreign firms to invest in its domestic market on a scale unprecedented in Asia. Since it launched reforms in 1978, China has taken in $500 billion in FDI, ten times the total stock of FDI Japan accumulated between 1945 and 2000. According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, U.S. firms have invested more than $40 billion in more than 40,000 projects in China. Given its openness to FDI, China cannot maintain its domestic market as a protected bastion for domestic firms, something both Japan and South Korea did during their periods of rapid growth. Instead, it has allowed U.S. and other foreign firms to develop new markets for their goods and services, especially high-value-added products such as aircraft, software, industrial design, advanced machinery, and components such as semiconductors and integrated circuits.
Thanks to this appetite for imports, powerful domestic coalitions, particularly China’s growing ranks of urban consumers and its most competitive firms, will continue to favor trade openness. Chinese consumers pride themselves on driving foreign-brand cars and using mobile phones and computers with circuits that were designed and manufactured abroad. Many Chinese firms resist protectionism, because they need to import critical components for their domestic operations and fear retaliation against their exports. For example, in the 1990s, China’s machine tool and aircraft industries failed to secure effective state protection in the face of opposition from domestic firms that preferred imports, and they suffered significant decline as a result.
As an open economy and a large importing country, China could be an ally of the United States in many areas of global trade and finance. Already, Beijing has displayed a willingness to play by WTO rules. It has charged Japan and South Korea with unfair trade practices — markets the United States has also long sought to crack open. China initiated 10 antidumping investigations in 2002 on products with import value of more than $7 billion, and another 20 investigations in 2003. China is now a leading promoter of regional trade and investment regimes, including a free trade zone with ASEAN and a bilateral free trade agreement with Australia, one of the United States’ closest allies in the Pacific region. Already, Beijing’s proposals on regional economic cooperation seem far more relevant to most Asian nations than do Washington’s.
The final benefit the United States enjoys from China’s global economic integration is in the long-term, patient battle to promote liberalism in Asia. Foreign trade and development have spurred advancements in Chinese commercial law, greater regulatory consultation with Chinese consumers, slimmed-down bureaucracies, and adherence to international safety and environmental standards. Although it is still limited, the people’s freedom to debate economic and social issues has increased, especially in the robust financial media. This process of liberalization is incomplete and uneven, but it is in the interest of both China and the United States to see it continue.

OUTSIDE IN
Despite these benefits, business and political leaders in the United States now fear that China’s growing share of world exports, especially of high technology and industrial goods, signals the rise of yet another mercantilist economic superpower in northeastern Asia. But these concerns are unwarranted, for three reasons. First, China’s high-tech and industrial exports are dominated by foreign, not Chinese, firms. Second, Chinese industrial firms are deeply dependent on designs, critical components, and manufacturing equipment they import from the United States and other advanced industrialized democracies. Third, Chinese firms are taking few effective steps to absorb the technology they import and diffuse it throughout the local economy, making it unlikely that they will rapidly emerge as global industrial competitors.
A close look at the breakdown of China’s exports by type of producing firm puts China’s economic rise in perspective. Foreign-funded enterprises (FFEs) accounted for 55 percent of China’s exports last year. In this respect, China diverges from the typical Asian success story. According to Huang Yasheng of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, FFEs accounted for only 20 percent of Taiwan’s manufactured exports in the mid-1970s and only 25 percent of South Korea’s manufactured exports between 1974 and 1978. In Thailand, the FFEs’ share dropped from 18 percent in the 1970s to 6 percent by the mid-1980s.
As shown in the figure on the next page, the dominance of foreign firms in China is even more apparent in advanced industrial exports. While exports of industrial machinery grew twentyfold in real terms over the last decade (to $83 billion last year), the share of those exports produced by FFEs grew from 35 percent to 79 percent. Exports of computer equipment shot from $716 million in 1993 to $41 billion in 2003, with the FFEs’ share rising from 74 percent to 92 percent. Likewise, China’s electronics and telecom exports have grown sevenfold since 1993 (to $89 billion last year), with the FFEs’ share of those exports growing from 45 percent to 74 percent over the same period. This pattern repeats itself in almost every advanced industrial sector in China.
The data featured in the figure highlight another trend that reinforces China’s dependence on foreign investment and the growing gap between FFEs and domestic Chinese companies. In the 1990s, Beijing permitted a new FDI trend to develop: a shift away from joint ventures and toward wholly owned foreign enterprises (WOFEs). Today, WOFEs account for 65 percent of new FDI in China, and they dominate high-tech exports. But they are much less inclined to transfer technology to Chinese firms than are joint ventures. Unlike joint ventures, they are not contractually required to share knowledge with local partners. And they have strong incentives to protect their technology from both domestic and other foreign firms, in order to capture a greater share of China’s domestic markets. As a result, according to the most recent Chinese government statistics for high-tech industries (pharmaceuticals, aircraft and aerospace, electronics, telecommunications, computers, and medical equipment), FFEs increased their total share of high-tech exports from 74 percent to 85 percent between 1998 and 2002. But perhaps more significant, in the same period, they increased their share of total domestic high-tech sales from 32 percent to 45 percent, while the share of that market held by China’s most competitive industrial firms, SOEs, fell from 47 percent to 42 percent.
Finally, the data in the figure reveal that China’s private firms are not yet significant global players. Despite more than two decades of economic reform, China’s leading domestic industrial and technology companies are still primarily SOEs. Although they remain inefficient and dependent on government-subsidized loans, they account for the bulk of advanced industrial production in China, boast the country’s best research and development (R&D) capability, and spend the most resources to develop and import technology. Their preferential access to markets and resources has blocked the rise of private industrial firms. Likewise, collective firms owned by provincial and local governments have failed to emerge as major players in China’s advanced industrial and technology sectors.

PARTICULAR AND EXCEPTIONAL
One of the key reasons that state, collective, and private firms in China lag behind FFEs is that they have failed to invest in the type of long-term technological capabilities that their Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese predecessors built during the 1970s and 1980s.
Developing technology is a difficult and uncertain process. Neither large capital investments nor a significant stock of existing science and engineering capability can guarantee success. To create commercially viable products and services, firms must monitor and access new forms of knowledge, understand evolving market trends, and respond rapidly to changing customer demand. Firms that can develop strong links to research institutions, financiers, partners, suppliers, and customers have an advantage in acquiring, modifying, and then commercializing new technology. Such horizontal networks are essential conduits for knowledge, capital, products, and talent.
Yet China’s unreformed political system suppresses such independent social organization and horizontal networking and instead reinforces vertical relationships. China remains a fragmented federal system, its fractious regions unified by a single political party. The CCP controls all aspects of organized life, including industry associations, leaving few avenues for firms to work together for legitimate common interests. This structure drives business leaders to focus on building relationships through CCP officials and the bureaucracy. Although market reforms have brought more rules to the Chinese economy, without institutional checks and balances or direct supervision, CCP officials still exercise wide discretion in defining and implementing those rules, especially at the local level. They can, and often do, manipulate economic policies to pursue particular local goals. Some engage in this “particularism” because they are corrupt, others because they directly own or operate firms. Most, however, do it because the political elite encourages them to: understanding that local economic growth promotes social and political order, the CCP tolerates, and even rewards, officials who use any means to produce local investment and employment. But this often results in fragmented national industries and wasteful overlapping investment.
Chinese business leaders at both public and private firms recognize that an economy dominated by particularism is a risky business environment. Markets are fragmented; rules constantly shift under manipulation by government officials; and political obstacles prevent firms from associating, sharing risk, and taking collective action. To cope with these uncertainties, Chinese business has developed a distinctive industrial strategic culture over the past two decades — a set of values or guidelines about what strategies “work” in this environment. First, in response to the “particular” application of policy, Chinese firms routinely focus on obtaining “exceptional” treatment from key officials: special access to markets or resources, exemptions from rules and regulations, or protection against predation by other officials. Second, to maximize these exceptional benefits, as well as to avoid entanglements with other firms and their patrons, many Chinese companies shun collaboration within their industry, especially if such collaboration crosses regional or bureaucratic boundaries. Third, they generally favor short-term gains over long-term investments. Finally, Chinese firms tend to engage in excessive diversification in order to mitigate the potential damage of fratricidal price competition created by excess production capacity and overlapping investments.

NODES WITHOUT ROADS
This industrial strategic culture is rational and effective given the current structure of politics and business environment in China. (These features echo patterns of interaction between authoritarian officialdom and merchant enterprise that were established in China’s first period of industrialization in the Qing dynasty 150 years ago.) But China’s industrial strategic culture weakens the competitiveness of Chinese firms and it may have damaging economic repercussions down the road. Most Chinese industrial firms focus on short-term gains and, despite increasing operational efficiency, sales revenues, and profits, have not increased their commitment to developing new technologies. Their total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue has remained below one percent for more than a decade. R&D intensity (R&D expenditure as a percentage of value added) at China’s industrial firms is only about one percent, seven times less than the average in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Focusing on short-term returns has also guided China’s imports of industrial technology. Chinese firms tend to import technology by purchasing foreign manufacturing equipment, often in complete sets such as assembly lines. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, hardware accounted for more than 80 percent of China’s technology imports, whereas licensing, “know-how” services, and consulting accounted for about 9 percent, 5 percent, and 3 percent, respectively.
Although China has recently begun importing more “soft technology” — mainly in the form of licenses for the use of imported equipment — the knowledge embodied in it must be absorbed and mastered (or, in technology parlance, “indigenized”) before it can become an effective basis for domestic innovation. Chinese firms remain weak in this regard. Over the last decade, large and medium-sized Chinese industrial firms have spent less than 10 percent of the total cost of imported equipment on indigenizing technology. Indigenization spending at state firms in the sectors in which China is most often cited as a rising power (telecom equipment, electronics, and industrial machinery) is also low (at 8 percent, 6 percent, and 2 percent of the cost of imported equipment, respectively). This is far lower than the average for industrial firms in OECD countries, which amounts to about one-third of total technology import spending. The practice of Chinese firms also stands in contrast to spending patterns in Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were trying to catch up with the West. Industrial firms in those countries spent between two and three times the purchase price of foreign equipment on absorbing and indigenizing the technology embodied in the hardware.
Chinese firms have also failed to develop strong domestic technology supply networks. In 2002, Chinese firms devoted less than one percent of their total science and technology budgets (which include technology imports, renovation of existing equipment, and R&D) to purchasing domestic technology. China’s best firms are among the least connected to domestic suppliers: for every $100 that state-owned electronics and telecom firms spend on technology imports, they spend only $1.20 on similar domestic goods. Thus Chinese technology suppliers do not enjoy a strong “demand pull” from the best domestic firms to stimulate their own innovative capabilities; they are relegated primarily to serving rural enterprises and less competitive state-owned enterprises. And because FFEs use their investments in China as technology “snakeheads” (a Chinese term for portals), through which they bring product designs, advanced manufacturing equipment, and high-value components from foreign firms or their China subsidiaries, they too are poorly linked to Chinese domestic technology markets.
Industrial collaboration and horizontal networking are also rare, prompting Chinese firms to run their R&D projects in relative isolation. In the most recent national R&D census in 2000, Chinese industrial firms reported that they spent 93 percent of their $2.7 billion total R&D outlay in-house, but only 2 percent on collaborative activities with universities and less than 1 percent on projects with other domestic firms. China’s research institutes are increasingly insular, too, especially since market reforms have forced them to commercialize their operations. In 2000, only 38 of China’s 292 national industrial research institutes devoted more than one-third of total activities to collaborative projects, even though these institutes are specifically tasked with diffusing technology. Instead, many are becoming competitors of the firms they are supposed to serve. A 2003 World Bank report found that many Chinese engineering research centers have been mass-producing and marketing the products of their research for their own financial gain, rather than diffusing these technologies through patents.
Failed collaborations have also plagued China’s attempts to commercialize domestic innovations. Julong Technologies, the firm that developed China’s first digital telecom switching equipment, is no longer a major telecom-equipment player due to conflicts among its research, production, and marketing arms, which came under the influence of competing political officials. China’s homegrown mobile telephone standard, TD-SCDMA, has received central government support, but thus far none of China’s major telecommunications operators have agreed to commit to it, preferring a foreign standard, WCDMA, instead.
Given the political perils of challenging competitors and their local patrons, few Chinese firms develop alliances with or invest in companies in other provinces. One recent survey of 800 companies that have conducted domestic mergers and acquisitions found that 86 percent of them invested in firms within their own city and 91 percent invested in firms within their own province. Strong local political ties tend to isolate a region from the rest of the economy, which helps explain why Chinese firms are often small and the country’s industries fragmented. For example, a recent study performed for the State Council (China’s cabinet) revealed that Chinese managers regard the country’s two most politically powerful technology and industrial hubs, Beijing and Shanghai, as leading centers of local protectionism in China. Among the industries most affected by such protectionism were pharmaceuticals, electrical machinery, electronics goods, and transport equipment. SOEs and private firms suffered the most, FFEs the least — which suggests that the burden of particularism falls most heavily on Chinese firms.
To avoid the difficulties of developing interregional supply chains while securing short-term profits, Chinese firms tend to engage in excessive diversification — also with damaging results. Many of China’s most famous firms have made unsuccessful forays into ancillary businesses: Haier (from household appliances into computers, mobile phones, and televisions), Fangzheng (from computers into tea, steel, software, and financial services), and Shougang (from steel into banking, auto assembly, and semiconductors). Huawei, China’s best technology firm and maker of network equipment, has recently made a questionable entry into the mobile-handset market, where sales prices and margins have fallen dramatically for the last five years and 37 licensed vendors produced excess inventories of 20 million phones last year.
Together, China’s institutions and the industrial choices of local firms have restricted the ability of Chinese firms to develop new products and services. The share of total sales revenues accounted for by new products at Chinese industrial firms was flat, at about 10 percent, throughout the 1990s. (In contrast, new products account for 35 percent to 40 percent of sales revenue for industrial firms in OECD countries. Chinese firms lag behind firms in other developing countries as well: in 2000, for example, new products accounted for about 40 percent of total sales revenues in Brazil’s electrical machinery industry.) And because of overlapping investments, fragmentation, and the weakness of industry associations, even those firms in China that make new products often find themselves engaged in vicious price competition, which prevents them from reaping high returns from their innovations.
Rather than thinking of China as yet another Asian technological and economic “giant,” it may be more useful to regard it, like Brazil or India, as a “normal” emerging industrial power. Thanks to the interaction of political structure and industrial culture, China’s twenty-first-century technological and economic landscape looks like a pattern of “nodes without roads” — a few poorly connected centers of technological success. Burdened by these peculiarities, China has yet to lay the domestic institutional foundations for becoming a technological and economic superpower. Without structural political reforms, its ability to indigenize, develop, and diffuse technology will remain limited. And most of its industrial firms will struggle to realize exiguous margins at the lower reaches of global industrial production chains.

STRATEGIC ENGAGEMENT
Given these limits on China’s potential to threaten the global balance of economic power, the United States should resist the false promise of protectionism, whether in the form adopted by the Bush administration (rhetorical jabs at the Chinese currency peg) or that recommended by the AFL-CIO labor federation (calls for tariff protection in the guise of better rights for Chinese workers).
Rather, recognizing both the challenges and the opportunities presented by China’s industrial landscape, Washington should pursue a policy of strategic engagement with Beijing. The purpose of this policy would be to bolster U.S. technological, economic, and political leadership, while helping China become more prosperous, stable, and integrated into global economic networks. Pursuing it will require simultaneously strengthening the basis for U.S. technological and manufacturing mastery in the United States and promoting U.S. exports, investment, and liberal values abroad.
The United States should revitalize manufacturing at home, for example. Tax cuts are no panacea; the United States needs focused policies to strengthen R&D, reduce legal and health care costs, and improve education. Innovation is critical to growth, but R&D spending in the United States has declined in relative terms from 60 percent of world R&D in the 1960s to 30 percent today. Meanwhile, although U.S. manufacturing productivity has risen by 27 percent in the last five years, health care premiums have risen by 34 percent and litigation costs by about 33 percent, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.
To maintain its lead abroad, the United States should push its products into the portal opened by its investment “snakeheads” in developing markets. It currently lags behind competitors in doing so: while Japan and the EU exported $79 billion and $49 billion in goods to China last year, the United States exported only $37 billion. Both the U.S. government and U.S. industry must do more to help small and medium-sized U.S. firms reach out to China’s markets.
The United States must accept that China is a work in progress and cannot yet meet all of the standards common in advanced industrialized economies. But focused bilateral sanctions, WTO complaints, and multilateral diplomacy should be vigorously pursued if China undertakes unfair trade practices that challenge core U.S. interests. The United States should prioritize carefully, however, focusing on the issues that pose the greatest threats and present the greatest opportunities. These include China’s recent attempts to impose technical standards on foreign firms in China, such as for DVD players, wireless communications, and mobile telephones, or to tax imported goods such as integrated circuits (a policy tantamount to a domestic subsidy and prohibited by WTO rules). Washington should also urge Beijing to curb investments in excess manufacturing capacity, as they could threaten key industries such as automobiles and semiconductors.
Continued engagement of this kind will help the United States consolidate the benefits it already reaps from the current relationship, ensure China’s continued prosperity and stability, and encourage China to play by global rules. Working with its allies to further incorporate China’s economy in international trade and industrial networks, the United States can reinforce the technological leadership of the advanced industrialized democracies, while diminishing the scope for Chinese technological and economic mercantilism.
The paradox of China’s technological and economic power is that China must implement structural political reforms, not simply freer markets or greater investment, before it can unlock its potential as a global competitor. But if it were to undertake such reforms, it would likely discover even greater common interests with the United States and other industrialized democracies. Pursuing strategic engagement is thus a way for the United States to hedge its bets: to preserve its competitive edge while encouraging China to continue developing its economy and liberalizing its politics. Chinese political reform is in the long-term interest of both Beijing and Washington. Unfortunately, the burden of a long history of fragmentation and authoritarian rule weighs heavily against China’s successfully completing this final modernization.

Posted at 12:52 PM · Comments (0)

August 12, 2005
Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
ZHUOSHUI, China - Every five days, a country market converges in a horn-honking, pig-squealing clamor on the old arching stone bridge that spans the river coursing through here.

For as long as anyone can remember, the biggest crop in this valley has been the corn that grows tall and thick by the river’s edge. But in the last two years, a new crop, qinghao, or sweet wormwood, has been crowned king, driven by a desperate need in the tropical world for new malaria treatments.

The rugged valleys and steep gorges along the Apeng River, in central China, have long been a metaphor for idyllic remoteness. Even China’s dazzling economic takeoff had done little to change that, until the World Health Organization approved a malaria treatment using artemisinin, the active ingredient of the qinghao plant, in 2001.

Since then, the plant’s market value has nearly quadrupled. In the process, qinghao has become an unlikely driver of globalization in these parts, sending peasants scouring the mountainsides to harvest the wild bush.

Just as eager to cash in, farmers, meanwhile, are replacing plots of corn, tobacco and potato with the herb, which is bought and sold from bulging burlap sacks amid frenzied market day crowds by dealers wielding brass hand-held scales.

Despite China’s long history and ancient medical traditions, artemisinin-based drugs are the first Chinese pharmaceutical product to be broadly distributed internationally, beyond the more traditional remedies like ginseng.

In antiquity, it was written that parts of this southeastern region of Chongqing Province were so isolated that the people here did not know what dynasty they lived under. Today, mounting a full-court press driven in part by demand for the drug, the Chinese government is rushing to remedy that, building the first highways into the area, along with a rail line and a small airport.

Confusion over dynasties seems to have given way nowadays to confusion over all the fuss being made over sweet wormwood, an ancient folk remedy for colds and fevers, even as trade in the herb begins to line people’s pockets.

“I don’t know what medicine this makes,” said Sun Lingui, a 23-year-old qinghao dealer who had staked out a prime position on the bridge here on a recent market day. He sold the herb along with a bushel full of dried beetles that he said were a traditional remedy for respiratory problems.

“I know it is used to extract something called artemisinin,” Mr. Sun added. “Anyway, it is for some kind of medicine, and I hear that tropical countries all need it.”

Mr. Sun said he had gleaned the little he knew about the plant from a television program, which spoke of the herb’s rapidly increasing value and alluded to its health benefits. What those benefits were, he, like the peasants surrounding him, could not quite recall.

The fact that this traditional Chinese drug, which the peasants of this village say is good for everything from sniffles to healing wounds, is the greatest recent hope in global efforts to fight malaria, which kills more than a million people each year, mostly in Africa, is scarcely appreciated here.

With established antimalarial medicines rapidly losing their effectiveness, the World Health Organization recommended in 2001 that countries afflicted with the disease switch to a combination therapy based in part on the Chinese drug. After a slow start in adopting artemisinin-based drugs, demand has skyrocketed in the last two years, with projections that 300 million doses will be needed in 2006.

Ding Derong, a scientist with China’s Southwest Agriculture University who has studied artemisinin for 30 years, said that 30,000 to 40,000 tons of the crop would be needed to meet that demand, but that only 20,000 were likely to be harvested.

“This is a very easy thing to plant and grow, but it is hard to cultivate good quality seeds,” Ms. Ding said. “At first, farmers will choose cheap seeds over good ones. The result is there will be a lot of disorder.”

Jiang Yifei, spokeswoman of the Holley Corporation, the largest Chinese producer of artemisinin, said the biggest challenge in increasing production was “organizing farmers to start standardized cultivation.”

Holley now supplies the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis with artemisinin. Novartis uses this active ingredient from the herb to produce the drug Coartem, which it supplies at cost to the World Health Organization for distribution to malaria-afflicted countries.

Holley is investing heavily in increased production of sweet wormwood, as evidenced by acre after orderly acre of plantations of the bushy plant draped across a sweltering valley not far from here. Particular efforts are being made to produce high-yielding seeds for distribution to farmers who agree to cultivate the plant in cooperation with the company.

Even peasants closely associated with these efforts, however, say they are being kept in the dark about the drug’s uses, and grumbled over what they said was the company’s secretiveness.

Xu Qianmin, a farmer who gets his seeds from Holley, said his arrangements with the company prevented him from talking about the uses of sweet wormwood, probably, he said, because there may be more commercial hopes for the plant. Little by little, though, with his family gathered around in their simple farmhouse, he opened up.

“I hear there’s a country in Africa with a population of 1.5 million people, and only 14 kilos of our qinghao cured all of their malaria,” he said, touting his plants as a sort of miracle drug.

“Qinghao isn’t only good for one disease,” he added. “We’ve heard it can be made into 300 different medicines.”

Asked for examples, he acted briefly as if he had committed an indiscretion, but then mused that treating cancer might be one of the drug’s future uses.

“The company has found a way to make money, and they want to keep things a secret,” Mr. Xu said, when asked why one needed to keep things quiet. “They don’t want others to come in and steal their business. They want it for themselves.”

Posted at 10:55 PM · Comments (0)

Thursday, August 11, 2005

BILL SAVADOVE in Shanghai
Copyright - The South China Morning Post
Nearly 100 people demonstrated outside a meeting of Shanghai’s legislature yesterday for the second day in a row, chanting slogans and waving handwritten signs protesting over housing disputes.

The protesters shouted “Government robbers return our housing” and called for the city’s leaders to step down as they stood across the street from the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, where the Shanghai People’s Congress Standing Committee is meeting until tomorrow.

Public protests are rare in Shanghai, though residents have staged a series of rallies over compensation packages offered for being evicted from their homes to make way for property and infrastructure projects. At a full legislature meeting in January, protests occurred daily.

Police monitored the demonstration yesterday, but it was not known whether any arrests were made.

Witnesses said plain-clothes officers and bystanders mingled with the protesters on the footpath outside a luxury hotel and retail complex in the heart of the city.

The number of protesters swelled yesterday from 20 to 30 the previous day. They were protesting over housing disputes across the city, not one particular project.

“We are from all over Shanghai,” said one woman, adding that they were complaining about “mistreatment” in relocations.

Police kept protesters away from the exhibition centre, blocking the way with vehicles, and tried to prevent them from speaking to reporters.

Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng told the standing committee on Tuesday that one of the most important tasks for the second half of the year was “maintaining social stability”.

Mr Han also vowed that the city would strengthen control of the property market in line with central government policy.

Speculative money has driven Shanghai’s property prices higher in the past two years, to the point where some residents have complained that housing has been priced out of their reach.

Local officials said the rise in property prices had slowed after both the city and the central government moved to dampen speculation. Official figures show housing prices rose 5.1 per cent in the first half of the year.

Shanghai relocated more than 55,000 families last year, nearly 37 per cent fewer than in 2003. Evictions are expected to grow this year as the city clears the future site of the 2010 World Expo.

Analysts said protests over property and land seizures were growing across the mainland because of economic development.

Some mainland officials have said growing protests are a sign of greater democracy, while rights groups say they highlight the lack of a mechanism to resolve disputes when local governments are involved.

Posted at 10:49 PM · Comments (0)

This is a re-read of a book I discovered years ago whose theme is the universality of myths. It can be a dense read, but few books that I know are broader in scope, or deeper in their wisdom.

Posted at 10:42 PM · Comments (0)

A quiet and elegantly written volume that is a powerful story of loss and decline, and proof that it’s never too late to start writing.

Posted at 10:40 PM · Comments (0)

This is a beautiful compilation, with Chinese language original of the poems and English translations printed side-by-side, along with a brief exegesis and bio of the poet.
Here’s one from Wei Ying-Wu, who lived in the 8th century:

I left the Yiching in the woods
now I drift with the gulls by the stream
among the singers of the ways of Ch’u
to whom do you most often turn

Posted at 10:32 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Bureau Adds Manpower, Builds
Technology-Theft Cases;
Charges of Racial Profiling
Mixed Feelings at 3DGeo

August 10, 2005; Page A1

WASHINGTON — Back in the 1980s, David Szady was among the premier Soviet spy catchers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, studying every aspect of the Kremlin’s mole network. Today, he’s mobilizing agents across the country to sniff out spies from a new rival: Beijing.

“China is the biggest [espionage] threat to the U.S. today,” says Mr. Szady, now 61 years old and assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division.

In one of their biggest initiatives after the fight against terrorism, the FBI and Justice Department have sent hundreds of new counterintelligence agents into the bureau’s 56 field offices, many with a specific focus on China. There is a cloak-and-dagger element to some of this: A principal FBI team focusing on Chinese economic espionage, including some undercover operatives, occupies an unmarked floor in a Silicon Valley office park near a popular Chinese restaurant.

But this is an altogether different battle from the one with the Soviets. Thousands of Chinese nationals regularly come to the U.S. as students and businessmen, some working for major U.S. defense contractors — something the Russians could only have dreamed of during the Cold War. They are welcomed with open arms by universities and companies who prize their technical acumen and links to capital and low-cost labor back home.

The vast majority of them are here innocently working or studying. Counterespionage experts say the trouble often starts when they are contacted by Chinese government officials or one of the more than 3,000 Chinese “front companies” the FBI alleges have been set up in the U.S. specifically to acquire military or industrial technologies illegally. Sometimes they are wooed with cash, but often the motivation is nationalism.

“They can work on so many levels that China may prove more difficult to contain than the Russian threat,” Mr. Szady says.

Even as concerns mount in Washington about China’s growing economic and military might, the government faces charges of racial profiling from Asian-American advocacy groups and ambivalence from some business groups. Working with sometimes vague laws on technology exports, it is having trouble making some of its cases stick.

The government is currently prosecuting about a dozen cases against individuals alleged to have sent technology — sometimes designs, sometimes software, sometimes high-tech equipment — to China illegally. FBI officials say at least three more cases will likely go ahead in the coming months. Over the past five years, the total number of such charges has grown by around 15% annually, according to some FBI agents.

Most of the cases involve small, lesser-known tech firms. But Sun Microsystems Inc. and Transmeta Corp. were the targets in one alleged plot, where two Chinese nationals who had worked at the software and semiconductor giants were arrested at the San Francisco airport allegedly holding proprietary data from the companies. The pair were charged with economic espionage and the case is pending. The FBI’s Business Alliance, established a year ago, has been meeting regularly with leading defense contractors to understand what technologies they’re developing and what potential threats are posed by company employees. The participants include Lockheed Martin Corp., General Dynamics Corp. and Raytheon Co.

Growing Threat

The FBI campaign is part of a broader shift in Washington, where more and more policy makers see China’s rapid economic rise as a threat to the U.S. both militarily and economically. That growing sentiment is seen in the heated debate over the recent failed bid by China’s state-owned oil company Cnooc Ltd. for California’s Unocal Corp. The Pentagon has caused a stir in recent months by raising the prospect that China’s secretive military buildup could pose a significant long-term threat to Asia and the U.S.

WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO

WSJ’s Jake Schlesinger discusses1 the FBI’s initiative to crack down on Chinese economic espionage.
Chu Maoming, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, calls the FBI’s assertion that Beijing is coordinating spying activities inside the U.S. “totally groundless.”

Many people in Silicon Valley are concerned that the FBI is overreaching. Asian-Americans worry about a new wave of racial profiling and say the crackdown is reminiscent of the 2000 case of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born American scientist who was fired from his job at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was prosecuted for allegedly giving away nuclear secrets to Beijing. After months in solitary confinement, all the espionage charges were eventually dropped, though Mr. Lee pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of mishandling top-secret information.

Business executives, meanwhile, fear a chill in commerce. “There’s a bit of a disconnect between how the law-enforcement agencies see” the risk of espionage and how the business community does, says Harris Miller, the Arlington, Va.-based president of the Information Technology Association of America, one of the high-tech industry’s principal lobbying groups. He says many U.S. companies are dependent upon manufacturing and conducting research in places like China — and on the talents of Chinese employees.

“There’s a real advantage to work with foreign nationals, as they’re very talented,” Mr. Miller says. “You don’t want to turn them away just because they are not born in the U.S.”

Even some of the victims of alleged Chinese espionage have mixed feelings about the FBI’s campaign.

Software maker 3DGeo Development Inc. suspected it had a spy problem when it brought in for training Yan Ming Shan, an employee of one of 3DGeo’s clients, state-owned oil company PetroChina Co. The Chinese oil giant had earlier sent an employee to train at 3DGeo’s Santa Clara, Calif., campus, but he was ejected after trying to gain access to the software company’s secured systems. Mr. Shan then appeared and was expelled after doing the same thing. Mr. Shan was later arrested at San Francisco International Airport and accused of seeking to pass on some of 3DGeo’s proprietary software programs to PetroChina.

Mr. Shan, a Chinese national, was sentenced last December to two years in prison for illegally accessing 3DGeo’s computers.

Dimitri Bevc, 3DGeo’s president, says the episode highlights a dilemma for the company, which is seeking to secure its intellectual property but also expand its business in Asia. “There’s incredible demand from Chinese firms that are hungry for technology,” says Mr. Bevc. “But we are built on our own intellectual property.”

Now Mr. Bevc is afraid his company is being punished in the Chinese marketplace. The company is still seeking payments from PetroChina for work completed in September 2001, says Mr. Bevc. Meanwhile, 3DGeo’s sales representative told Mr. Bevc his Chinese sales prospects have been drying up. “What we heard back was…that 3DGeo did something wrong” by taking action against Mr. Shan, who served most of his sentence while awaiting trial and has since returned to China, says Mr. Bevc.

PetroChina declined to comment on the case. Nicholas Humy, an attorney for Mr. Shan, said his client pleaded guilty only to illegally accessing 3DGeo’s computer system and not to stealing the company’s software or seeking to pass it on to a foreign entity. “The government never proved to a jury…that Mr. Shan was trying to commit industrial espionage,” Mr. Humy said.

October Trial

On the military side, prosecutors at the San Jose, Calif., offices of the Department of Justice are preparing for an October trial of two Silicon Valley residents. The pair were indicted in June 2004 for allegedly signing contracts with Chinese military-related entities to provide high-tech gear and consulting work for the mass production of thermal-imaging cameras. Technology industry officials say the case highlights the murkiness of export laws.

The case involves Night Vision Technology Corp., a San Jose-based firm that procures infrared technology and other high-tech equipment for overseas buyers, particularly in Taiwan. The company is headed by Martin Shih, 62, a Taiwanese-Canadian executive with wide experience as an electrical engineer, working both in Canada and in California with satellite-communications company Loral Space & Communications Ltd. Mr. Shih’s Taiwanese-American consultant, Philip Cheng, was also charged.

Pretrial motions filed by the two men’s attorneys speak to the belief of many in the technology industry that U.S. laws guarding technology exports are difficult to interpret because so often the technologies have legitimate commercial applications. They also say products like infrared cameras can’t be blocked for export because they have numerous commercial applications, such as use in consumer-electronics items. The lawyers also point out that the equipment can be purchased on the open market in countries such as France.

“The indictment does not allege — and the government cannot plausibly argue” that the infrared products “were ‘specifically designed, modified, or configured for military use,’ ” according to one of the motions by the lawyers, quoting from the indictment.

An attorney for Mr. Shih, K.C. Maxwell, said her client would plead not guilty in the October trial. An attorney for Mr. Cheng, Matt Pavone, declined to comment.

The FBI has had a difficult time making similar charges stick against other alleged Chinese spies. In May, Qing Chang Jiang, a Chinese national in the import-export business, was acquitted in a California court on charges of illegally selling microwave amplifiers, which can be used in radar and missile systems, to the Beijing government.

The technology is involved in so many nonmilitary commercial applications that many companies aren’t aware they need a license to export it, say attorneys who have worked on these cases. Mr. Jiang’s lawyer says that the U.S. company he got the technology from, L-3 Communications Holdings Inc.’s Narda Microwave-West, told him he didn’t need a license and so he went ahead with the sale.

A spokeswoman for L-3 Communications declined to comment. But the U.S. Department of Commerce said L-3 Communications was aware an export license was required and that the company worked closely with the government on the case.

Mr. Jiang was convicted on a lesser charge of making false statements to federal investigators and is currently awaiting sentencing in California. His attorney, Tom Nolan, believes the U.S. government is systematically targeting Asian businessmen. “They’re trying to prevent Chinese industry from doing business in the U.S.,” he says.

Asian-American community leaders note that the number of Asian-Americans applying for government research jobs plummeted after the Wen Ho Lee case, and warn of a similar mutually destructive chill now. “At a time when the U.S. government is so dependent on the scientific skills of our community, it seems crazy that they’ve taken steps that dampen our desire to serve,” says Cecilia Chang, a Fremont, Calif.-based Asian-American activist who led many protests and donation drives for Mr. Lee.

And that could have a big impact on American academia and commerce. About 150,000 Chinese students are currently studying in the U.S., according to the FBI, and the number of new admissions has been rising. Nearly 64,000 Chinese students entered the U.S. last year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, up from 55,000 in 1998. All told, about 700,000 Chinese tourists and business executives visit the U.S. each year.

The swirl of suspicions and tensions between the FBI, China and the Chinese-American community has surfaced even among the bureau’s own agents. Mr. Szady has made a point of hiring more Asian-Americans into his counterespionage network. Yet in the past two years, the FBI brought charges against two of its own Chinese-American employees in Los Angeles, accusing them of having aided Beijing. One case was thrown out this year and the other is pending.

Mr. Szady acknowledges the inherent complexity of monitoring the Chinese community in the U.S., and says he’s trying to find a balance: “How do you protect without being overbearing?” But he argues that it’s the Chinese government, not the FBI, that is blurring the lines between legitimate transborder commerce and national rivalry. He says that Beijing doesn’t recognize the concept of Chinese-American. In the government’s eyes, “they are all overseas Chinese,” says Mr. Szady, a lanky former chemistry student dubbed the “Z Man” by his agents.

Warming Relations

Mr. Szady and other FBI experts believe China began intensifying its spying operations in the late 1970s, when warming relations between Washington and Beijing opened the way for hundreds of thousands of Chinese to begin visiting the U.S. annually. These analysts say units of the People’s Liberation Army and China’s Ministry of State Security oversee intelligence operations, and that the state-run Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics has targeted U.S. weapons labs.

In addition, the Beijing government runs an extensive, informal, decentralized spy network, counterespionage experts allege. In most cases, Beijing’s spy agencies don’t send trained agents to the U.S. to penetrate companies and government agencies, but rather simply seek to glean information from the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who visit and study in the U.S. every year. They also try to get Chinese-Americans to provide information, appealing to their desire to help uplift China’s economy.

“In almost all of its collections operations, China is not so much looking at opportunities for stealing things…as devising all sorts of opportunities for you to come to the conclusion that you would be willing to give at least some of these things,” says Paul Moore, who was the FBI’s top China analyst from 1978 through 1998. “It’s the mundane, day-to-day contacts that are killing us, not the exotic spy operations.”

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com2

Posted at 10:56 AM · Comments (0)

August 7, 2005
Copyright The New York Times

Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.

A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples. They are natural subjects for a writer who, as he has recorded in his many fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born in Trinidad, where his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for what is arguably Naipaul’s finest novel, ”A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). At 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and has lived in England ever since. Alfred Kazin once described him as ”a colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind.”

Knighted in 1990, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is Britain’s only living Nobel laureate in literature, having been awarded the prize in October 2001, a season when many were just awakening to realities Naipaul had been writing about for more than 20 years. Also significant is that he had explored Islamic fundamentalism and other issues of global import not through fiction, but through nonfiction reportage. The novel’s time was over, he had said. Others had made the claim before, but it resonated more deeply coming from a contemporary giant. What is more, Naipaul said, only nonfiction could capture the complexities of today’s world. It was a profound observation. But did it speak to a larger cultural situation, or was it simply the personal judgment of one cantankerous writer, who in fact continued to publish a novel every few years even after declaring the form dead?

Naipaul recently offered some thoughts on the matter, in an interview in the cozy sitting room of his cottage in Wiltshire. Photograph portraits were on the mantle. French novels lined one bookshelf. The sounds of the outside world could be heard: a lawnmower, the buzzing of a fighter jet from a nearby airbase. A compact man of 72, Naipaul has been ill in recent months, and said he is not working on a book at the moment. Although it was unseasonably hot on the splendid sunny afternoon of the longest day of the year, he wore a tweed jacket and corduroy pants. Unsmiling, he settled somewhat stiffly onto a straight-backed armchair and began to chart the trajectory of his thinking.

”What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material,” he said. ”And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn’t know fully.” Naipaul’s voice is rich and deep and mellowed by tobacco, and when he pronounced the word ”world,” he savored it, drawing it out to almost three syllables. ”I thought if I didn’t have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I’d have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason.”

Naipaul has said he wrote the novel ”Half a Life” (2001) only to fulfill a publisher’s contract, and that ”Magic Seeds” (2004) would be his last novel. (Over the years, he has often hinted at retirement, only to publish another book soon after.) Yet the fact that Naipaul has continued to write novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form’s limitations; indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no longer adequate. ”If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it’s O.K., but it’s of no account,” Naipaul said. ”If you’re a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it’s of no account.”

What is of account, in Naipaul’s view, is the larger global political situation — in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. ”I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,” he said. To what extent, he wondered, had ”people who lock themselves away in belief … shut themselves away from the active busy world”? ”To what extent without knowing it” were they ”parasitic on that world”? And why did they have ”no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them”? Far from simple, the questions brought a laserlike focus to a central paradox of today’s situation: that some who have benefited from the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it.

In November 2001 Naipaul told an audience of anxious New Yorkers still reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center that they were facing ”a war declared on you by people who passionately want one thing: a green card.” What happened on Sept. 11 ”was too astonishing. It’s one of its kind. It can’t happen again,” he said in our conversation. ”But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.” The bigger issue, he said, is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance, today lacks ”a strong cultural life,” making it vulnerable to Islamicization. He even went so far as to say that Muslim women shouldn’t wear headscarves in the West. ”If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture,” he said. ”It’s a form of aggression.”

No matter how uncomfortable or debatable, there is a painful prescience to Naipaul’s observations on Islam and the West. That prescience was in evidence once again when, just two weeks after our meeting, bombers struck the London Underground and a city bus, killing more than 50 people. Naipaul was at home in Wiltshire that day, and professed no surprise that the attacks appeared to have been carried out by British citizens. ”We must stop fooling ourselves about what we are witnessing,” he said in a telephone conversation a week after the July 7 attacks. The debate in Britain about British detainees held at Guantanamo Bay was evidence of the foolishness. ”People here talk about those people who were picked up by the Americans as ‘lads,’ ‘our lads,’ as though they were people playing cricket or marbles,” Naipaul said. ”It’s glib, nonsensical talk from people who don’t understand that holy war for Muslims is a religious war, and a religious war is something you never stop fighting.”

These remarks, like so many of Naipaul’s utterances over the years, seem calculated to provoke. In his interviews as in his life, Naipaul is famously irascible, difficult, contradictory, an ideological lightning rod. Yet in his writing, he is an artist on whom nothing is lost. Naipaul addressed this split in his Nobel acceptance speech, in which he seconded Proust’s argument that ”a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.” Naipaul’s work is as subtle as his interviews are clamorous. In ”Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,” his 1981 travelogue through the ironies and intricacies of non-Arab Islamic countries, and in its 1998 follow-up, ”Beyond Belief,” Naipaul listened seriously and empathetically to people in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia: countries that were converted to Islam over the course of centuries and, in the late 70’s, witnessed a rise in both power and Islamic fundamentalism. The books raise but don’t necessarily answer deep and vexing questions: Is secularism a precondition of tolerance? Does one necessarily have to abandon one’s individual cultural and religious identity to become part of the West? Why do people willingly choose lives that restrict their intellectual freedom? What becomes of modern societies founded on Islam, whose strictest aherents long for a return to the time of Muhammad?

Like Salim, the protagonist of his classic novel ”A Bend in the River,” who describes himself as ”a man without a side,” Naipaul has cultivated political detachment. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said: ”I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.” This is both true and incomplete. Naipaul’s cold, unsparing look at the corruption and disarray of the postcolonial world, his disdain for Marxist liberation movements and his view that Islamic society leads to tyranny are implicitly political positions, and have made him the object of much political criticism. He has been sharply criticized by, among others, Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate, and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, who said ”although Naipaul was writing about Africa, he was not writing for Africans.” The scholar and critic Edward Said, who died in 2003, called ”Beyond Belief” ”an intellectual catastrophe.” Naipaul, he added, thinks ”Islam is the worst disaster that ever happened to India, and the book reveals a pathology.”

But what spares Naipaul’s work from the ideology of critics who would dismiss him as anti-Muslim and admirers who would laud him for essentially the same thing is its unsentimental, often heartbreaking detail. In ”Among the Believers,” Naipaul speaks with Mr. Jaffrey, a newspaper journalist and British-Indian-educated Shiite in Tehran who supported Khomeini as a way of bringing about the Islamic dream of a ”society of believers.” Mr. Jaffrey ate a plate of fried eggs as he spoke. In ”Beyond Belief,” Naipaul revisits one of the journalist’s colleagues, who also relishes his lunch. Ideology is abstract; fried eggs are not. Naipaul’s nonfiction has the force, the almost unbearable density of detail and the moral vision of great fiction. It comes as no surprise that Dickens and Tolstoy are his heroes. For all Naipaul’s talk about the limitations of the novel, the power of his work is ultimately rooted in a novelist’s preternatural attentiveness to individual human lives and triumphs, to the daily things we do that make us who we are, and are the key to our survival.

A breakthrough in Naipaul’s own understanding of himself as a writer and his turning away from the novel toward nonfiction came in a remarkable essay he wrote on Joseph Conrad. First published in The New York Review of Books in 1974, it appears in his 2003 collection, ”Literary Occasions.” It is not entirely surprising that Naipaul would turn to the work of the Polish émigré; both were raised in one world and willed themselves into becoming artists in another, England. ”I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammeled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer,” Naipaul wrote in that essay.

”It came to me that the great novelists wrote about highly organized societies,” he wrote. ”I had no such society; I couldn’t share the assumptions of the writers; I didn’t see my world reflected in theirs. My colonial world was more mixed and secondhand, and more restricted. The time came when I began to ponder the mystery — Conradian word — of my own background.” Along the way, Naipaul kept coming up against Conrad. ”I found that Conrad — 60 years before, in the time of a great peace — had been everywhere before me,” he wrote. ”Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering … a vision of the world’s half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade themselves, where there was no goal, and where always ‘something inherent in the necessities of successful action … carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.’ Dismal, but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation.”

Yet in our conversation, although Naipaul said he thought Conrad was ”great” because he ”wished to look very, very hard at the world,” he also insisted that Conrad ”had no influence on me.” ”Actually, I think ‘A Bend in the River’ is much, much better than Conrad,” he said. ”I think the best part of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is the reportage part. The fictional part is excessive and feeble. And there is no reportage in my thing. I was looking and creating that world. I actually think the work I’ve done in that way is better than Conrad.” Naipaul also dismissed the idea there might be a direct link between his Conrad essay and subsequent works in which he explored some of the same places and themes. ”These things might appear like that. But that’s only for a person on the outside,” he said.

A different picture emerges from Naipaul’s bibliography. After the Conrad essay, Naipaul in fact followed Conrad’s itinerary to the Congo — the subject of his nonfiction essay on Mobutu, ”A New King for the Congo”(1975), and of ”A Bend in the River” (1979); and to Aceh, Indonesia, for ”Among the Believers” and ”Beyond Belief.” Naipaul has also gone where Conrad went as a narrator, cultivating a kind of finely wrought ambiguity and moving toward reportage. ”To understand Conrad,” as he wrote in his essay, ”it was necessary to begin to match his experience. It was also necessary to lose one’s preconceptions of what the novel should do and, above all, to rid oneself of the subtle corruptions of the novel or comedy of manners.”

In conversation, another dynamic becomes apparent, in which the more dismissive Naipaul is of a writer, the more likely it is that he has engaged deeply with that writer’s work. Sitting a few feet away from a bookshelf of French novels, Naipaul called Proust ”tedious,” ”repetitive,” ”self-indulgent,” concerned only with a character’s social status. ”What is missing in Proust is this idea of a moral center,” he said. Naipaul also had little respect for Joyce’s ”Ulysses” — ”the Irish book,” he sniffily called it — and other works ”that have to lean on borrowed stories.” Lately, he has found Stendhal ”repetitive, tedious, infuriating,” while ”the greatest disappointment was Flaubert.”

All this points to another idea: Modernism is over. ”We are all overwhelmed by the idea of French 19th-century culture. Everybody wanted to go to Paris to paint or to write. And of course that’s a dead idea these days,” Naipaul said. ”We’ve changed. The world has changed. The world has grown bigger.” Which brings us back to the limitations of the novel. The writer must leave the sitting room and travel abroad into the active, busy world. It is the tragic vision only a novelist can reach: that the world cannot be contained in the novel.

And yet, for all his laments, Naipaul is not invested in the notion that Western civilization is in decline. ”That’s a romantic idea,” he said brusquely. ”A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying… . It’s a university idea. People cook it up at universities and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance.” The ”philosophical diffidence” of the West, he maintains, will prevail over the ”philosophical shriek” of those who intend to destroy it. Naipaul formulated those terms in a lecture he delivered in 1992 at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York. (Called ”Our Universal Civilization,” it appears in his 2002 essay collection, ”The Writer and the World.”) In it, he cites a remarkable passage from Conrad: ”A half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an easy chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs.”

As for evidence of the diffidence: ”I think it actually is all around us. It’s all around us,” Naipaul said. But where, exactly? ”There are millions and millions of people all around us,” was all he would say. In ”India: A Million Mutinies Now” (1990), his third nonfiction book about India, Naipaul celebrated the million manifestations of daily life, of lives undefeated by the chaos, disarray and poverty of the larger society. A Hindu by birth, though not observant, Naipaul finds India a place of great hope. It is, he says, the country where belief and unbelief coexist most peaceably. The economic development of India — and China — he said, will ”completely alter the world,” and ”nothing that’s happening in the Arab world has that capacity.” Yet Naipaul called it ”a calamity” that, even with its billion people, ”there are no thinkers in India” today. India is also where he turns for a theory of history. ”The only theory is that everything is in a state of flux,” he said. This is his own ”personal idea,” he said, but one linked to a philosophical concept in Indian religion.

”I find it impossible to contain the history of Europe in my head. It’s so much movement, so much movement,” he said. ”Even when you go back to the Roman times there are these tribal groups pressing all the time, pressing and pressing and pressing,” he continued, pushing his fists together for emphasis and fixing his gaze intently at the near distance. He has recently been reading the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, an Englishwoman who traveled across the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. The chaos of history pressed in on the Wiltshire sitting room. ”You have this picture of the devastation the Turks had created in Hungary,” he said. ”Who ever thought that world would have changed if you were living at that time? But it has changed. And what we’re living in will of course change again.”

Dismal, but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation.

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

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Japan, Aug 9, 2005

After weeks of fierce political infighting within the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s Upper House of parliament has decisively rejected the flagship postal privatization bills of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, by 125 to 108 votes.

Even though the LDP and its coalition partner, New Komeito, hold a majority in the 242-seat upper chamber, many members of the fractious LDP joined the opposition to vote down the crucial bills, which were a vital component of Koizumi’s reform program.

The humiliating defeat led Koizumi to call a snap general election, probably for September 11, which opinion polls indicate the LDP will find extremely difficult to win, and may herald a seismic shift in Japanese politics. The failure of the postal bills also probably marks the end of Koizumi’s political career. Even if the LDP retains power, the desperately divided party is highly unlikely to re-nominate a prime minister who attempted political suicide.

Koizumi is believed to have called the election to test the public’s view of his administration. LDP sources said the party would not endorse party members who voted against the bills, a move that may force rebels to form their own party.

The rejected bills formed the centerpiece of the prime minister’s structural reform agenda, but have faced intense resistance not just from the opposition parties, but more significantly from within the LDP. In fact, the party is so bitterly divided over the issue that one of its lawmaker, Yoji Nagaoka, committed suicide after heated confrontations over the measures.

Since the Lower House narrowly passed the plans on July 5, Koizumi had been fighting an increasingly uphill struggle to gain the support of LDP members in the Upper House. He has constantly warned that the bills’ failure in the higher chamber would represent a vote of no-confidence against his cabinet, forcing him to dissolve the more powerful Lower House for a snap general election.

Since becoming prime minister in April 2001, Koizumi has frequently pledged he would either reform the political system or bring down the LDP. He now looks to have hit the self-destruct button, much to the dismay of LDP lawmakers who fear they may lose power in the snap election.

Former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, former LDP deputy president Taku Yamasaki, Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Taro Aso and several other key political LDP figures frantically pleaded with Koizumi not to initiate a snap election, but Koizumi could not be deterred. He even threatened to dismiss any member of the cabinet who opposed his decision, forcing at least one member to resign.

Koizumi sees dissolving the Lower House at an extremely inopportune time for the LDP as the only means he has to punish the anti-reformers within the LDP and renew the political system. Others interpreted the move as his way of committing political suicide out of despair over the failure of his life-long ambition to privatize the postal system.

Japan Post is a giant with about US$3 trillion in assets, including the world’s biggest deposit-taking institution, and has nearly 25,000 offices and 260,000 employees. The bills would have split Japan Post into four units under a state-owned holding company in 2007. Insurance and savings businesses were to have been sold off by 2017.

The yen and Japanese share prices fell on Monday when the results of the vote were known. The currency regained its losses, however, and the Nikkei share average later traded in positive territory.

Koizumi cannot dissolve the Upper House, but if the opposition gains control of the more powerful lower chamber, Upper House LDP members will find themselves in effective opposition with no prospect of cabinet seats or other posts.

The main consequences of a snap Lower House election are likely to: reduce the number of LDP lawmakers in the Diet - parliament, terminate Koizumi’s reign as prime minister, give the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) a good chance of gaining power, deepen internal LDP divisions, possibly splitting the party, and kill Koizumi’s long-cherished dream of postal reform.

Even if the LDP scrapes back into power, the divisive postal plans are likely to be shelved for the sake of party unity, and if the opposition wins, it has vowed to kill the plans.

While some see the situation as an ignominious end for one of postwar Japan’s longest-serving and most popular leaders, Koizumi seems to view his actions as a way of going out in a blaze of glory.

Under nearly all scenarios, both Koizumi and the LDP wind up as big losers.

Opposition in a good shape
Koizumi became prime minister in April 2001, and quickly used his personal popularity to take the LDP to a landslide victory in the July 2001 Upper House election and then later to a more modest win in the November 2003 Lower House election, which also witnessed impressive opposition gains. As Koizumi’s popularity has steadily waned, the opposition has become increasingly powerful.

The Democratic Party of Japan displayed its growing electoral appeal by winning more seats than the LDP in the July 2004 Upper House election, even though the LDP retained its majority in the chamber with the help of its coalition partner, New Komeito, which won 10 seats. Koizumi’s current predicament partially stems from the LDP’s slim majority in the upper chamber.

A recent survey by the highly regarded Shukan Bunshun magazine suggested that if an election were held in September it would hand the DPJ a solid majority and reduce the number of LDP lawmakers to below the 200 mark from the current 237. The results of recent Tokyo municipal elections also underlined the DPJ’s ability to attract vital floating voters, who are normally the key element in winning Japanese elections. Political momentum is clearly with the DPJ.

Not surprisingly, the DPJ is relishing the prospect of a snap election and last Friday its secretary general, Tatsuo Kawabata, gleefully summed up party feeling, “If the Lower House is dissolved, we will take it as the chance of a lifetime, and say ‘thank-you’.”

Smaller opposition parties, which in the past have split the anti-LDP vote, have also made things easy for a DPJ victory this time around. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) recently decided to reduce the number of candidates it fields, making more constituencies two-horse LDP-DPJ races, a situation that often favors the DPJ. The Social Democratic Party is also likely to put up fewer candidates than in the previous poll, further boosting DPJ prospects.

Another significant factor in the DPJ’s favor is that the polls indicate that postal privatization is not considered a key issue among ordinary voters, suggesting that Koizumi does not have a vital campaign issue around which to rally the electorate to his side.

Additionally, polls indicate the public is concerned about Japan’s poor ties with China and South Korea, which have been severely strained since Koizumi started visiting the controversial Yasukuni shrine, which honors Class-A war criminals along with the country’s war-dead.

The election will probably be officially announced August 30, and the poll most likely be held on Sunday September 11. The law stipulates an election must be held within 40 days of dissolution.

Lower House vote fatally weakened Koizumi
Ever since the Lower House narrowly approved the postal bills on July 5, the LDP has been in a state of severe crisis. Despite a comfortable majority in the Lower House, the postal bills were only approved by a mere five ballots in a truly cliff-hanger vote.

A total of 35 LDP lawmakers rebelled against Koizumi, the largest number since the 37-vote revolt against former prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa in 1993, a rebellion which split the LDP and handed victory to the opposition in the subsequent election. Such a large-scale uprising in the LDP is rare, indicating that momentum was clearly running against Koizumi and signaling that the LDP could be about to break apart, as it did in 1993.

Koizumi tried to put a brave face on the situation, but the sheer narrowness of result, and the much higher than expected LDP rebellion, substantially weakened him. When he appeared in public over the weekend he had the air of a weary condemned man. As the Upper House result was announced he sat grim-faced.

LDP may split
Mitsuo Horiuchi and Shizuka Kamei, two heavyweight LDP arch-enemies of Koizumi, organized the Lower House revolt and promised to defeat the measures in the Upper House, which Kamei described as “round two”. This forced Koizumi to declare that he would take a rejection of the bills by the upper chamber as a vote of no confidence in his administration and call an election. In effect, he put a revolver to the collective LDP head and threatened to pull the trigger.

Horiuchi and Kamei called Koizumi’s bluff, but they may also turn out the losers, as in past elections anti-reform LDP lawmakers have suffered greater poll setbacks than reformers.

Kamei is particularly vulnerable after a member of his faction, Yoji Nagaoka, committed suicide after he was put under intense politically pressure for supporting Koizumi in the Lower House. Fifty-four-year-old Nagaoka hanged himself following heated confrontations with Kamei faction members over the postal privatization plan.

The LDP is currently so riven over the issue that those lawmakers who opposed Koizumi may break away to form their own party, especially if the LDP leadership carries out its threat of refusing to endorse Lower House rebels in the election.

Many of the LDP postal privatization rebels depend on the state-run postal system as a solid vote-gathering machine in their constituencies, where local post office chiefs often act as reliable vote-gatherers during election campaigns. This bond lies at the heart of the fierce opposition to privatization proposals and the forces it generates may rip the LDP apart.

The prospects for both Koizumi and the LDP do not look good, while the DPJ’s star is rising.

J Sean Curtin is a GLOCOM fellow at the Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global Communications.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

Posted at 12:56 AM · Comments (0)

The foremost Western authority on the life and times of Emperor Hirohito — known posthumously as the Emperor Showa — here talks openly with staff writer ERIC PRIDEAUX about the role of Japan’s former “living god” in both wartime and peace; and of his place in history in comparison with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, and George W. Bush.
In 2000, historian Herbert P. Bix shocked readers with a biography of Emperor Showa (called Emperor Hirohito during his reign) that shattered the image of him as a mere figurehead who was detached from Japan’s imperialist warmongering in the first half of the 20th century.

Bix argued in “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan,” which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, that Emperor Showa was in fact intimately involved in the decision-making behind his military’s ruthless campaigns. Hence, Bix strongly contends, the Emperor bore heavy moral, legal and political responsibility.

TIMEOUT is running an exclusive interview with Bix, in which he explains why Japan will be unable to realize its full democratic potential without re-evaluating Emperor Showa. Bix also asks in this hard-hitting piece what lessons today’s world leaders can learn from a study of this enigmatic figure.

At the postwar Tokyo war crimes tribunal, the Allies indicted 28 Japanese war leaders for “crimes against peace,” “violations against the laws and customs of war” and “crimes against humanity,” including the Nanking atrocities in 1937-38 and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Seven were hanged.

Bix maintains that Emperor Showa was shielded from trial by Allied commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his staff, who feared communists and wanted to harness the Emperor’s domestic popularity to hasten Japan’s recovery, and so suppressed damning evidence of his war involvement.

Though “Hirohito” attracted criticism from rightwing academics in Japan, Bix (who is married to a Japanese, Toshie) reserves his most pointed criticism for his own government in Washington. Asked to compare recent events with those of Emperor Showa’s reign, Bix condemned the invasion of Iraq as “an act that will live in infamy” — one that was “far worse than Pearl Harbor.”

Herbert P. Bix

How did you come to write “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan?”

I wanted to write a history of modern Japan. I was interested in the Emperor and I wanted to situate the Emperor and the imperial institution in the entire modernization process.

I wanted to show the development of the Emperor’s personality, his ways of thinking, his whole involvement in all aspects of national life.

Did you set out to determine whether he was a dictator who should be held accountable for Japan’s role in World War II?

I knew from the very outset that he wasn’t a dictator, and dictatorship was not in the Japanese historical experience. The Emperor [Hirohito] was sort of a participant in a pluralistic decision-making system. So I always knew that. But I did feel it amazing that nobody questioned his responsibility for the war, given the central position he played in national life.

Crown Prince Hirohito on July 20, 1923

The Emperor died in January 1989, just when the Cold War order was collapsing and the new era of instability was setting in. That’s when some important material started to become available. I got a copy of Kinoshita Michio’s diary of the [wartime] imperial entourage published by Bungei Shunju in 1990. And I was also sent a copy of the Showa Emperor’s monologue [the justification of his wartime role that he dictated for the Occupation authorities early in 1946] that Bungei Shunju published at the end of 1990.

When I read those, I said, Aha! Here is a human being like the rest of us, and … with this new material I could return to the study of the institution, because previously I had only written about the emperor system very schematically and abstractly — the way most people did.

I think all this new evidence made me want to revise outdated and erroneous views. And I think Japanese people — and the world — had been told only about the Emperor’s innocence in starting the Pacific War and his heroism in ending it. And I didn’t buy that; I was very skeptical about it.

And I thought, too, to describe the Emperor in the postwar period as a powerless symbol, that needed to be investigated. In other words, I started off in search of the real Hirohito because I had all these doubts about the official view. And … I found that none of the claims about him could stand careful scrutiny.

Did you feel there was a vacuum in Japanese scholarship regarding Hirohito?

Emperor Hirohito on Nov. 30, 1943

I think Americans actively abetted the re-emergence of the “chrysanthemum taboo” — the taboo on discussion of the Imperial institution and the role of the Emperor before, during and after the war.

And I think that American psychological warfare propaganda directed against Japan from late 1943 onward also promoted the official Japanese view of the Emperor.

So, for different reasons, Americans and Japanese during the last two years of the war were working hard to shield him from criticism.

How would you contrast Hirohito’s militarist responsibility with that of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini? In other words, did Hirohito bear responsibility for the onset of fascism in the same way as those European dictators?

I argued [in the book] that he bore moral, legal and political responsibility of the highest degree for the war — and that responsibility extended also to war atrocities.

Emperor Hirohito at a military parade in May 1937

Hirohito stood at the center of a system of power that disciplined the Japanese people to be loyal subjects of the emperor state. And I think that he, more than any other Japanese, epitomized the politics of irresponsibility under the Meiji Constitution.

In no way was he a dictator. In no way was he comparable to a Hitler or a Mussolini, to a Churchill or a Roosevelt or any other Western leader. He stood at the head of a so-called modern state and was considered to be a living deity. What other modern state at that time was headed by a living deity?

Here was a man who lived, himself, under a fabricated image of the ideal monarch. The idealized Emperor Meiji was his model.

In one of the early chapters [of the book], I use the term “cognitive dissonances” in relation to his personality. Remember, he was given an education in idealized Confucian norms and in Bushido. He was taught above all to be a benevolent monarch and he wanted to live up to those ideals.

I think I show that Hirohito was usually very active behind the scenes, and he was sharper than most historians and political observers gave him credit for being.

I say right at the outset that the idea of Hirohito as a mere figurehead is pure myth. Similarly the idea of him as a normal constitutional monarch is outrageous; that was never the case.

Mickey Mouse looks on as Emperor Hirohito enters Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif, on Aug. 8, 1975.

Hirohito was Imperial Japan’s hereditary head of state; he was the supreme commander of his forces. He was also a religious leader and he was the nation’s chief pedagogue. He lived in a world of high politics. So, naturally, he engaged in politics. Officials who exercise power and influence always operate under pressures — internal and external pressures. Hirohito was no different. He made choices. His choices had consequences.

In Hirohito’s case, the domestic pressures on him came from the political parties, the military, his close advisers and from the Japanese people. And also from the international community. They came, too, from the colonies.

Here is a man who bore enormous responsibility for the consequences of his actions in each of his many roles. Yet, this man never assumed responsibility for what happened to the Japanese and Asian peoples whose lives were destroyed or harmed by his rule. He was a head of state and supreme commander who never assumed responsibility for having connived at actions, such as not punishing officers who disobeyed his orders or committed crimes.

Hirohito often gave orders without issuing commands. This isn’t unique to Japan. It is the “voiceless order” tech nique that high officials in most countries around the world routinely employ.

In your book, is this what you call his “wishes”?

It’s acting by not acting — and we see this in American history as well.

I gave the examples of the Nanking Massacre [in 1937], which I believe Hirohito had to know about. And I talked about his roles in helping to undermine political parties and the rule of Cabinet government, and in delaying surrender. In every period, he plays a role in politics and military decision-making — but he comes to military decision-making gradually.

Emperor Hirohito at a garden party in 1988.

For example, regarding the delayed surrender. At the end, in 1945, the army and the navy and the Supreme War Leadership Council and the Cabinet, they all had reasons to bring the lost war to an end short of Japan’s further destruction and unconditional capitulation to the Anglo-Americans. But only the Emperor had the sovereign power to resolve the issue, and he was more concerned about preserving an empowered monarchy — with himself on the throne — than he was about saving the lives of his people.

And at the end, during the entire month of June and into July, when the American terror bombing of Japanese civilian targets reached its peak, Hirohito resisted and showed no determination whatsoever to bring the war to an end.

Long after the war, in 1975 I think, at a staged press conference — because all his press conferences were, of course, staged — he was asked a general question that had been submitted in advance about his view of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he gave this answer: “It is very regrettable that nuclear bombs were dropped, and I feel sorry for the citizens of Hiroshima. But it couldn’t be helped because that happens in wartime.”

He never took responsibility for the war that was carried out in his name. And of course Japanese people, the young men, went to war believing that they were defending their country, showing their loyalty to him. But he never acknowledged loyalty to his subjects. He only acknowledged responsibility to his ancestors.

I made clear what I thought about him. Morally, I thought he was a very weak person. He lacked backbone, and I think his reign was a tragedy for the Japanese people.

But, I wrote my book in an era when all sorts of things were changing in Japan; I wrote it in the 1990s. The war and occupation had become history. And then the long Cold War had come to an end and we were moving toward a new century. Everything was changing when I wrote my book. And it affected me, but I didn’t go into detail on the new era that was about to dawn, the new era of ideological extremism, of a new militarism, a new imperialism. I didn’t go into that.

In the book, you portray a coterie of officials raising Hirohito to be the hands-on, authoritarian leader that his own father, Emperor Taisho, never was. Should Hirohito’s upbringing, in which he appears to have been the product of intense indoctrination, not absolve him to some degree from responsibility for the militarist departure from the “Taisho democracy” movement and for Japan’s wartime atrocities?

I never said that he was groomed to be an authoritarian leader. I wrote that he was socialized to be a benevolent monarch.

“Authoritarianism” was assumed in the Japanese political context. But Emperor Meiji was his model, not his father, and he was the product of an intense socialization and indoctrination process. But I don’t think this absolves him, to any serious degree, from responsibility for the destruction of Taisho democracy.

Why not? Surely, many liberal thinkers today would argue that someone who grows up in an authoritarian environment, and later becomes authoritarian themselves, cannot be held entirely to blame, due to the experience of their upbringing.

Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but that didn’t absolve him from political, or moral, or legal responsibility. Particularly in the case of his sanctioning wars of aggression.

I imagine that many Japanese rightists reading your book would say, “What right have you to come and tell us we shouldn’t have done this, when we were living in an era of violent, global Western imperialism? This was the only way for the Emperor to defend his nation.”

Well, it wasn’t. My answer is that it wasn’t the only way; a different foreign policy could have been pursued in Japan in the late Meiji Era [1868-1912], in the Taisho Era [1912-26] and in the early Showa Era [1926-89] — a different foreign policy vis-a-vis Korea, China and the Western countries. But Japan’s leaders in each period chose not to do so.

In Meiji and most of Taisho, the so-called realist decision-makers of Imperial Japan acted prudently. The problem was that at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the ’30s they lost their bearings and made one error after another. But there were always options. Japan always had options; it didn’t have to become a rogue state.

Do you see any similarities between the way Hirohito and his key advisers went about their business and the conduct of today’s world leaders?

If we look at Japan today — certainly since the rise of the Koizumi Cabinet — we see a world shaped by a new militarism that has arisen in the United States, a new imperialism, a government in Washington composed of ideological extremists and demonstrable war criminals who have initiated wars of aggression.

The United States after 9/11 launched a war against Afghanistan and then a few years later against Iraq. It has spread bases now throughout Central Asia, the Persian Gulf and Iraq. It is distrusted; it has lost all ideological legitimacy in the eyes of most people in the world — especially in the Middle East and across Central Asia and the whole Islamic world. So we have this government, headed by George W. Bush, in 2003 ignoring the Security Council and launching an illegal war against Iraq.

Here, you can bring in Japan — you might say the Americans’ preventive war against Iraq was worse, in many ways far worse, than Japan’s attack on an American military base, in an American colony, in December 1941 — far worse than Pearl Harbor.

Stop and think about it: It [Pearl Harbor] was an act of aggression and it initiated the Pacific War, but here was the world’s only hyperpower initiating the same type of infamous act of aggression against a defenseless country, and doing so for reasons that are truly despicable.

Oil and revenge were factors, certainly, in the decision of the Bush administration. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

But in the new 21st century, in the era of the new militarism, the new imperialism and the rise of the ideological extremists in decision-making positions in the United States, we can look back on the Asian-Pacific War. If we do so carefully, we won’t be justifying what Japan did and what Japan’s war leaders were punished for doing — all except for Hirohito — but we can see that in both cases government, individuals in positions of official power, planned and prepared and initiated and waged wars of aggression.

The problem is — and this really upsets many Japanese regardless of whether they’re from the left or right — Japan’s leaders were subjected at the [International Military Tribunal for the Far East] Tokyo trials to charges of crimes against “civilization.” They were punished for crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and of course, war crimes. But there was a double standard, because the Americans didn’t apply the same standards to themselves. This rankles.

This civilization theme is a myth. But I still think the Tokyo tribunal wasn’t wrong. It had shortcomings by contemporary standards and it operated with a view of history that wasn’t always correct. But by and large, it did more good than harm. Of course, the right has a different view.

Do you think Hirohito should have been tried and punished, and if so, how?

In the book, I never said he should, and when I went around and spoke I never said that either.

What I said was that the Japanese people should have been allowed to freely discuss his role, and that he should have been allowed to abdicate. Abdication should have been the aim. That’s my answer. He should have been encouraged to abdicate, and the Japanese people should have been encouraged to freely debate the Emperor’s role and the role of the Imperial institution. But instead, Gen. MacArthur and the Truman administration shielded the Emperor and documents were placed off limits.

I think the joint efforts of Americans and Japanese so-called realists to preserve the Imperial institution, each for different reasons in what I call a de-facto partnership, had horrible consequences.

But I want to come back to the present. When the Bush government launched its illegal war against Iraq, Japan’s LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] government, the government of Junichiro Koizumi, dutifully supported the United States, just as other Japanese Cabinets had supported other U.S. interventions since the Korean War.

China and France and Germany and Russia, among others, did not. Koizumi did. Where Japan’s military relationship with the United States is concerned, I’ve said this conservative LDP regime lacks independence of thought and will, and they’re likely to continue cooperating with the United States militarily and to view China in terms of the primacy of their ties with the United States.

What I’d like to see is Japanese journalists begin to reopen investigations of how the security treaty with the United States is harming Japan both economically and politically. I’d like to see investigative journalism focus on this as much as Yasukuni Shrine.

And this is important because restorationist impulses are today stirring beneath the surface of conservative politics. After all, it’s a new world and the younger generation of Japanese people won’t remember the war and they’re open to all sorts of manipulation.

What do you mean by the relationship with the United States “harming Japan both economically and politically”?

First of all, let’s go back a moment. When I speak of restorationist impulses stirring again, look at the efforts to revise Japan’s Basic Education Law of 1947. Look at the efforts to restore an official state connection to Yasukuni Shrine and to promote neo-nationalist views of the lost war.

I think Japanese conservatives may not be happy with this strategic partnership with Washington, but they’re not pushing for an independent militarization. What they want to do is revise the peace constitution, particularly [war-renouncing] Article 9, so that Japan can once again wage war. And yet this is the great achievement of the Japanese people: their embrace of the principle of pacifism.

Do you believe a segment of the Japanese conservative leadership actually wants to wage war again?

Well, they want to be able to wage war without restriction. They call it being a “normal” state. Of course this is highly regressive, because Japan remains a leader precisely because it has the non-nuclear principles and it’s not a major exporter of arms to other countries.

But the conservatives are frustrated and dissatisfied with Japan’s long subordination to the United States. Japan has a sort of satellite, or client, relationship with Washington. A person like the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, he attracts that wing of the party that is quite dissatisfied, and he transfers his frustration to China. I think this only adds to the complication of [diplomacy] in East Asia. Where China is concerned, I don’t see [Japan] acting independently of the United States.

You see the conservatives using every opportunity to exploit fear — fear of North Korea, fear that Japan might be invaded. Japan has a pretty strong armament capability and large military that is perfectly capable of defending itself. It’s inconceivable that a foreign country would invade Japan.

But we’re seeing politics here. We’re seeing an effort on the part of the conservatives, the LDP, to revise the Constitution… . I think calls to elevate the status of the Emperor to head of state are less important than efforts to eliminate Article 9. I would like to see the Imperial Family move out of Tokyo and go back to Kyoto. That would be very positive.

Because it would reduce their roles?

Yes, as long as this Imperial institution exists, it’s going to be used. There’s no question. It exists now to be used. And the pressure is there.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone recently proposed (as chairman of an LDP constitutional review subcommittee) declaring the Emperor the head of state. How significant is that, in light of your view in “Hirohito” that the prewar elevation of the Emperor dramatically undermined democratic currents of the day?

In the years that Nakasone was prime minister, late 1982-87, he did many things for which he had to apologize, and he made statements that he had to retract. He was constantly putting his foot in his mouth. Visiting Yasukuni Shrine in his official capacity in 1985 was one such stupid thing. And I think that proposing that the Emperor be elevated to the head of state is another.

Nakasone is also a strong backer of writing a new Basic Education Law. The current one is in tune with the ideals of the peace Constitution. But he and others envision a new type of Constitution that will allow the ruling elites to resume waging war.

Does Nakasone’s proposal represent a drift away from democracy?

Well, Japan has a type of formal, talk-down democracy, like in the United States. We see more clearly than ever at the start of the 21st century the shortcomings of this low-level, talk-down form of democracy. If Japan is ever to deepen its democracy, it would have to move away from this.

What significance do you see in Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s long-held insistence on visiting Yasukuni Shrine?

That question really goes back to how we define the era in which we’re living, because, as I said, the Koizumi Cabinet was born at the start of the 21st century. Not only is the Asia-Pacific War “history,” but the Occupation is history, and the postwar period is history. The Cold War is over. The political situation is one of searching for a new threat so as to impose discipline and reorder things.

In this new environment, I think Koizumi’s behavior isn’t so odd. I think it reflects the fact that the Japanese people remain divided on the meaning of their whole trans-war experience. It reflects the fact that memories of the Asia-Pacific War have evolved: A younger generation with no experience of war has come on the scene, and a minority of influential elites — overrepresented, of course, in the LDP — have asserted publicly an affirmative view of the war.

I think the actions of the prime minister and likeminded conservatives in his Cabinet have to be set against this lack of national consensus, but also have to be set in terms of the opportunities the new international configuration of powers offers to change Japan.

To change Japan in what ways?

To change Japan so it is a more active participant in the American project, supporting American hegemony, supporting more actively the United States in its wars, which are now increasingly focused on resources — on poor, weak nations.

So the visit to Yasukuni Shrine, and the Cabinet’s approval of history textbooks that whitewash crimes committed in past wars, these things take on a certain meaning in this context, and it is nonsensical when the prime minister and other ministers insist that foreigners shouldn’t criticize their actions, because remembrance of the war dead, and what gets taught in Japanese classrooms, are essentially domestic matters.

But Japanese historical consciousness about the lost war isn’t a matter solely for Japanese, and I think the majority of Japanese people sense this and they don’t approve of his continuing to insist on visiting Yasukuni Shrine.

I think it’s demonstrably untrue that the Japanese people have never changed their views of the last, lost war. But Koizumi’s actions allow many Chinese and Korean people, and other peoples in Asia, to have that false view. It’s wrong. But the political stance of a ruling class has an enormous influence on how the rest of the world views a country.

Nonetheless, Germany seems to have fared better than Japan in grappling with its wartime past. What must Japan do to put World War II behind it once and for all, and normalize relations with Asian neighbors?

I’m often asked that question, and I think the German elites found it in their national interest to gain the trust of their European neighbors, and to quickly reintegrate into western Europe. Over the last quarter century, I’d say they’ve done a fairly good job in grappling with their legacy of their war criminality and overcoming the past.

But the circumstances for Japan were entirely different — always have been different.

During the early years of the Occupation, Japanese intellectuals went much further than their German counterparts in grappling with issues of war responsibility. They did a much better job. It’s not appreciated.

But the Pacific had become an American lake after World War II, and U.S. power predominated. And once the U.S. decided to pressure Japan to take sides in the Cold War, and to cut off relations — both diplomatic and trade ones — with China and turn its back on Asia, the way the Meiji oligarchs did at the end of the 19th century, once that happened, I think we get this regression, and you get influential persons backtracking in confronting issues of war responsibility. That needs to be pointed out.

But at the same time, I would say that there is no collective, unified “Japan” adhering to erroneous views of the past. Every generation of Japanese has revisited World War II, and will continue to do so.

There will always be people who will deny history. Such people are always going to find — as they did in Japan, starting in the latter half of the 1950s — a public space to air their views.

The Japan Times: Aug. 7, 2005
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Posted at 11:12 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wilson Quarterly

Everyone knows looks shouldn’t matter. Beauty, after all, is only skin deep, and no right-thinking person would admit to taking much account of how someone looks outside the realm of courtship, that romantic free-trade zone traditionally exempted from the usual tariffs of rationality. Even in that tender kingdom, where love at first sight is still readily indulged, it would be impolitic, if not immature, to admit giving too much weight to a factor as shallow as looks. Yet perhaps it’s time to say what we all secretly know, which is that looks do matter, maybe even more than most of us think.

We infer a great deal from people’s looks—not just when it comes to mating (where looks matter profoundly), but in almost every other aspect of life as well, including careers and social status. It may not be true that blondes have more fun, but it’s highly likely that attractive people do, and they start early. Mothers pay more attention to good-looking babies, for example, but, by the same token, babies pay more attention to prettier adults who wander into their field of vision. Attractive people are paid more on the job, marry more desirable spouses, and are likelier to get help from others when in evident need. Nor is this all sheer, baseless prejudice. Human beings appear to be hard-wired to respond to how people and objects look, an adaptation without which the species might not have made it this far. The unpleasant truth is that, far from being only skin deep, our looks reflect all kinds of truths about difference and desire—truths we are, in all likelihood, biologically programmed to detect.

Sensitivity to the signals of human appearances would naturally lead to successful reproductive decisions, and several factors suggest that this sensitivity may be bred in the bone. Beauty may even be addictive. Researchers at London’s University College have found that human beauty stimulates a section of the brain called the ventral striatum, the same region activated in drug and gambling addicts when they’re about to indulge their habit. Photos of faces rated unattractive had no effect on the volunteers to whom they were shown, but the ventral striatum did show activity if the picture was of an attractive person, especially one looking straight at the viewer. And the responses occurred even when the viewer and the subject of the photo were of the same sex. Good-looking people just do something to us, whether we like it or not.

People’s looks speak to us, sometimes in a whisper and sometimes in a shout, of health, reproductive fitness, agreeableness, social standing, and intelligence. Although looks in mating still matter much more to men than to women, the importance of appearance appears to be rising on both sides of the gender divide. In a fascinating cross-generational study of mating preferences, every 10 years different groups of men and women were asked to rank 18 characteristics they might want enhanced in a mate. The importance of good looks rose “dramatically” for both men and women from 1939 to 1989, the period of the study, according to David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas. On a scale of 1 to 3, the importance men gave to good looks rose from 1.50 to 2.11. But for women, the importance of good looks in men rose from 0.94 to 1.67. In other words, women in 1989 considered a man’s looks even more important than men considered women’s looks 50 years earlier. Since the 1930s, Buss writes, “physical appearance has gone up in importance for men and women about equally, corresponding with the rise in television, fashion magazines, advertising, and other media depictions of attractive models.”

In all likelihood this trend will continue, driven by social and technological changes that are unlikely to be reversed anytime soon—changes such as the new ubiquity of media images, the growing financial independence of women, and the worldwide weakening of the institution of marriage. For better or worse, we live now in an age of appearances. It looks like looks are here to stay.

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The paradox, in such an age, is that the more important appearances become, the worse most of us seem to look—and not just by comparison with the godlike images alternately taunting and bewitching us from every billboard and TV screen. While popular culture is obsessed with fashion and style, and our prevailing psychological infirmity is said to be narcissism, fully two-thirds of American adults have abandoned conventional ideas of attractiveness by becoming overweight. Nearly half of this group is downright obese. Given their obsession with dieting—a $40 billion-plus industry in the United States—it’s not news to these people that they’re sending an unhelpful message with their inflated bodies, but it’s worth noting here nonetheless.

Social scientists have established what most of us already know in this regard, which is that heavy people are perceived less favorably in a variety of ways. Across cultures—even in places such as Fiji, where fat is the norm—people express a preference for others who are neither too slim nor too heavy. In studies by University of Texas psychologist Devendra Singh, people guessed that the heaviest figures in photos were eight to 10 years older than the slimmer ones, even though the faces were identical. (As the nation’s bill for hair dye and facelifts attests, looking older is rarely desirable, unless you happen to be an underage drinker.)

America’s weight problem is one dimension of what seems to be a broader-based national flight from presentability, a flight that manifests itself unmistakably in the relentless casualness of our attire. Contrary to the desperate contentions of some men’s clothiers, for example, the suit really is dying. Walk around midtown Manhattan, and these garments are striking by their absence. Consumer spending reflects this. In 2004, according to NPD Group, a marketing information firm, sales of “active sportswear,” a category that includes such apparel as warm-up suits, were $39 billion, nearly double what was spent on business suits and other tailored clothing. The irony is that the more athletic gear we wear, from plum-colored velour track suits to high-tech sneakers, the less athletic we become.

The overall change in our attire did not happen overnight. America’s clothes, like America itself, have been getting more casual for decades, in a trend that predates even Nehru jackets and the “full Cleveland” look of a pastel leisure suit with white shoes and belt, but the phenomenon reaches something like an apotheosis in the vogue for low-riding pajama bottoms and flip-flops outside the home. Visit any shopping mall in summer—or many deep-Sunbelt malls year round—and you’ll find people of all sizes, ages, and weights clomping through the climate-controlled spaces in tank tops, T-shirts, and running shorts. Tops—and nowadays often bottoms—emblazoned with the names of companies, schools, and places make many of these shoppers into walking billboards. Bulbous athletic shoes, typically immaculate on adults who go everywhere by car, are the functional equivalent of SUVs for the feet. Anne Hollander, an observant student of clothing whose books include Sex and Suits (1994), has complained that we’ve settled on “a sandbox aesthetic” of sloppy comfort; the new classics—sweats, sneakers, and jeans—persist year after year, transcending fashion altogether.

We’ve come to this pass despite our seeming obsession with how we look. Consider these 2004 numbers from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons: 9.2 million cosmetic surgeries (up 24 percent from 2000) at a cost of $8.4 billion, and that doesn’t count 7.5 million “minimally invasive” procedures, such as skin peels and Botox injections (collectively up 36 percent). Cosmetic dentistry is also booming, as is weight-loss surgery. Although most of this spending is by women, men are focusing more and more on their appearance as well, which is obvious if you look at the evolution of men’s magazines over the years. Further reflecting our concern with both looks and rapid self-transformation is a somewhat grisly new genre of reality TV: the extreme makeover show, which plays on the audience’s presumed desire to somehow look a whole lot better fast.

But appearances in this case are deceiving. The evidence suggests that a great many of us do not care nearly enough about how we look, and that even those who care very much indeed still end up looking terrible. In understanding why, it’s worth remembering that people look the way they do for two basic reasons—on purpose and by accident—and both can be as revealing as a neon tube top.

Let’s start with the purposeful. Extremes in casual clothing have several important functions. A big one nowadays is camouflage. Tent-like T-shirts and sweatsuits cover a lot of sins, and the change in our bodies over time is borne out by the sizes stores find themselves selling. In 1985, for example, the top-selling women’s size was eight. Today, when, as a result of size inflation, an eight (and every other size) is larger than it used to be, NPD Group reports that the top-selling women’s size is 14. Camouflage may also account for the popularity of black, which is widely perceived as slimming as well as cool.

That brings us to another motive for dressing down—way down—which is status. Dressing to manifest disregard for society—think of the loose, baggy hipsters in American high schools—broadcasts self-determination by flaunting the needlessness of having to impress anybody else. We all like to pretend we’re immune to “what people think,” but reaching for status on this basis is itself a particularly perverse—and egregious—form of status seeking. For grownups, it’s also a way of pretending to be young, or at least youthful, since people know instinctively that looking young often means looking good. Among the truly young, dressing down is a way to avoid any embarrassing lapses in self-defining rebelliousness. And for the young and fit, sexy casual clothing can honestly signal a desire for short-term rather than long-term relationships. Indeed, researchers have shown that men respond more readily to sexy clothing when seeking a short-term relationship, perhaps because more modest attire is a more effective signal of sexual fidelity, a top priority for men in the marriage market, regardless of nation or tribe.

Purposeful slovenliness can have its reasons, then, but what about carelessness? One possible justification is that, for many people, paying attention to their own looks is just too expensive. Clothes are cheap, thanks to imports, but looking good can be costly for humans, just as it is for other species. A signal such as beauty, after all, is valuable in reproductive terms only if it has credibility, and it’s been suggested that such signals are credible indicators of fitness precisely because in evolutionary terms they’re so expensive. The peacock’s gaudy tail, for example, attracts mates in part because it signals that the strutting bird is robust enough not only to sustain his fancy plumage but to fend off the predators it also attracts. Modern humans who want to strut their evolutionary stuff have to worry about their tails too: They have to work them off. Since most of us are no longer paid to perform physical labor, getting exercise requires valuable time and energy, to say nothing of a costly gym membership. And then there is the opportunity cost—the pleasure lost by forgoing fried chicken and Devil Dogs. Eating junk food, especially fast food, is probably also cheaper, in terms of time, than preparing a low-calorie vegetarian feast at home.

These costs apparently strike many Americans as too high, which may be why we as a culture have engaged in a kind of aesthetic outsourcing, transferring the job of looking good—of providing the desired supply of physical beauty—to the specialists known as “celebrities,” who can afford to devote much more time and energy to the task. Offloading the chore of looking great onto a small, gifted corps of professionals saves the rest of us a lot of trouble and expense, even if it has opened a yawning aesthetic gulf between the average person (who is fat) and the average model or movie star (who is lean and toned within an inch of his or her life).

Although the popularity of Botox and other such innovations suggests that many people do want to look better, it seems fair to conclude that they are not willing to pay any significant price to do so, since the great majority do not in fact have cosmetic surgery, exercise regularly, or maintain anything like their ideal body weight. Like so much in our society, physical attractiveness is produced by those with the greatest comparative advantage, and consumed vicariously by the rest of us—purchased, in a sense, ready made.

Whether our appearance is purposeful or accidental, the outcome is the same, which is that a great many of us look awful most of the time, and as a consequence of actions or inactions that are at least substantially the result of free will.

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Men dressed liked boys? Flip-flops at the office? Health care workers who never get near an operating room but nevertheless dress in shapeless green scrubs? These sartorial statements are not just casual. They’re also of a piece with the general disrepute into which looking good seems to have fallen. On its face, so to speak, beauty presents some serious ideological problems in the modern world. If beauty were a brand, any focus group that we convened would describe it as shallow and fleeting or perhaps as a kind of eye candy that is at once delicious and bad for you. As a society, we consume an awful lot of it, and we feel darn guilty about it.

Why should this be so? For one thing, beauty strikes most of us as a natural endowment, and as a people we dislike endowments. We tax inheritances, after all, on the premise that they are unearned by their recipients and might produce something like a hereditary aristocracy, not unlike the one produced by the competition to mate with beauty. Money plays a role in that competition; there’s no denying that looks and income are traditionally awfully comfortable with each other, and today affluent Americans are the ones least likely to be overweight. By almost any standard, then, looks are a seemingly unfair way of distinguishing oneself, discriminating as they do on the basis of age and generally running afoul of what the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called “the rise of radical egalitarianism,” which was at the very least suspicious of distinction and advantage, especially a distinction as capricious and as powerful as appearance.

Appearance can be a source of inequality, and achieving some kind of egalitarianism in this arena is a long-standing and probably laudable American concern. The Puritans eschewed fancy garb, after all, and Thoreau warned us to beware of enterprises that require new clothes. Nowadays, at a time of increased income inequality, our clothes paradoxically confer less distinction than ever. Gender distinctions in clothing, for instance, have been blurred in favor of much greater sartorial androgyny, to the extent that nobody would any longer ask who wears the pants in any particular household (because the correct answer would be, “everybody”). The same goes for age distinctions (short pants long ago lost their role as uniform of the young), class distinctions (the rich wear jeans too), and even distinctions between occasions such as school and play, work and leisure, or public and private. Who among us hasn’t noticed sneakers, for example, at a wedding, in a courtroom, or at a concert, where you spot them sometimes even on the stage?

The problem is that, if anything, looks matter even more than we think, not just because we’re all hopelessly superficial, but because looks have always told us a great deal of what we want to know. Looks matter for good reason, in other words, and delegating favorable appearances to an affluent elite for reasons of cost or convenience is a mistake, both for the individuals who make it and for the rest of us as well. The slovenliness of our attire is one of the things that impoverish the public sphere, and the stunning rise in our weight (in just 25 years) is one of the things that impoverish our health. Besides, it’s not as if we’re evolving anytime soon into a species that’s immune to appearances. Looks seem to matter to all cultures, not just our image-besotted one, suggesting that efforts to stamp out looksism (which have yet to result in hiring quotas on behalf of the homely) are bucking millions of years of evolutionary development.

The degree of cross-cultural consistency in this whole area is surprising. Contrary to the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or at the very least in the eye of the culture, studies across nations and tribal societies have found that people almost everywhere have similar ideas about what’s attractive, especially as regards the face (tastes in bodies seem to vary a bit more, perhaps allowing for differing local evolutionary ecologies). Men everywhere, even those few still beyond the reach of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, are more concerned about women’s looks than women are about men’s, and their general preference for women who look young and healthy is probably the result of evolutionary adaptation.

The evidence for this comes from the field of evolutionary psychology. Whatever one’s view of this burgeoning branch of science, one thing it has produced (besides controversy) is an avalanche of disconcerting research about how we look. Psychologists Michael R. Cunningham, of the University of Louisville, and Stephen R. Shamblen cite evidence that babies as young as two or three months old look longer at more attractive faces. New mothers of less attractive offspring, meanwhile, have been found to pay more attention to other people (say, hospital room visitors) than do new mothers of better-looking babies. This may have some basis in biological necessity, if you bear in mind that the evolutionary environment, free as it was of antibiotics and pediatricians, might have made it worthwhile indeed for mothers to invest themselves most in the offspring likeliest to survive and thrive.

The environment today, of course, is very different, but it may only amplify the seeming ruthlessness of the feelings and judgments we make. “In one study,” reports David M. Buss, the evolutionary psychologist who reported on the multi-generational study of mating preferences, “after groups of men looked at photographs of either highly attractive women or women of average attractiveness, they were asked to evaluate their commitment to their current romantic partner. Disturbingly, the men who had viewed pictures of attractive women thereafter judged their actual partners to be less attractive than did the men who had viewed analogous pictures of women who were average in attractiveness. Perhaps more important, the men who had viewed attractive women thereafter rated themselves as less committed, less satisfied, less serious, and less close to their actual partners.” In another study, men who viewed attractive nude centerfolds promptly rated themselves as less attracted to their own partners.

Even if a man doesn’t personally care much what a woman looks like, he knows that others do. Research suggests that being with an attractive woman raises a man’s status significantly, while dating a physically unattractive woman moderately lowers a man’s status. (The effect for women is quite different; dating an attractive man raises a woman’s status only somewhat, while dating an unattractive man lowers her status only nominally.) And status matters. In the well-known “White­hall studies” of British civil servants after World War II, for example, occupational grade was strongly correlated with longevity: The higher the bureaucrat’s ranking, the longer the life. And it turns out that Academy Award-winning actors and actresses outlive other movie performers by about four years, at least according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2001. “The results,” write authors Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh, “suggest that success confers a survival advantage.” So if an attractive mate raises a man’s status, is it really such a wonder that men covet trophy wives?

In fact, people’s idea of what’s attractive is influenced by the body types that are associated with status in a given time and place (which suggests that culture plays at least some role in ideas of attractiveness). As any museumgoer can tell you, the big variation in male preferences across time and place is in plumpness, and Buss contends that this is a status issue: In places where food is plentiful, such as the United States, high-status people distinguish themselves by being thin.

There are reasons besides sex and status to worry about how we look. For example, economists Daniel S. Hamermesh, of the University of Texas, and Jeff E. Biddle, of Michigan State University, have produced a study suggesting that better-looking people make more money. “Holding constant demographic and labor-market characteristics,” they wrote in a well-known 1993 paper, “plain people earn less than people of average looks, who earn less than the good-looking. The penalty for plainness is five to 10 percent, slightly larger than the premium for beauty.” A 1998 study of attorneys (by the same duo) found that some lawyers also benefit by looking better. Yet another study found that better-looking college instructors—especially men—receive higher ratings from their students.

Hamermesh and some Chinese researchers also looked into whether primping pays, based on a survey of Shanghai residents. They found that beauty raises women’s earnings (and, to a lesser extent, men’s), but that spending on clothing and cosmetics helps only a little. Several studies have even found associations between appearance preferences and economic cycles. Psychologists Terry F. Pettijohn II, of Ohio State University, and Abraham Tesser, of the University of Georgia, for example, obtained a list of the Hollywood actresses with top box-office appeal in each year from 1932 to 1995. The researchers scanned the actresses’ photos into a computer, did various measurements, and determined that, lo and behold, the ones who were the most popular during social and economic good times had more “neoteny”—more childlike features, including bigger eyes, smaller chins, and rounder cheeks. During economic downturns, stronger and more rectangular female faces—in other words, faces that were more mature—were preferred.

It’s not clear whether this is the case for political candidates as well, but looks matter in this arena too. In a study that appeared recently in Science, psychologist Alexander Todorov and colleagues at Princeton University showed photographs of political candidates to more than 800 students, who were asked to say who had won and why based solely on looks. The students chose correctly an amazing 69 percent of the time, consistently picking candidates they judged to look the most competent, meaning those who looked more mature. The losers were more likely to have babyfaces, meaning some combination of a round face, big eyes, small nose, high forehead and small chin. Those candidates apparently have a hard time winning elections.

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To scientists, a convenient marker for physical attractiveness in people is symmetry, as measured by taking calipers to body parts as wrists, elbows, and feet to see how closely the pairs match. The findings of this research can be startling. As summarized by biologist Randy Thornhill and psychologist Steven W. Gangestad, both of the University of New Mexico, “In both sexes, relatively low asymmetry seems to be associated with increased genetic, physical, and mental health, including cognitive skill and IQ. Also, symmetric men appear to be more muscular and vigorous, have a lower basal metabolic rate, and may be larger in body size than asymmetric men… . Symmetry is a major component of developmental health and overall condition and appears to be heritable.” The researchers add that more symmetrical men have handsomer faces, more sex partners, and their first sexual experience at an earlier age, and they get to sex more quickly with a new romantic partner. “Moreover,” they tell us, “men’s symmetry predicts a relatively high frequency of their sexual partners’ copulatory orgasms.”

Those orgasms are sperm retaining, suggesting that symmetric men may have a greater chance of getting a woman pregnant. It doesn’t hurt that the handsomest men may have the best sperm, at least according to a study at Spain’s University of Valencia, which found that men with the healthiest, fastest sperm were those whose faces were rated most attractive by women. There’s evidence that women care more about men’s looks for short-term relationships than for marriage, and that as women get closer to the most fertile point of the menstrual cycle, their preference for “symmetrical” men grows stronger, according to Thornhill and Gangestad. Ovulating women prefer more rugged, masculinized faces, whereas the rest of the time they prefer less masculinized or even slightly feminized male faces. Perhaps predictably, more-symmetrical men are likelier to be unfaithful and tend to invest less in a relationship.

Asymmetric people may have some idea that they’re behind the eight ball here. William Brown and his then-colleagues at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, looked at 50 people in heterosexual relationships, measuring such features as hands, ears, and feet, and then asked about jealousy. The researchers found a strong correlation between asymmetry and romantic jealousy, suggesting that asymmetrical lovers may suspect they’re somehow less desirable. Brown’s explanation: “If jealousy is a strategy to retain your mate, then the individual more likely to be philandered on is more likely to be jealous.”

In general, how we look communicates something about how healthy we are, how fertile, and probably how useful in the evolutionary environment. This may be why, across a range of cultures, women prefer tall, broad-shouldered men who seem like good reproductive specimens, in addition to offering the possibility of physical protection. Men, meanwhile, like pretty women who appear young. Women’s looks seem to vary depending on where they happen to be in the monthly fertility cycle. The University of Liverpool biologist John Manning measured women’s ears and fingers and had the timing of their ovulation confirmed by pelvic exams. He found a 30 percent decline in asymmetries in the 24 hours before ovulation—perhaps more perceptible to our sexual antennae than to the conscious mind. In general, symmetrical women have more sex partners, suggesting that greater symmetry makes women more attractive to men.

To evolutionary biologists, it makes sense that men should care more about the way women look than vice versa, because youth and fitness matter so much more in female fertility. And while male preferences do vary with time and place there’s also some remarkable underlying consistency. Devendra Singh, for instance, found that the waist-to-hip ratio was the most important factor in women’s attractiveness to men in 18 cultures he studied. Regardless of whether lean or voluptuous women happen to be in fashion, the favored shape involves a waist/hip ratio of about 0.7. “Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe represented two very different images of beauty to filmgoers in the 1950s,” writes Nancy Etcoff, who is a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Yet the 36-24-34 Marilyn and the 31.5-22-31 Audrey both had versions of the hourglass shape and waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7.” Even Twiggy, in her 92-pound heyday, had a waist/hip ratio of 0.73.

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Is it cause for despair that looks are so important? The bloom of youth is fleeting, after all, and the bad news that our appearance will inevitably broadcast about us cannot be kept under wraps forever. Besides, who could live up to the impossible standards propagated by our powerful aesthetic-industrial complex? It’s possible that the images of models and actresses and even TV newscasters, most of them preternaturally youthful and all selected for physical fitness, have driven most Americans to quit the game, insisting that they still care about how they look even as they retire from the playing field to console themselves with knife and fork.

If the pressure of all these images has caused us to opt out of caring about how we look, that’s a shame, because we’re slaves of neither genes nor fashion in this matter. By losing weight and exercising, simply by making ourselves healthier, we can change the underlying data our looks report. The advantages are almost too obvious to mention, including lower medical costs, greater confidence, and a better quality of life in virtually every way.

There’s no need to look like Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lopez, and no reason for women to pursue Olive Oyl thinness (a body type men do not especially prefer). Researchers, in fact, have found that people of both sexes tend to prefer averageness in members of the opposite sex: The greater the number of faces poured (by computer) into a composite, the higher it’s scored in attractiveness by viewers. That’s in part because “bad” features tend to be averaged out. But the implication is clear: You don’t need to look like a movie star to benefit from a favorable appearance, unless, of course, you’re planning a career in movies.

To a bizarre extent, looking good in America has become the province of an appearance aristocracy—an elect we revere for their seemingly unattainable endowment of good looks. Physical attractiveness has become too much associated with affluence and privilege for a country as democratically inclined as ours. We can be proud at least that these lucky lookers no longer have to be white or even young. Etcoff notes that, in tracking cosmetic surgery since the 1950s, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports a change in styles toward wider, fuller-tipped noses and narrower eyelids, while makeup styles have tended toward fuller lips and less pale skin shades. She attributes these changes to the recalibration of beauty norms as the result of the presence of more Asian, African, and Hispanic features in society.

But what’s needed is a much more radical democratization of physical beauty, a democratization we can achieve not by changing the definition of beauty but by changing ourselves. Looking nice is something we need to take back from the elites and make once again a broadly shared, everyday attribute, as it once was when people were much less likely to be fat and much more likely to dress decently in public. Good looks are not just an endowment, and the un-American attitude that looks are immune to self-improvement only breeds the kind of fatalism that is blessedly out of character in America.

As a first step, maybe we can stop pretending that our appearance doesn’t—or shouldn’t—matter. A little more looksism, if it gets people to shape up, would probably save some lives, to say nothing of some marriages. Let’s face it. To a greater extent than most of us are comfortable with, looks tell us something, and right now what they say about our health, our discipline, and our mutual regard isn’t pretty.

Posted at 6:16 AM · Comments (0)

August 7, 2005
Copyright The New York Times

IS there a modern world leader as poorly understood as Kim Jong Il? Selig Harrison, a North Korea expert who has traveled to Pyongyang numerous times, regards Kim as a kind of Asian Gorbachev, a man pushing ”reform by stealth.” For President Bush, by contrast, the North Korean leader is a ”pygmy,” a mindless, brutal leader: since 2001 the White House has until recently essentially refused to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea.

In ”Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea,” the veteran Asia correspondent Jasper Becker makes a powerful case for defining Kim once and for all — not as an ordinary, if nuclear-tipped, dictator, but as an extraordinarily skillful tyrant presiding over the worst man-made catastrophe in modern history, worse than Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or the Soviet Union in the 1930’s.

Becker cannot report from inside North Korea, and he is not a nuclear expert. Instead, relying on extensive interviews with North Korean exiles, he offers a highly readable narrative that unearths Kim’s history, probes his decision-making style and details the grotesque consequences of those decisions. His book is a subtle plea to the world to expand its focus beyond the — admittedly important — nuclear issue to the vast humanitarian catastrophe unfolding under Kim Jong Il’s gaze.

Becker traces Kim’s destructive behavior to the early days of the world’s only Communist dynasty. The regime was founded on lies, with Kim Il Sung, the father of the present ruler, destroying all evidence of Soviet participation in his rise to power and brainwashing Koreans far more extensively than other Communist nations brainwashed their citizens. In 1963, a Soviet diplomat in the North called Kim Il Sung’s rule a ”political gestapo.”

At least Kim Il Sung enjoyed some respect within his country for his role as the founder of the North. He also faced some checks, admittedly limited, on his power: unlike Kim Jong Il, he held regular meetings of cadres. But after his father’s death in 1994, Kim Jong Il transformed North Korea from an odious totalitarian regime into something actually worse, ”a Marxist Sun King” state that was ready to oversee an unparalleled orgy of extravagance and absolutism.

Details of that extravagance are drawn from Kim’s former lackeys. ”For all the immense privileges enjoyed by … those who ruled the Soviet Union and China, they did not aspire to a live a life completely alien to their countrymen,” Becker writes. ”They did not show signs of a consuming desire to emulate the tastes of a jet-set billionaire.” Kim does — and he has built a stable of 100 imported limousines, as well as an entourage of women who are trained in ”pleasure groups” to service the leader sexually. Kim imports professional wrestlers from the United States, at a cost of $15 million, to entertain him. And when he decided to build a film industry, he did what Hollywood studio heads could only dream about — kidnapped foreign directors and actors and forced them to work for him. His wine cellars contain more than 10,000 French bottles. He flies in chefs from Italy to prepare pizza. Meanwhile, his people scrounge for edible roots.

Hunger had been a problem under Kim Il Sung. But under Kim Jong Il, Becker writes, it became possibly ”the most devastating famine in history,” with death rates approaching 15 percent of the population, surpassing ”any comparable disaster in the 20th century,” even China’s under Mao. (One of Becker’s previous books was about the famine in China in the late 1950’s and early 60’s.) By some estimates, over three million North Koreans have died, more victims than in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and international agencies are warning that this year may bring particularly serious hunger.

To survive has required tenacity. Koreans are reported even to have murdered children and mixed their flesh with pork to eat. When I have encountered North Korean refugees in Asia, they look barely human — stunted figures with sallow, terrified faces. Some North Koreans have tried to grow their own food, potentially a sign of independent thinking. But for years Kim had them stopped, though he has begun to open the economy slightly in the past three years. Those who protested were sent to an extensive gulag system, which may have resulted in the deaths of one million people. In this internal slave state, Becker suggests, tests of chemical weapons are carried out on prisoners, and pregnant women whose children were tainted with foreign blood have been forced to have abortions. Kim Jong Il has ”resisted adopting every policy that could have brought the misery to a quick end,” Becker says, making ”the suffering he inflicted on an entire people an unparalleled and monstrous crime.”

Despite the famine, and despite some intelligence assessments that his regime was about to collapse, Kim Jong Il has survived in power for over a decade. Becker is strongest in laying blame, accusing the international community of tacitly acquiescing in Kim’s charnel house. United Nations agencies that are supposed to monitor the humanitarian crisis in North Korea have averted their gaze, refusing to confront a host government. They have declined to call the North’s hunger a famine, and allowed Pyongyang to control food aid, all but assuring that it would be channeled to Kim’s associates.

In South Korea, where much of the population does not remember the Korean War, successive governments have shamefully hindered North Korean refugees from fleeing, meanwhile funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to the North. The Clinton administration also provided assistance to Kim, while making human rights a low priority. Kim Jong Il ”obtained enough foreign aid” from the United States and South Korea ”to continue food and goods distribution and maintain the loyalty of core followers,” Becker writes. On the other hand, by often refusing even to deal directly with the North Korea issue and simply hoping for Pyongyang’s collapse, the Bush administration has failed to make any headway at all.

Yet after convincingly demonstrating why North Korean human rights should be as much an issue as North Korean nukes, Becker has only limited policy suggestions to offer readers. He recognizes that removing the Dear Leader by force would be almost impossible — his first chapter contains a detailed war game illustrating the capabilities of Kim’s weaponry. But he also understands that ”when the North Korean crisis is defined as being just about proliferation or restoring the economy, Kim Jong Il has already won,” that any strategy for dealing with Kim Jong Il must try to improve the lives of average North Koreans.

Becker does suggest pushing the United Nations to rethink how it handles states that terrorize their people. But there are other options as well. The United States could step up containment to try to ensure that North Korea can’t sell its weapons to terrorists; and it could make better use of its bully pulpit, highlighting the North’s concentration camps and pressing the South Koreans to open their borders more to North Korean refugees. The Bush administration’s upcoming appointment of a special envoy for North Korean human rights is a good start. The United Nations could make greater efforts to gain access to Korean concentration camps, employing Korean speakers to ferret out information. At the same time American diplomats could work harder to persuade South Korea and China that a breakdown of Kim’s regime would not necessarily cause chaos, indeed, might actually result in greater stability on their borders. For the present, however, Kim Jong Il will remain happily misunderstood.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a special correspondent for The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Posted at 6:12 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
Published: August 5 2005 11:07 | Last updated: August 5 2005 11:07

Yuichiro Miura, the oldest man to reach the top of the world - at the age of 70 years and 222 days, back in 2003 - has legs so thick and muscled that he swings them when he walks, the legacy of a lifetime on skis. He looks a lot younger than his present 72 and is dressed in heavy boots, sports trousers and a light climbing T-shirt. He has a mass of silver hair that frames a tanned face lined with fissures that fan out around his eyes and crevasses that run down his cheeks. He looks weathered and permanent: a cross between Sitting Bull and an Easter Island statue.

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This is one of the most respected faces in Japan. Miura was world speed skiing champion in 1964 and the first man to ski down the country’s sacred Mount Fuji. His father, 101, is still skiing, and his son is a former member of Japan’s Olympic ski squad. In a nation that has seen its economic miracle come and go, and languished in stagnation for a decade and a half, Miura is regarded by the public as a reminder of the traits that made postwar Japan great: endurance, perseverance and triumph over suffering. Yet there is something extremely un-Japanese about him - his individuality and matter-of-fact selfishness, a rarity in a country that encourages the subjugation of the individual. “I don’t yield to the masses,” he says. “I do whatever I want to do, and after that society can treat me as a hero.”

I meet him in his compound, Miura Base Camp, next to a railway line in western Tokyo. He greets me, then sits down abruptly with each hand planted on an enormous leg. With a half smile, he turns to face me. “You do not conquer a mountain,” he says. “It invites you to climb it. The mountains were calling me. It is very important to have this feeling of humility.”

In 1970, Miura organised an expedition to reach a point on Everest 26,000ft high, the South Col, and ski down the 45 to 50-degree ice slope, slowed only by a parachute. The expedition was marred by tragedy when six local porters were crushed by an icefall. Remembering, Miura - in a low voice, looking at the floor - says: “Because I wanted to ski down the mountain those people had to die. In any new adventure there is sacrifice. It happens inevitably if you want to do something new.”

At the South Col he pointed his skis downhill. His speed after six seconds was over 100mph, the parachute opened and he fought to stay in control as he hurtled downwards. But he lost balance as a ski caught a rock and he tumbled towards an enormous crevasse and certain death. “The situation was as bad as it could have been,” he says. “I felt like my heart was coming out of my body. I asked myself what I would be as a reincarnation? I might be part of a star, or a cow in Tibet.”

He careened head-first over an enormous rock ledge, but grabbed his remaining ski and used it to stop, a few feet from death. “For a while I was not sure if I was alive or dead. Then I discovered I was still alive and started thinking what is it that I am alive for? I was reborn as a human being. The mountain was telling me to live again as a human being.”

He had descended 6,600ft - over a vertical mile - in two minutes, and fallen a further 1,320ft. The attempt was filmed: the footage is gripping and intense, described by some as the most exciting skiing film ever shot. Hailed in Japan as a hero, Miura was simultaneously aware that men had died and he nearly lost his own life. “I did not succeed and I did not fail,” he says.

The events of 1970 help to explain why, today, he meanders between the hardness of the professional mountaineer and the poetic ruminations of a man who has had a close brush with death. Shaking his head as if still in disbelief, he agrees: “When you climb Everest, you are experiencing death and this world together. You are treading on the edge of both and you could go either way. It is a luxurious experience.”

Three decades after Everest almost dealt Miura a fatal blow, he successfully reached the summit, laying to rest the ghosts he says had been “calling him” since his Oscar-winning performance. He had conquered a peak that almost killed him. Now, he is planning to do it again in 2008, at the age of 75. “The record has nothing to do with it,” he says. “It is unimportant that I will be 75, I just want to climb it again and test myself.” That said, a 74-year-old Polish climber is hoping to reach the summit later this year.

The subject of death has stalked our meeting in the way it looms over any attempt on Everest. For many climbers, Miura included, it is this closeness to death that gives mountaineering its purity and allure. “If you train hard you bring yourself closer to death,” he says. “When you are in a physically hard position, mentally you enter an inner state of rapture and when you are in that kind of mentality, everything is less scary.”

Asked to analyse his motivation, he is at a loss. So I quote him a passage from one of the earliest books about climbing Everest, written by Francis Younghusband in 1926, in which he said: “Everest is the embodiment of the physical forces of the world against which we pit the spirit of man.” Miura, 72, looks up with the face of an adolescent. “That’s it,” he says. “That’s it

Posted at 5:38 AM · Comments (0)