Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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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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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: June 28, 2007

BEIJING: The Chinese state comes extremely well prepared for one of the key attributes of great-power status: controlling the terms of debate on issues of any consequence.

For decades, the Communist Party has told Chinese people in very direct terms what they can and cannot think. That tradition has softened during the current era of economic opening and fast growth, but the government still enjoys a striking amount of sway over the parameters of discussion of everything from world history to current affairs, defining for the public what is good, bad, right, wrong, true and untrue.

This great thought-orientation machine has been gearing up in recent weeks for a major new challenge, and one that won’t be going away anytime soon. According to a study by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China has just surpassed the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, a year ahead of the earliest projections, putting this country in a position that its propaganda bosses have never been willing to countenance: the role of villain. It doesn’t help that the issue in question, global warming, is one that has the entire world’s attention right now.

According to well established rules of the propaganda game, China, as a nation, must never be at fault. But the ugly fundamentals of environmental degradation here are becoming increasingly obvious and increasingly grave, and for those who must spin the global warming issue, this has all the makings of an immense headache.

The country is becoming a world beater in many things, the less celebrated of which include dirty, high-energy-consuming industries - from steel, which it produces in immense quantities, often from antiquated plants, to cement, of which China produces 40 percent of the world’s output.
Today in Asia - Pacific
Indonesian Islam’s softer hard line
Former Prime Minister Miyazawa of Japan dies at 87
Japan ex-intelligence chief arrested over land deal with pro-North Korea group

China is building one to two coal-fired power plants every week, with plans for more than 500 new ones currently on the books. Even now, the country consumes more of this dirtiest of fossil fuels than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Indeed, China consumes almost as much coal as the rest of the world.

The industrial side of the ledger looks bleak, but as important as it is, it is only one piece of a disturbing picture. The passenger vehicle is in its infancy in China, but it, like so many things here, is growing by leaps and bounds. Each year, seven million new cars hit the road in a country that is enthusiastically mimicking America’s wasteful experience, pushing toward a vision of a country blanketed with highways, with a car in every garage, and with an automobile industry second to none.

Urbanization is a related problem. New and bigger cities are being created at a speed never before seen in human history. The purpose, as in just about everything here, is to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and to create a shot at prosperity for all of the country’s citizens.

It is not hard to sympathize with Chinese planners in this, but that does nothing to suspend questions about the wisdom of their approach or to allay fears about the consequences. As Elizabeth Economy, a leading expert on China’s environmental problem, wrote recently: “With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts.”

So far, Beijing’s message to the world on all of this could be neatly summed up as “bug off.” One could hear this in the voice of Chen Feng, the chairman of Hainan Airlines, who told a panel at the recent World Economic Forum in Singapore that the West deserved the blame for environmental problems, adding pointedly that Westerners were “robbers and bandits before you became right-minded people.”

The substance of the Chinese argument is unassailable. Cumulatively, China, a newcomer to mass industrialization, has contributed far less to global warming than, say, the United States, and even today, on a per capita basis, produces only about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that the rich states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development do.

This line is part of a game of hardball, still in its early innings, that pits China and a loose coalition of developing countries against the already rich and long-polluting West. This game consists of racing as far ahead with the current mode of development as possible and relying on the West to win a “better” deal for China within the framework of a new global agreement on greenhouse gases.

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Posted at 12:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: June 28, 2007

BEIJING: The Chinese state comes extremely well prepared for one of the key attributes of great-power status: controlling the terms of debate on issues of any consequence.

For decades, the Communist Party has told Chinese people in very direct terms what they can and cannot think. That tradition has softened during the current era of economic opening and fast growth, but the government still enjoys a striking amount of sway over the parameters of discussion of everything from world history to current affairs, defining for the public what is good, bad, right, wrong, true and untrue.

This great thought-orientation machine has been gearing up in recent weeks for a major new challenge, and one that won’t be going away anytime soon. According to a study by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China has just surpassed the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, a year ahead of the earliest projections, putting this country in a position that its propaganda bosses have never been willing to countenance: the role of villain. It doesn’t help that the issue in question, global warming, is one that has the entire world’s attention right now.

According to well established rules of the propaganda game, China, as a nation, must never be at fault. But the ugly fundamentals of environmental degradation here are becoming increasingly obvious and increasingly grave, and for those who must spin the global warming issue, this has all the makings of an immense headache.

The country is becoming a world beater in many things, the less celebrated of which include dirty, high-energy-consuming industries - from steel, which it produces in immense quantities, often from antiquated plants, to cement, of which China produces 40 percent of the world’s output.
Today in Asia - Pacific
Indonesian Islam’s softer hard line
Former Prime Minister Miyazawa of Japan dies at 87
Japan ex-intelligence chief arrested over land deal with pro-North Korea group

China is building one to two coal-fired power plants every week, with plans for more than 500 new ones currently on the books. Even now, the country consumes more of this dirtiest of fossil fuels than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Indeed, China consumes almost as much coal as the rest of the world.

The industrial side of the ledger looks bleak, but as important as it is, it is only one piece of a disturbing picture. The passenger vehicle is in its infancy in China, but it, like so many things here, is growing by leaps and bounds. Each year, seven million new cars hit the road in a country that is enthusiastically mimicking America’s wasteful experience, pushing toward a vision of a country blanketed with highways, with a car in every garage, and with an automobile industry second to none.

Urbanization is a related problem. New and bigger cities are being created at a speed never before seen in human history. The purpose, as in just about everything here, is to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and to create a shot at prosperity for all of the country’s citizens.

It is not hard to sympathize with Chinese planners in this, but that does nothing to suspend questions about the wisdom of their approach or to allay fears about the consequences. As Elizabeth Economy, a leading expert on China’s environmental problem, wrote recently: “With plans on the books to urbanize half the Chinese population by 2020, energy consumption will soar. City residents in China use 250 percent more power than their rural counterparts.”

So far, Beijing’s message to the world on all of this could be neatly summed up as “bug off.” One could hear this in the voice of Chen Feng, the chairman of Hainan Airlines, who told a panel at the recent World Economic Forum in Singapore that the West deserved the blame for environmental problems, adding pointedly that Westerners were “robbers and bandits before you became right-minded people.”

The substance of the Chinese argument is unassailable. Cumulatively, China, a newcomer to mass industrialization, has contributed far less to global warming than, say, the United States, and even today, on a per capita basis, produces only about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that the rich states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development do.

This line is part of a game of hardball, still in its early innings, that pits China and a loose coalition of developing countries against the already rich and long-polluting West. This game consists of racing as far ahead with the current mode of development as possible and relying on the West to win a “better” deal for China within the framework of a new global agreement on greenhouse gases.

Posted at 12:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW

Tue 26 Jun 2007

In recent years, two main schools of thought have emerged about how to lift Africa out of its seemingly bottomless descent into war, poverty, and disease. To borrow labels used by the reporter Andrew Rice in an insightful review for the Nation two years ago, two predominant arguments are being advanced: the “governance-first” camp “holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them that way,” and the “poverty-first” camp “believes African governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor.”

Each argument contains its own implicit demand: one puts the onus on Africans to throw out their more-often-than-not corrupt and kleptocratic leaders and find a way to take advantage of the rich resources of the continent to make it prosper. The other looks to the Western world to fulfill a moral responsibility to provide billions of dollars in aid to Africans so that an improved standard of living will lead to stronger and more stable countries.

With the exception of angry and often cruelly written op-eds by one-time Peace Corps volunteer and travel writer Paul Theroux, not much time and space is ever given here in the West to the “governance-first” argument. Mostly, there is one, overwhelming attitude that dominates the way we write and think about Africa in the West: we are the only possible saviors, obligated by our humanity to donate money and urge our government to both increase spending on aid and cancel any debts owned by these poor countries.

This “poverty-first” attitude also fits in nicely with the role that certain celebrities – i.e., Bono — have carved out as representatives of the continent, hoping to prick the conscience of Western leaders. It makes sense. When the guilt for Africa’s many problems lands totally on the West and not on Africa itself, an opportunity opens up for those with money and star power to set themselves up as spokespeople for hundreds of millions of Africans. It’s a precarious role, one that can easily tip over into a paternalistic and condescending tone that’s not that far away from the worldview of colonial powers who saw themselves as engaged in a civilizing mission.

All this as introduction to a look at the current issue of Vanity Fair, its “Africa Issue.”

First — it must be said — good intentions should never be undervalued. When you have a glossy magazine like Vanity Fair, whose existence depends on revenue from ads for expensive products — like the diamond-encrusted Dior watch that appears on the wrist of Sharon Stone on page twenty-five of the “Africa Issue” — it is always a risk to focus on subject matter that is not quite as sexy as, say, a photo shoot that features Scarlett Johansson’s bare bum. When you set yourself the task of capturing the essence of the continent in an issue, you can’t avoid AIDS, you can’t avoid disease, and you can’t avoid child soldiers. None of these are easy sells to the designers and car companies that pay for the magazine’s big bucks production costs.

That caveat out of the way, it’s worth examining how Graydon Carter and his guest editor for the issue – yes, none other than Bono – went about bridging this divide between the style of Vanity Fair and the substance of Africa. It turns out that the “poverty-first” view of Africa’s problems suits their purposes perfectly. With the emphasis on the West’s obligation — on Bono’s role in changing things, and not on some unknown African activist or opposition politician — than the issue can have all the glamour of every other Vanity Fair and still be ostensibly about Africa.

The cover, in a way, tells the story. Together with photographer-to-the-stars, Annie Liebovitz, Carter and Bono conceived of twenty different portraits that would appear on twenty different versions of the cover. According to Liebovitz, the concept was to present a group of people having a “conversation” about Africa. “It’s a visual chain letter,” she said in a note in the issue, “spreading the message from person to person to person.” The people having this conversation include, conveniently, Brad Pitt and Madonna, Oprah and Barack Obama. It’s not clear exactly what the connection of any of these people is to the continent. And, by my count, only three of them are actually from Africa – Desmond Tutu, Djimoun Honsou, and Iman. But the key indicator of what the issue’s character will be is that this a conversation about Africa by a group of well-known celebrities. They are the ones here with agency to tell the story of Africa in Vanity Fair.

What follows inside has much of the same tone. An article about all of humanity’s genetic connection to the continent reveals what the editors think of their task: “The world population that was spawned in Africa now has the power to save it. We are all alive today because of what happened to a small group of hungry Africans around 50,000 years ago. As their good sons and daughters, those of us who left, whether long ago or more recently, surely have a moral imperative to use our gifts to support our cousins who stayed.” Condescension might be too strong a word, but it is shocking to what extent the actual people, the Africans, seem to get totally lost here. They are certainly absent from the big features.

Predictably, there is a long, glowing profile of Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia professor who is the darling of the “poverty-first” crowd, uncritically endorsing his ideas about pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into Africa and breathlessly following him as he jets from village to village dispensing advice. Even more predictably, the piece is illustrated by a photo still from his MTV special with Angelina Jolie. The effect of Bono’s own (red) campaign is detailed in another article, self-congratulatingly titled, “The Lazarus Effect.” By getting companies, like the Gap, to promote products whose sales will go toward providing anti-retroviral drugs for free, the campaign has helped many people with HIV to live longer and healthier.

All good stuff, but the article reads more like an advertisement for Bono’s good works than about the lives of those affected by the disease. William Langweische, the resident narrative master, turns in an expertly told story about a family of Indians in the Congo that have an airplane transport company. He beautifully describes flying around in planes patched together with duct tape, but here again, the people remain small specks on the ground.

The whole concept of the issue seems to be about Westerners telling other Westerners about Africa (à la the cover). Bill Clinton muses about Nelson Mandela. An interesting music festival in the deserts of northern Mali, is described through the diary entries of an MTV executive. A photo portfolio of mostly Western-educated and urban-based Africans is meant to present a new face of the continent, but they are robbed of their own voices and are instead introduced by prominent Westerners, like Dave Eggers, Harry Belafonte, and Damien Hirst. Early in the issue Desmond Tutu is interviewed by, of all people, Brad Pitt.
In fact, an African is the author of only one single article in the issue. And Binyavanga Wainaina’s rambling and seemingly unedited (in an otherwise heavily edited magazine) memories of a changing Kenya do not do justice to the thousands of African writers who could have written so much more eloquently about their homes and their own people (which, by the way, are so diverse that the idea of a monolithic presentation of Africa seems a little silly to begin with).

I’m being harsh, I know. Maybe Vanity Fair is not the forum for Africans to present themselves on their own terms. But it is frustrating to think that what might be some people’s only exposure to Africa can’t come in a form that allows for some authentic voices to emerge, telling the real story of Africans themselves who are struggling to alter their realities, or even simply describing what those realities are, in their own words. One has to wonder: what an impact it would have had had Vanity Fair decided to put an unknown– or even a relatively known – African on their cover instead?
The issue does have a few bright spots. An excellent story about the intense Chinese influence on Africa told me something I did not know. And an overview of African literary stars also exposed me to some writers I’d like to read. But even these articles were written by Westerners. Why didn’t Carter and Bono allow Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (misspelled…should be Adichie), the Nigerian author who’s described here as the new “It girl” of African literature, to tell us about the richness of Nigeria’s literary scene, of the influence of authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka on her own work?

I don’t mean to seem naïve by making these suggestions. I know that Graydon Carter, for all his caring for Africa, needs to think about what sells magazines. But it seems to me that it’s not just a market concern that drove the way the issue was put together. It goes back to that particular understanding about how to salvage Africa, and the popular notion that Westerners alone can do it.
Paul Theroux, in one of those angry op-eds, had a word or two for those who believe that: “Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth.”

I tend to agree with Theroux’s idea if not his tone. The Vanity Fair issue was, I’m sure, born out of good intention. But, in the end, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that what it actually achieves in the end is to convince us of those good intentions. Nothing more. And that, for Africans, both those who desire help and those trying to help themselves, is not even close to enough.

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_obscure_continent.php?page=1

Posted at 12:36 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The London Review of Books

Contrary to their intention, commemorations of historical events are more often reminders of the power of forgetting: either official ceremonies that gradually lose their meaning, becoming public holidays like any other, or gatherings of tiny bands of militants or mourners, whose numbers dwindle to nothing as the years pass. In Los Angeles, you can see both kinds. If you ask people what Memorial Day stands for, virtually no one, not even professors of history, can tell you. As for the other sort, I myself stand every summer with a small band of friends outside the Chinese consulate in downtown Los Angeles, holding placards scarcely anyone notices. But what we commemorate has, unusually, not been forgotten elsewhere. It is now 18 years since soldiers and tanks entered Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Yet every year since then, on the night of 4 June, tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong and, whatever the weather, light candles in memory of what happened then, and those who died as a result of it. I don’t think any other mass commemoration has lasted so long. But what is remembered so powerfully in Hong Kong cannot even be mentioned on the other side of the border that separates the Special Administrative Region from the rest of the People’s Republic of China.

Eighteen years is not a short time; it’s long enough for a baby to become an adult. On 4 June this year, a strange incident occurred. In Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan, a city with a population of 11 million, the small-ads pages of an evening newspaper contained a short item that read: ‘Salute to the steadfast mothers of the 4 June victims.’ The entry was noticed by some readers, scanned and uploaded onto the internet, where it rapidly circulated. The authorities jumped to investigate. Within days, three of the paper’s editors had been fired. How had the wall of silence been breached? The girl in charge of the small ads, born in the 1980s, had called the number given by the person who placed the ad to ask what the date referred to. Told it was a mining disaster, she cleared it. No one had ever spoken to her about 1989. Censorship devours its own children.

The mothers the ad was honouring are a small group of elderly women who have become the symbol of the event the country cannot refer to. Ding Zilin, who organised the women, is now 71. She used to teach Marxist philosophy at the People’s University in Beijing. In 1989, when Tiananmen Square was occupied by thousands of students, her 17-year-old son, who was still at school, got caught up in the movement. On the evening of 3 June, as the atmosphere grew increasingly tense, she feared the boy might join other demonstrators in the streets and locked him in her apartment. He escaped through a bathroom window, and was killed that night, when troops marched into the centre of the city. No one knows how many died alongside him. Government repression has been so complete that the number of victims remains a mystery. When Li Hai, a former activist from Peking University, tried to collect information about them in the early 1990s, he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for ‘leaking state secrets’. Despite constant police harassment and repeated house arrests, Ding persisted in her inquiry, and in 1994 published, in Hong Kong, a verifiable list of victims. Every year the list has expanded, and it now has 186 names. More and more people who lost family members have gathered around Ding. Inspired by the example of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, and with help from human rights activists in Hong Kong, Ding and her friends some time ago named themselves the Tiananmen Mothers. Actually, the group also includes fathers, wives and husbands of those who were killed, as well as some of those who were injured during the repression. Qi Zhiyong, a worker, lost a leg from a bullet wound near Tiananmen. For trying to get redress and compensation, he has repeatedly been beaten by police thugs in his home; this year he was put under precautionary arrest before 4 June, and only released when the anniversary was over. His case is typical.

The government’s fears are not irrational. Over six weeks, what began as a student demonstration became a national political crisis, in which the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of power was seriously challenged for the first time since the foundation of the People’s Republic. The government resolved the crisis by ordering regular troops, brought in from the provinces, to enforce martial law in Beijing, even at the cost of opening fire on the crowds and rolling tanks over peaceful protesters in order to seize control of Tiananmen Square, the most powerful symbolic space in modern China. For a whole week after the first gunshot, not a single political leader came out to face the nation, leaving the capital in the control of a professional army, a situation Beijing had not seen since the Allied Expedition against the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

With Deng Xiaoping’s decision to crush the demonstrations the Party recovered its monopoly of power, but not its legitimacy or its authority. To fill the ideological void Deng set China on an accelerated path of economic change, announced to the nation by a speech in the southern city of Shenzhen in the spring of 1992, and expressed in the message ‘to get rich is glorious.’ Plastered on billboards across the country, the Party’s new slogan dismissed any possibility of discussion of ideas or principles, proclaiming simply: ‘Development is the Irrefutable Argument.’ Fifteen years later, China is the industrial wonder of the world. The average standard of living has improved, poverty has been reduced, urbanisation has exploded, exports and financial reserves are sky-high. Abroad, admiration for the People’s Republic has never been higher. National prosperity and pride typically go together. With such achievements to boast of, why should the Communist Party still be so fearful of something that happened an epoch ago? Why does it go to such lengths to distort and repress the past, and where it is unable to erase people’s memories entirely, why does it try to portray the demonstrations of 1989 as senseless turmoil and the movement’s activists as conspiring tricksters? But the real question is this: what was the conviction that led the protesters to stand up to the military machine?

Two opposing interpretations of the movement of 1989 have gained ground, mainly in the West but also to some extent in China. The first is socio-economic. In early 1988, the government pushed forcefully to free prices, but the inflation that followed provoked such strong reactions throughout the country that it was compelled to reinstitute food rationing in the big cities in January 1989. Some American scholars have argued that this was a factor in the massive social unrest that manifested itself in the spring of 1989. In China itself, thinkers on the New Left have taken this argument a step further, seeing the military crackdown of 4 June as essentially paving the way for the marketisation of the economy, by breaking resistance to the lifting of price controls (they were removed again, this time successfully, in the early 1990s). According to this view, the driving force behind the mass movement, even its inspiration, was the refusal of reforms that would deprive the population of established standards of collective welfare. What the gunshots in Beijing shattered were the last hopes for the ‘iron rice bowl’ of socialism, clearing the way to a fully-fledged capitalism in China.

Another school of thought turns this argument upside down. In this account, the mass movement, far from clinging to the socialist past, looked boldly ahead to a liberal future. The growing number of banners written in English, and the styrofoam statue of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, modelled partly on the Statue of Liberty, erected on Tiananmen in the last days of May, all show that America was the demonstrators’ real dream: not the iron rice bowl, but the market and the ballot box. Last month, George Bush presided over the erection in Washington of a monument to the Victims of Communism, in the form of a scaled-down bronze replica of the styrofoam goddess.

It is true that socio-economic discontent, especially following on the rapid inflation of the summer of 1988, played an important role in generating support for the student protests of the next year. But these economic grievances were unambiguously transformed into political protests in the movement of 1989. Their target was the way Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang, then secretary-general of the Communist Party, ruled the country. Particularly powerful in mobilising protest was Zhao’s description of his reforms as ‘crossing a river by stepping one by one on stones under the water’. If all you can do is test the stability of unseen stones on the riverbed, what entitles you to a monopoly over policy-making? Why should we wait while you pick your way through the current, now and then finding yourself on the right stone, and letting us drown when you step on the wrong one? That was more or less the feeling of the movement. The economic slogans of 1989 were mostly attacks on past policies that had gone wrong, and especially on corruption among high officials. But these never took the form of specific economic demands, nor did any demands of that kind come into the many attempts at ‘dialogue’ – i.e. negotiations – between protesters and officials, before talks finally broke down. What dominated were unequivocally political demands for freedom of speech, civil rights and citizen participation.

As for the movement’s ideology, one must remember that this huge social upheaval erupted very quickly. When a hunger strike among the students put pressure on the government in mid-May, the news media, including the People’s Daily, enjoyed a week of press freedom unprecedented in the history of the PRC. On the streets people from the most varied social backgrounds were suddenly able to voice their ideas and debate among themselves. In the ensuing hubbub, it was easy to overinterpret a few isolated symbols. Popular imaginings of America are an example. A highly abstract idea of the US, based on very little knowledge, became one of the vehicles – a shell, if you like – in which people’s imaginative energy was invested. This shell was filled, however, with understandings – and critical reflections – based on life in the socialist, or semi-socialist, society of the previous decades. Socialist discourse and notions of an idealised America were mixed together in people’s minds. This can be a disappointment for today’s intellectuals, who occupy much more clear-cut ideological positions, liberal or leftist. Yet below the Goddess of Democracy, armbands on the picket line were red. The historical significance of the upheaval of 1989 in Beijing does not lie in one paradigm or another, espoused by this or that spokesman or leader. It lies in the space the movement opened up for creative imagination and the opportunities it offered for experiment. The focus was always on the right of citizens to participate in the public life of the country, and the channels that would enable them to do so.

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Posted at 12:27 AM · Comments (0)

From “The Bund” newspaper’s feature about my work.

　　记录一座变化中的城市

　　作为一名资深记者，Howard French反复要求记者在采访过程中记录下他的每一句话。“你必须用我的原话。”他强调说。在看待这个世界的其余方面时，这位摄影爱好者也抱有同样坚决、明确和自信得近乎固执的观点。例如，在他作为《纽约时报》上海分社社长在上海生活的3年多时间里，他坚持用自己的眼光拍摄心目中最珍贵的城市即景，即便在他人眼中，这些并非上海的精华。文/许佳　图片提供 /Howard W. French　图片编辑/金婕

　　2006 年夏天，一个非常炎热的傍晚，方浜路上低矮房子里的居民们，照例从室内搬出小桌小凳，坐在上街沿边吃晚饭。在这些露天纳凉的人当中，有个寻常的三口之家，小男孩正赤着上身坐在板凳上。面前的饭食引不起他的兴趣，令他感到为难。

　　高温加上不肯吃饭的小孩，使得一旁的年轻母亲急躁起来。她端起碗，向儿子高声吐出一连串训斥。小男孩不知如何辩解，他明白面前这碗引不起食欲的饭必须要吃下去，又发觉邻居正在近处饶有兴致地注视着这一幕，因而郁郁不乐地垂下了脑袋。

　　进食的难题是如此困扰着他，以至于直到快门按下的一刻，他才刚刚抬起头来，注意到面前不远处正单膝跪在他们面前地上、手举相机的一个外国人。

　　Howard French 使用的相机是Rolleiflex 2.8。因为不能调焦，所以当他从中华路拐进方浜路，远远看见这个三口之家的时候，他必须悄悄靠近，以达到理想的拍摄距离。“在拍摄时，我不希望人们意识到我的存在，”French 说，“我不需要他们‘向外国人摆姿势’。”

　　他尽可能不被察觉地走到很近的位置，单膝跪地，按下快门——就在这一刻，那个小男孩才刚抬起头注意到他。“有人在拍我们。”这可能就是小男孩向正训斥自己的妈妈说的话。

　　“我感到自己像是一场亲密的古老仪式中的贵客。”在为《纽约时报》撰写的文章《局外人的相机，秘密世界的入场券》(An Outsider’s CameraProvides a Ticket Into a Secret World)中，French 这样描述自己穿梭于上海旧城区大街小巷、拍摄本地人生活场景的感受。方浜路上这个三口之家的晚餐场面，成为了他的摄影集《消失中的上海》 (Disappearing Shanghai)的封面图。在这本画册中，French 向我们展示了一个令他着迷的上海。

　　“上海城里的大多数地方我都去过”

　　“上海城里的大多数地方我都去过，我对中心市区很熟悉。”HowardFrench 自信对这座城市有着广泛的了解。自从2004 年开始担任《纽约时报》驻上海分社社长的职务之后，他就一直带着相机在城市各处探索。在《局外人的相机，秘密世界的入场券》开头，他写道：“我仍清楚记得在上海第一年的那些时刻—下午晚些时候，这个城市独特的美仿佛被黄昏澄澈的光线过滤了一般，变得纯净起来。”

　　就像许多生活在上海的外国人一样，French 选择旧法租界作为自己的居住地。他在永嘉路附近买了一栋房子，宣称：“我住在一个所有邻居都是中国人的地方。”说到与社区中其他人的关系，他简单地形容为 “友好，但不常交谈”。有趣的是，在他拍摄的照片中根本不出现他自己居住的社区。“我不知道为什么，”他说，“也许 .天都会看到的东西，就会不想拍吧。”

　　作为《纽约时报》的外派记者，French 曾经在五大洲的100 多个国家采访工作过。海外从业对他而言就是日常生活。在来上海之前，他的工作地点是东京。而在任何地方，他都会带着自己的相机到城里漫游。French 保留着步行上下班的习惯，在工作之余，他的唯一消遣就是前往山西路、中华路、方浜路、董家渡路和天潼路这些他钟爱的马路，为自己的镜头寻找目标。“我不爱购物，也不喜欢去酒吧。我每天的工作很忙，除此之外，拍照对我而言就足够有趣了—我为什么要去寻找别的乐趣呢？”

　　在French 的照片中，各色各样的人总是主体—光顾排档的、饥肠辘辘的人，吃着一支粉色棉花糖过马路的小男孩，在街心摆黄鱼车卖蘑菇的小贩，坐在弄堂口聊天的人，在路口等待通行的骑车人，这些人物全部拍摄于上海的一些陈旧的，甚至可称为破败的区域，比如山西路和方浜路。在这些区域里分隔出一条条幽深里弄的房屋，并不是如今被热炒的老洋房，也不是典型意义上的上海传统建筑石库门，而是从1920 年代开始就陆续建造起来，并且因为人世变迁而住进了越来越多居民，因而也变得越来越面目全非。

　　“我最爱去正在被毁坏、逐渐消失的区域。”French 说。“我只问他们，这个地方就要消失了，你怎么看？”

　　在2007 年6 月16 日出版的《金融时报》上，记者Geoff Dyer 撰文写道：“为了给数千玻璃幕墙的摩天大楼让路，成群老建筑被扫平，其中一些具有相当可观的历史价值。批评者认为，在这个过程中，城市将失去社区和街道生活，而这正是城市活力的源头。”

　　French对山西路上那些不带电梯的两层公寓非常感兴趣，他称这种独特结构是“数百万前来工厂打工赚钱的移民为了适应随着领取薪酬而来的新的生活方式而建造的”，是“工人阶级的社区”。由于年代久远，许多这里的原住民已经搬离，新的外来者住了进来。French认识的一些上海人问他：“你为什么关心这些地方？他们不是上海人。”对此，他的回答是：“我不关心这个。上海人本来也是从别的地方来的。你们说的差别没意义。”

　　这些老旧地段的“里弄生活”深深吸引着French。他不仅拍摄这里的居民，还同他们聊天。“我对这些人很熟悉，恐怕比很多上海人还熟悉。”他说，“对于拆迁，每个人的想法都不同，很矛盾，并不是‘改善生活环境’那么简单。”这些面临翻天覆地的变化的居民，几乎每个人都愿意对French 说两句。有的人说：“我们没有好的环境，没有卫生间，没有足够的空间。”有的则说：“我不愿意跟这里的那么多人分开。”还有人说：“我不想搬到浦东那么远。”对于从小生长在上海的人而言，这都是再自然不过的想法。而对于一个外国人，它则带有新鲜的意味。作为新闻记者的French 感兴趣的是一个正在变化的城市，和这个城市中一些正在消失的历史。

　　由于工作的关系，French 去过中国的许多城市，且这些城市与普通外国旅游者的目的地不一样。然而在所有城市当中，他最感兴趣的还是上海。他强烈排斥所谓的“旧上海情结”：“我拍摄这些照片，不是因为我对旧上海有什么浪漫的想象。一般人概念里的那种‘典型外国人’形象是一派胡言。我对这个改变中的城市感兴趣——本能地有兴趣。”

　　“你每天过自己的生活。早上出门，晚上回家。你不认识周围的人。”French 这样描述在上海，以及在全国各地正如雨后春笋般冒出来的新式小区居民。“上海正在改变。可能你们拥有更好的生活环境，但却失去了自己的社区文化。当旧的社区消失时，旧的上海也没有了。”对于不同的人，这个结果有不同的意义。对于French 来说，这意味着“上海不再像原本那样特殊。”

　　不过，在与居民们交谈和拍摄他们的过程中，French 不常流露出自己的看法。“我不会告诉他们‘笑’或者‘表现得悲伤些’。我只问他们，这个地方就要消失了，你怎么看？”

　　《消失中的上海》在加州大学伯克利分校展出时，曾经惹来一些中国
留学生的不满。他们向French 提问说：“你为什么要拍这些？”他则简单答道：“难道这不是上海吗？”

　　类似的问题曾经很多次出现。而French 站在个人的角度作出的回答总是：“作为一个艺术家，我只想拍普通人的生活，想拍一些不同的东西。”他也会在南京路上拍摄路人，因为“人永远是有意思的”。不过与此同时，他坦率地说：“我是从纽约来的，南京路对我而言并不特别。”他坚持自己所记录的是大多数上海人的生活。

　　French 在上海的朋友全都是中国人，其中也有许多城市中的精英。但是在他看来，“他们的生活没什么特别之处”。通过对老社区的探寻，他找到了一段“比乘坐时光机器回到过去更为逼真”的岁月，因而也成为了这座城市正在发生的一切改变的亲历者。

　　面对如此巨大而迅速的变化，每个人都抱有复杂的感受。城市本身的生命力使一切评论都成为徒劳。我们所能做的唯有经历和记录。

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I am just getting around to reading Coetzee for the first time. Sat down with this novel at lunch, and read half of it in one go. It’s slim, don’t worry, but it’s also got a subterranean pull that made it almost impossible to put aside. How often do you find literature like that? Not often enough, that’s for sure.
Coetzee draws you into the life of a middle aged college professor, a lonely divorcee who loves women and begins making a series of fatefully bad decisions involving them. I’ll leave it that. Someone blurbed the book likening Coetzee to Camus. I scoffed. That’s still a pretty tall order, but even after a couple of chapters you know you are in that realm.

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The Shanghai weekly that goes by the name The Bund in English (外滩 画报 or Wai Tan Hua Bao in Chinese) ran a cover story in their Lifestyle section on my Disappearing Shanghai work in their editions of June 28.
It is a five-page spread, in all, with nine of my images, including two full-page reproductions.
The paper also ran an extensive interview with the photos. It’s not online, though, so I can’t share this here. This comes on the heels of the Berlin magazine Tip’s publication of some my Shanghai images.
All of the images can be seen on my new website. Click to visit the site.

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[Editor’s note: As much as I admire Federer’s game, I have problems with the efforts, thus far premature, to coronate him as the greatest ever. I suspect I’ll continue to feel that way even if, or as is likely when, he surpasses Sampras’s tally of Slam titles.
The reason is no fault of Federer’s, but it lingers nonetheless: competition.
There is simply no comparing the caliber of the elite players faced by Sampras (or Borg, and arguably Laver, for that matter) with the crowd at the top of the game today. Just think who Sampras contended with: Agassi, Rafter, Courier, Wilander, Becker, Edberg, Chang, and even in-form Safins and Hewitts, and this list is not exhaustive. Kuper’s piece makes the case very nicely what a different era we’re operating in.]

June 23 2007
Copyright The Financial Times
I have some sense of what watching the men’s tournament at Wimbledon will be like this next fortnight, because I recently tried watching the men at the French Open.

You arrive at a match well-intentioned. Two brilliant players appear, each of whom has lived off steamed broccoli and sacrificed his life to tennis since the age of two. They begin blamming away, harder and better than any legends of the past. And minutes into their four-hour extravaganza your thoughts drift to lunch, always the day’s signature event in Paris. You know the match is irrelevant, because either Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal wins every grand-slam tournament anyway.

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This Wimbledon, busy fans can save time by watching only one men’s match: the Federer-Nadal final. But do catch that one, because during it the balance of power in male tennis may shift, from the Swiss to the Mallorcan.

Since 2005 we have lived in extraordinary times. In Federer, we have possibly the best male player ever; in Nadal, possibly the best clay-court player ever. Like the US and USSR in the cold war, they have divided the world between them. Nadal has ruled European clay courts, including the French Open. Federer got the rest of the world, notably Wimbledon, and the US and Australian Opens.

Between them, Federer and Nadal have won the last nine grand-slam tournaments. No two men have so dominated tennis since the Open era began in 1968. Even Pete Sampras, the previous most dominant male player in history, was less omnipotent.

“Not long ago I was surfing the internet,” says Nadal. “I compared the points of Federer and Sampras” - that is, the rankings points they earned playing tournaments. “Sampras was number one with about 5,500 points. Federer has 7,500. That’s an enormous difference.” Nadal himself, currently on 5,225 points, may soon outstrip Sampras.

No other male players really exist anymore. Take the Russian Nikolai Davydenko, a fantastic player, currently fourth-best in the world. When he reached the quarter-final at the French Open, someone pointed out to him that to win the tournament, he would now have to beat Guillermo Cañas, Federer and Nadal.

“Listen,” replied Davydenko, “If I beat those guys, I’ll quit tennis next Sunday. I won’t even just quit, I’ll die.”

Predictably, Davydenko lost in straight sets to Federer. He thus joined the “nine-zero club” of luminaries who have lost nine consecutive matches to the Swiss. The club’s other members include Andy Roddick (the world’s number three) and Lleyton Hewitt (number one before Federer arrived). For these players, the question applies that an apocryphal child once asked about Randolph Churchill: “Mama, what is that man for?”

Tennis crowds, although notoriously ill-informed about the game, are starting to grasp the pointlessness of almost all men’s tennis, as witness the banks of empty seats on centre court in Paris before the final.

The British media bang on about Andy Murray, the Scot ranked eighth in the world, but in truth the only story in men’s tennis is Federer versus Nadal. Probably not since Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe has male tennis had a rivalry between two such brilliant performers. Rivalries, ideally featuring players whose personalities can be distilled into cartoon versions, give tennis some of the appeal of Tom and Jerry. Would Borg (“The Iceman”) catch McEnroe (“Superbrat”) this time, or have his hair set on fire?

The obvious dynamic between Federer and Nadal is older brother versus younger brother. Whereas Nadal plays in clubbers’ gear, Federer dresses as if for a Sunday round-robin at a suburban Basle club. Federer plays in old-fashioned silence, while Nadal is all grunts and cheers. Off court, Nadal is giggly and vague, Federer stern and precise in three languages. Nadal is a kid, Federer a Roman emperor. Ideally there would also be an element of “goodie” against “baddie”, but unfortunately they are both nice guys.

The one thing lacking in their rivalry is great tennis. Whereas McEnroe and Borg brought out the best in each other, Federer usually disappoints against Nadal. “He wears you down,” Federer said after losing in Paris. “He’s the kind of a guy who makes you miss, so you can never say you played really well against him.”

This summer their rivalry should climax. Their Yalta-style division of the world seems about to break down. In Paris, Nadal showed he has all the tools to beat Federer on any surface. His “heavy” forehand shots are already legendary, but his serve has improved over the last year, and he makes as few errors on a tennis court as is given to a human. Admittedly, he won a mere 16 of the 17 break-points in the French Open final, but he is only 21 and will improve.

Nadal may not win Wimbledon, because growing up he got about as much experience on grass as the average fish. On the other hand, last year he reached the final. Certainly he ought to win one of the next three grand-slams on Federer’s turf. If that happens, all other male players might as well retire.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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A friend in Shanghai asked me how I can bear to listen to the kinds of music I am drawn to. “It’s so serious. It’s so heavy. It’s so sad….”
I beg your pardon, young lady.

I was listening to Billie Holiday tonight, singing the Kurt Weil/Ogden Nash classic, “Speak Low,” after a sweltering day on the streets taking pictures that ended in a diluvian downfall - pardon the neologism. Billie didn’t write this song, but if you’ve ever heard her sing it, you know she owns it

Here are the lyrics:

Speak low when you speak, love
Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak, love
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we’re swept apart, too soon
Speak low, darling, speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon
I feel wherever I go that tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon
Time is so old and love so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief
We’re late, darling, we’re late
The curtain descends, ev’rything ends too soon, too soon
I wait, darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Letter from Africa

By Howard W. French
Thursday, June 21, 2007

LILONGWE, Malawi: The world is getting smaller all the time.

Information, placed at our fingertips by technology, is driving massive and accelerating change. With the spread of increasingly cheap, near-universal telephone access, the day is near when no one is more than a phone call away.

These are some of the most optimistic and ubiquitous clichés of globalization, assumptions that many of us take as a simple matter of faith. Life in this city provides a vivid illustration of the fact, however, that in Africa, the globalization of our imagination is just that - an imagined thing.

There are many nice things one can say about Malawi, beginning with the fact that it is a stable democracy that has peacefully managed political succession since 1994. What cannot be said with confidence is that this out-of-the-way country in southern Africa has hitched itself to the broader current of change sweeping the world. And while some may celebrate the persistence of quaint backwaters like this, for an Africa that is falling behind the rest of the world, insularity only compounds matters.

Many observers have noted that in 1960, at the peak of the independence era, the better-off African countries - places like Ghana, to name one - were as wealthy as East Asian counterparts like South Korea.

All manner of analyses, whether economic or political, have been proffered to try to explain why these two countries and their respective regions have diverged so sharply. Failed industrial policies, low savings rates and excessively large states with corrupt and heavily managed enterprises have all been advanced as reasons for Africa’s failings.

Other more basic possibilities, perhaps even more important than classic explanations like these, tend to be overlooked, but after only a couple of days in Malawi, it became hard to understand how that could be.

This feeling began with my search for a bookstore and the subsequent discovery - yes, I know it is hard to believe - that there is nothing quite deserving of the name, even here, in the capital of this country of 13 million.

I asked and asked again, at my hotel, among local teachers and among expatriates alike, and I kept getting directed to the same wan little store, the Maneno Bookshop, which in reality is a stationery store on the main commercial strip here that deals in a couple of dozen textbook titles - “Tutorials of Anesthesia,” was one - and not enough fiction to fill a single, small shelf.

Later, I went to the two international-style hotels in the city, and discovered that international periodicals are no easier to come by in this country.

Access to books in Malawi seems to be limited to two routes: attendance at churches, which are abundant here, and which provide religious reading material to their members, or attendance at one of the highly elitist private academies, like the Kamuzu Academy. There, the lucky few have access to a library stocked with 25,000 volumes, including a large Webster’s Dictionary signed by Ronald Reagan as a gift to the school.

This discussion of globalization and its sputtering failure in Africa might very well have begun with the Internet, access to which is treated like a rare and expensive privilege in country after country in the world’s poorest continent. In Ethiopia, Malawi and Chad, I sat in Internet cafés, paying by the minute at rates which would be considered impossibly expensive by most of the citizens of these countries, and was sometimes exorbitant even by the standards of a Westerner’s purse.

Ditto for mobile phones, which are indeed spreading rapidly on the continent, but are still so costly that they have only a fraction of their potential impact in connecting people to each other and to the outside world.

There is something much more fundamental, however, which needs to be addressed first. Africa is paying a painfully high price for its failure to educate its people. Of course this means a failure to bring down illiteracy rates in the poorest of its countries. Take Mali, for example, where only roughly 19 percent of adults are literate, according to the United Nations Development Program, and where learning to read is heavily skewed toward males. What sort of long-term development is possible in such a barren landscape?

In many other African countries, reading rates may be substantially higher. They rise to 64 percent in Malawi. But the promise inherent in globalization involves more than simply being able to read. It requires actual reading, of a rich and constantly renewed variety of material, of science and technology, of the arts, of current affairs and of history. Yet for the overwhelming majority of Africans in whatever country they may find themselves, the choices remain appallingly few.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
June 18, 2007

SHANGHAI: When stories of hundreds of people being forced to work under slavelike conditions in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province burst forth in the Chinese news media last week, many readers were horrified by a picture of their country that they hardly recognized.

Most shocking of all was the fact that a great many of the workers were children, in a country where employment in factories under the age of 16 is illegal. According to the reports they made, many of the children had been kidnapped, held against their will and forced to work unusually long hours under brutal conditions.

After the torrid initial burst of news reports, the government, through the Central Office of External Communication of the Communist Party, instructed the news media to stop reporting “harmful information that uses this event to attack the party and the government,” China Digital Times reported.

The arrest Saturday of Heng Tinghan, the manager of a factory where one enslaved worker had died and 31 others had been rescued - and the closest thing in this story to an official villain - seemed to assure an early end to coverage.

However reprehensible, in some ways, the words attributed to Heng by a newspaper in Hubei Province, where he was caught, are the most revealing comments yet about this scandal of worker abuse and the exploitation of minors.
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“I felt it was a fairly small thing, just hitting and swearing at the workers and not giving them wages,” Heng said, according to The Shiyan Evening News. “The dead man had nothing to do with me.”

Under President Hu Jintao, the Communist Party has made the creation of what it calls a harmonious society one of the government’s main tenets, and as part of that effort, in fact, a major revision of laws governing the rights of children took effect just this month. The reality on the ground here, however, is often far closer to Heng’s world than it is to the government’s vision of things, with working conditions in many areas approaching what might be called brutal capitalism.

From the densely packed factory zones of Guangdong Province to the street markets, kitchens and brothels of major cities, to the primitive factories of China’s relatively poor western provinces, child labor is a daily fact of life and one to which the government typically turns a blind eye.

“In order to achieve modernization, people will go to any ends to earn money, to advance their interests, leaving behind morality, humanity and even a little bit of compassion, let alone the law or regulations, which are poorly implemented,” said Hu Jindou, a professor of economics at Beijing University of Technology. “Everything is about the economy now, just like everything was about politics in the Mao era, and forced labor or child labor is far from an isolated phenomenon. It is rooted deeply in today’s reality, a combination of capitalism, socialism, feudalism and slavery.”

Indeed, even if conditions at Heng’s brick kiln were considered unusually harsh, experts said that the withholding of pay or otherwise cheating minors, and holding them and forcing them to work against their will, were commonplace.

In the same week that the Shanxi Province kiln factory horrors were revealed, child labor abuse of an entirely different sort emerged, illustrating how widespread such practices are and how government attitudes make them all but impossible to suppress.

This story began with reports in a Guangdong newspaper, where junior high school students from faraway Sichuan Province complained that they were being abused through a work-study program that supplied young workers from western China to an electronics assembly plant in the southeastern industrial boomtown of Dongguan, where labor shortages are common, as a form of compensation for their school fees.

Students complained that they worked 14-hour days, including mandatory overtime, and that their money was withheld from them. In some instances, those who wished to quit the program had no way of telephoning their families or paying for transportation home.

Zhang Ronghua, the mother of one of the Sichuan students, described her 15-year-old daughter’s situation in an interview by telephone. “My daughter promised to call every week, but she’s been gone for three weeks and has only called once,” Zhang said. “She said that she wants to come home, that she’s worked from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. and that she’s constantly busy and tired.”

A moment later, the mother added, “If it wasn’t because we couldn’t afford her tuition, I would never have allowed her to go.”

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Copyright - The Nation

In 1967, when Time magazine managed to get an Australian reporter by the name of John Cantwell into mainland China, his dispatch read like what a report from North Korea—or from another planet—would look like today. “Red Guards march around in vigilante groups, stern-faced and forbidding…. I saw them surround and berate an old man who dared look at an anti-Mao poster…. Hostile crowds sometimes surrounded me, and people shouted: ‘What are you doing here, white devil?’” A delicate beauty from the Chinese travel service informed him, “Chairman Mao has taught us that we must crush the American aggressors. We must kill, crush, destroy all imperialist monsters.” “Practically no one smiles,” Cantwell wrote. Good thing, readers might have concluded, we were fighting a war in Vietnam to contain these lunatics.

A scant forty-two months later, America was introduced to a China where everyone smiled. American Ping-Pong players, invited on a surprise visit in April 1971, received hospitality so overwhelming a team member started crying. One player, Tim Boggan, reporting back in an article for the New York Times, affectionately described a “large playground where perhaps 200 children of all ages were playing soccer, basketball, and other sports,” the kind of camaraderie he said he’d like to see more of in the United States. Less than a year after that, on Richard Nixon’s historic visit, the nation saw this busy, happy, industrious people for themselves on TV: families picnicking at the Ming Tombs; a chef at the Peking Hotel transforming a turnip into a chrysanthemum for the First Lady; Pat Nixon, fetching in a white lab coat, cheered by the adorable moppets at Peking Children’s Hospital.

Study the tourist snaps on Flickr.com from the Ming Tombs, the Great Wall, all the stops on the Nixons’ itinerary: America’s China is now the place where everyone smiles. One typical stop for upper-middle-class tourists on tightly scripted itineraries even recalls Tim Boggan at the playground and Mrs. Nixon at the children’s hospital: the Shanghai Children’s Palace, a lovely old mansion where adorable children dance ballet, play accordions, learn computer programming, practice Chinese opera. An affluent American couple I talked with upon their return from China rhapsodized about it, gushing that every child in this nation of 1.3 billion—this they had been given to understand by their guide—is provided such opportunities free. It seemed, I responded, better than anything a typical American child can expect. “A lot better,” the wife responded. I pressed; she allowed some skepticism to creep into her voice: “It’s possible they made it look better than it was.” No such skepticism, though, when the subject turned to their tour of the site of the Three Gorges Dam, which soon will cause the Yangtze River reservoir to rise to 175 meters over sea level. “It’s going to solve a lot of their problems,” the husband gushed, noting the high-rises being built to house the million exiles who will be displaced, who now live in “shacks like you wouldn’t believe.” “They’re really on the cusp of an economic revolution.”

CONTINUED BELOW
This man, retired after many decades building a successful business in the Midwest, is a car nut who long ago became dismayed by, then resigned to, the slow decline of American industrial dominance. He didn’t see any American cars on China’s newly teeming roads; China, he pointed out, is “going to start exporting cars to the US in the next few years.” He couldn’t imagine America building a Three Gorges Dam. That was for the Chinas of the world—civilizations of destiny.

This capitalist sounded like the kind of pilgrim who used to visit Soviet steel mills, or cut sugar cane beside Cuban peasants, and returned singing panegyrics to a new, better world being born.

Mission accomplished, you could imagine China’s commissars murmuring. China still has commissars, it’s easy to forget; it is still run, James Mann reminds us in his striking little hand grenade of a book The China Fantasy, “by a Communist Party governed, in hierarchical ascending circles, by a Central Committee, a Politburo, and a Standing Committee of the Politburo.” They still do what commissars do. That’s the point of Mann’s book.

My tourist retirees visited Tiananmen Square. Good American innocents abroad, they asked their guide about the event that made it familiar to them. “He wouldn’t answer questions. He didn’t want to talk about it.” Few American visitors come back better informed than before they arrived about the hundreds (thousands? we will never know) massacred in the democracy demonstrations of 1989; or the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Chinese jails at any given time (some for the “crime,” officially stricken from the books, of “counterrevolution”); or the dozens of criminals killed every day by the state (by one count there were 12,000 executions in China in 2005); or the hundreds of antigovernment protests in rural China. Or, say, about the retired military doctor Jiang Yanyong, who in 2003 became a national hero and international symbol of China’s strides toward democracy for publicizing the SARS epidemic and who, a year later, was thrown in jail for criticizing the Tiananmen massacre.

Those who return no better informed about this record than when they arrived include, it would appear, tourists who should know better. Nicholas Kristof dishonored the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre in 2004, Mann points out, with a column titled “The Tiananmen Victory.” The democracy activists had won: “After the Chinese could watch Eddie Murphy, wear tight pink dresses and struggle over what to order at Starbucks, the revolution was finished. No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.”

There haven’t been any multiparty ballots for China’s middle class to mark yet. And there won’t be, Mann argues in an elegant formulation: The urban middle class is “a tiny proportion of the country’s overall population,” and in any election candidates representing their interests would be swamped by those of the peasantry; thus it is just as easy, or easier, to imagine them as “a driving force in opposition to democracy.”

That’s not what you used to hear from Bill Clinton. He claimed that with the rise of market economics, and the exploding middle class these reforms have wrought, the road to Chinese democracy was smooth: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty,” he said in 1997. “And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy…. Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”

No, wait. That was George W. Bush, in his November 1999 opening foreign policy address. This one is from William J. Clinton: Trade with China, he told President Jiang Zemin, will “increase the spirit of liberty over time…. I just think it’s inevitable, just as inevitably the Berlin wall fell.”

Clinton’s NSC head, Sandy Berger, said in 2000 that “there is an unstoppable momentum” toward democracy in China.

No, wait. That was Tony Blair in 2005. Berger said, “Just as NAFTA membership eroded the economic base of one-party rule in Mexico, WTO membership…can help do the same in China.”

China has become rather like Israel: No matter the party, no matter the leader, certain de rigueur formulas must be uttered. Mann strips the hustle bare: “Every single American president since Nixon has, in one way or another, either ignored or quietly given up on the issue of Chinese democracy.” Since this abandonment has been hemmed around by strenuous presidential representations that democracy is precisely what American policy toward China is all about, this has required some fancy ideological footwork. Mann lays out the steps. He says that the apostle of human rights, President Carter, made the second breakthrough, after Nixon’s: He came up with the rationalization that whatever the abuses evident in the 1970s, the situation was much better than it had been during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Ronald Reagan, President during Deng Xiaoping’s first moves toward market liberalization, was able via that patented Reagan magic to explain away China’s Leninist state with a verbal wave of the hand: He referred to the People’s Republic as “so-called Communist China.” “Mr. Deng, keep up this wall!”

The first President Bush was presented with an irritant: that inconvenient 1989 massacre, the same year citizens staged democracy demonstrations in East Germany, where, on the orders of a weak and intimidated Kremlin, the army stepped aside. Incredibly, this became the excuse to downplay Tiananmen: The cold war was over. What was the point of undue hostility? Bush 41 promptly announced a “comprehensive policy of engagement,” making it the United States’ priority to restore the $2 billion in interest-free loans the World Bank had withheld from China in punishment. It was Clinton who “managed to turn black into white and white into black—to persuade Americans that it was somehow politically progressive and intellectually sophisticated to accept Chinese repression and uncouth or unenlightened to attempt to combat it.” He revoked his own executive order on trade sanctions, written to honor his campaign promise of “an America that will not coddle dictators, from Baghdad to Beijing.” “Why bother to protest a crackdown or urge China to allow political opposition,” Mann archly concludes, “if you know that democracy’s coming anyway by the inexorable laws of history?”

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If Monk could sing, this is what he might have sounded like. Oh my, Abbey has got soul, and chops and smarts - this is above all music for the mind, so well is everything here conceived. And if that conveys even a little hint of coldness, banish the thought. You’ll shiver, yes, but in warmth. A word should be said, too, for the accompanyists, too, another reflection of Abby’s smarts.
Metheny and Hargrove and Charlie Haden and Kenny Barron are anything but revelations, but you can tell they’re drinking at the source with Lincoln and digging it. What to make of Julien Lourau and Rodney Kendrick, respectively tenor sax and piano. Hardly household names, these guys bring the highest art to the table.

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Copyright The Financial Times

June 16 2007

If China were to choose a new symbol for its national flag, an architect joked recently, the competition would be between a crane and a bulldozer.

Cities like Beijing and Shanghai have been growing rapidly for more than a decade but in recent years they have gone into hyper-speed - Beijing to prepare for next year’s Olympics and Shanghai for the 2010 World Expo.

Driven by a voracious appetite for the new and the modern, the boom has delivered some striking constructions, from the Water Cube swimming complex in Beijing to the night-time skyline in Shanghai whose futuristic shapes and massive LED screens entrance visitors.

But to make way for the thousands of glass and steel high-rises, vast swathes of old buildings have been swept aside - some of considerable historical interest. In the process, critics say, the cities could lose the sense of community and street life that are important sources of vitality.

“There are plenty of places that have built new cities almost overnight,” says Greg Girard, a Shanghai-based photographer who has just published a book chronicling the dramatic changes in the city’s landscape. “But Shanghai is maybe the first to do so while tearing down an old city at the same time.”

Chinese heritage officials have long grumbled about the destruction. But the issue came centre-stage this week when a senior government minister said the current wave of urbanisation was responsible for as much damage to the country’s traditional heritage as the Cultural Revolution.

In unusually blunt comments, Qiu Baoxing, deputy minister for construction, said local officials “were totally unaware of the value of cultural heritage”. He added: “It is like having a thousand cities with the same appearance.”

Both Beijing and Shanghai boast unique architectural styles. Beijing used to be lined with hutongs - long, windy lanes flanked by courtyard houses. As well as notable art deco and neo-classical buildings, Shanghai has lilongs, a blend of European and Chinese influences with walk-up apartment blocks that look on to semi-secluded alleys. It was in these ambiguous mixtures of public and private space that the city’s social life used to be rooted.

According to Hu Xinyu, head of Friends of Old Beijing conservation group, half of Beijing’s 3,000 hutongs had been destroyed by 2003 and since then “the speed has been very fast”. In Shanghai, architect Chen Guang reckons that of the historical architecture not included in the city’s protection scheme, only 2-3 per cent will be left by 2010.

At the same time, both cities have developed endless suburbs studded by anonymous high-rise blocks and reached by eight-lane highways that make car ownership a near necessity.

The risk is that China’s urban centres will end up looking identical to a procession of other cities around the region. “In terms of style, the building boom of the last decade has been a total failure,” says Ruan Yisan, an architecture professor at Tongji University in Shanghai. “It has been a totally market-led, profit-driven, commercial exercise.”

Yet conservationists in China face huge practical difficulties. With the communist authorities allocating one family to each room of old houses, many became over-crowded and in poor repair. One recently destroyed mansion in Shanghai’s French Concession housed 40 families.

When the wrecking ball arrives, residents often have an ambivalent attitude to the buildings, mixing nostalgia with the desire to move to more modern surroundings with toilets and central heating. “We would love to be moved to a better flat, as long as it is not too far away,” says Zhang Yi, who lives in a 1920s house behind Fuxing Road in Shanghai.

Moreover, the debate in China takes place in a very different context. For Europeans, old buildings are one of the principal ways of connecting to the past. But in China, food, dialect, or social relations can be more important.

“There is a whole western tradition of classical archaeology and visiting the Parthenon,” says Lynn Pan, a Shanghai-born historian. “But there is no such tradition in China.”

Against this backdrop, however, there is a growing conservation lobby, especially in Shanghai, where the government has now issued protection orders for 632 buildings. Recent achievements include preserving parts of the old Jewish area in Hongkou.

Architects point out that China is still a work in motion. As in Hong Kong, some of the worst high-rises can be replaced by better ones as the city becomes richer.

Christopher Choa, an architect who recently left Shanghai after a decade, says the energy of a city could eventually impose itself on the blander new constructions. “Inside every modern Chinese city there is an old Chinese city trying to get out,” he says. “The issue is whether the lilong life will seep out into the empty spaces.”

Mr Choa also argues that western attitudes to current Chinese construction mirror European responses to the 1890s boom in New York, mixing fascination with “an undercurrent of contempt for the naivety of some of the new Chinese buildings”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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One of two great reads in the FT today. Bravo to David Piling.

Copyright The Financial Times

June 16 2007

It is three in the morning and I am on a fishing boat, drinking cheap sake from a plastic cup, and gnawing through my second hunk of dolphin meat. My day had started an hour earlier when, roused by a bashing on the door, I had left the warmth of my futon for the blistering cold of northern Japan in early spring. Cherry blossoms were budding in Kyushu, much further south. Here, the grass was streaked with snow.

Fumbling down an incline through the pitch black, I dimly made out the shape of a boat - more of an industrial barge - purring in the bay below. Nearby, a dozen or so fishermen, seated on tatami mats and drinking canned hot coffee, began zipping up their windbreakers against the cold. “Didn’t you bring your boots?” asked one, scanning my leather shoes as though they were ballet slippers. Some rubber boots were fetched. I pulled them on and ambled towards the boat as the fisherman played with the name of my unfamiliar publication in the rough accent of northern Honshu: “Fai-nan-sharu Tai-mu-zu.”

I had arranged to hitch a ride on a fishing boat from Iwate prefecture because I wanted to trace one of the thousand threads that connect Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market to the ocean. Even as we set out, hundreds of miles away, the market - both a throwback to the rough, mercantile culture of Edo Japan and the hub of the modern global fishing industry - is stirring into life. More fish flows into Tsukiji and out of it, into the sushi bars, restaurants, hotels, fishmongers and supermarkets of Japan’s fish-devouring capital - than into any other location on earth. That makes Tsukiji, in the phrase of Theodore Bestor, an American anthropologist who has devoted much of his life to this extraordinary place, “the fish market at the centre of the world”.

To get an idea of the scale of Tsukiji (roughly pronounced “Skiji”), compare it with Billingsgate, its British equivalent. According to a 2006 Oxford University study, Billingsgate handles roughly 25,000 tonnes of fish a year, enough to make it the world’s third-biggest fish emporium. But at an annual 615,000 tonnes, Tsukiji handles in two weeks what goes through Billingsgate in a year. Given the massive volumes, what happens here affects ports, markets and sometimes dangerously depleted fish stocks the world over. Prices set at Tsukiji, which move to the rhythms of Japanese fashions, holidays and the whim of its traders, set the global tone. Tsukiji is synonymous with “fish”, much as, in the US, Hollywood means “movies” or Wall Street means “finance”. And few things loom so large in Japanese consciousness as fish. Archaeologists have found shell mounds, dating from 3,000BC, indicating that Japanese have been raiding the oceans for sustenance from the late Stone Age. Even today, fish account for between 40 and 50 per cent of Japan’s animal protein intake, according to Bestor, compared with just 5 per cent in the US and New Zealand.

More than the sheer quantity is the extent to which fish permeate everyday life. Parents fly painted carp windsocks to celebrate each boy born to the family. Fans at baseball games munch dried squid or fried octopus balls and watch teams with names like the Hiroshima Carp. At weddings, guests are served sea bream, or tai, an aquatic pun based on the fact that omede-tai means “congratulations”. Fish crop up in everyday idioms, too. A sharp rise, what might be called a “spike” in English, is unagi nobori, literally “climbing eel”. Samehada, shark skin, means goose bumps. A kingyo, or goldfish, is a novice smoker who doesn’t inhale, while a “goldfish poo”, trailing behind, is an obsequious sidekick.

So deeply ingrained are images of the sea that, according to testimony in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a mother, looking up in awe at the spreading mushroom cloud, mouthed: “It moves like a sea slug.”

I had been on the boat only 20 minutes, but my stomach was already moving like a sea slug, too. We had slipped quietly out of the bay and chugged through the cold, squid-ink blackness. I climbed up to the deck and joined the captain in his tiny lookout, warmed by a single bar heater. He peered anxiously at the menacing black water below, ignoring the pulsing GPS screens above.

About 30 minutes out, he slowed the boat and snapped a giant floodlight on to the ocean’s surface. Hundreds of white seagulls flocked through the darkness like ghosts towards us. Another boat, the mirror image of ours, pulled near. Both crews, wrapped from head to toe against the cold, began winching in the net. No one talked. As the net drew to the surface, a few flashes of silver illuminated the dark. Soon it was a wriggling mass of sardines. The boats were now close enough for the crews to shake hands, though no one did.

A yellow cylindrical net was winched into the fishy mass and then back to our boat, where it spilled its silver contents. The crew erected wooden blocks to section off the deck, which became a knee- deep soup of thrashing sardines. Suddenly it was over. The boats pulled apart, the captain turned off the floodlight, plunging the ocean back into darkness.

Now, I am pressed into the boat’s tiny mess with some of the crew. We face each other in monk-like silence, our knees wedged against a rickety table on which sits my morning libation of sake. One of the crew is grilling scraps of fish. He thrusts a piece towards me, skewered on a toothpick. “It’s dolphin,” he says, “drowned in the nets.” Surrounded by men who eke their living from the sea, it hardly occurs to me to refuse.

We visit three more fishing grounds that morning, and each time the routine is the same. In a month’s time, they will be hauling tuna onto this deck, but today the crew must content itself with one 20lb king salmon, a dozen or so cod and a slew of sardines. The sun has risen as we head back to port. When the catch is good, about half is loaded off the dockside and trucked eight hours to Tsukiji. As we near shore, women, like anxious miners’ wives, are waiting. They have prepared breakfast. There is rice - and lots and lots of fish.

Tsukiji’s origins are said to lie with the fisherman who followed Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogunate ruler of a united Japan, on his 1590 march to Edo, the swampy ground that would one day become Tokyo. By 1700, Edo, originally a fishing village, had become the world’s biggest city.

By order of the shogunate, all fish had to be sold through the central market at Nihonbashi, the city’s gatepost. Much of it came from the then-teeming Edo bay and, by the early 19th century, restaurants in Nihonbashi had developed a new form of cuisine that capitalised on the fish’s freshness. Called Edomae sushi, “in front of Edo”, it differed from the traditional fermented fish of Osaka. The new delicacy was squeezed by hand around a ball of vinegared rice and eaten raw.

Those licensed to trade fish soon came to regard their monopoly as a birthright. It provided them with funds needed to attend the kabuki theatre, to drink and to visit the nearby Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.

After the Meiji Restoration, when Japan opened up to the west, pressure grew on the market to move. Theodore Bestor, the author of The Fish Market at the Center of the World, tells me: “It was considered a messy, smelly place right in the centre of what was supposed to be the financial centre of the east.” The market traders held out for years until the matter was settled by the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Shortly after, it moved to its present site on reclaimed land: the literal meaning of Tsukiji, a place with a thousand romantic associations, is “Landfill.”

Its next move could be to an equally unglamourous location - a vacant lot once owned by Tokyo Gas (see Raw deal: Tsukiji’s move page 31). Market traders are already fighting to keep Tsukiji going, at the heart of city life.

The day after my Iwate fishing trip, I am up again at the crack of dawn, heading for Tsukiji by taxi. It is 4am and Tokyo - in so far as a conglomeration of 12 million people can ever be thus described - is sleeping. Harumi Avenue, the boulevard that ploughs through the normally elbow-to-elbow Ginza shopping district, is empty. But just a little further on, through an anonymous entrance lined by thrumming trucks, one enters a world where the rules and rhythms of everyday Japan do not apply.

The first thing that hits you - almost literally - is the traffic. Vehicles in Tokyo proper move with the neatness one would expect of a well-organised society. In Tsukiji, which has the atmosphere of a Turkish bazaar, there is what looks like anarchy. Despite the efforts of traffic policemen (Tsukiji has its own police force, not to mention a branch of Mizuho bank and a dedicated press corps), the rule inside the market appears to be every man for himself. Several generations of traffic compete for the same piece of road. Men on bicycles, men on foot, men pulling blood-stained wooden carts, men on motorcycles; all thread hither and thither, their Styrofoam boxes packed with fish, squeaking and wobbling as they go. Now and then, there is a scattering, as a truck lurches in. Everywhere, sputtering mechanised carts buzz like angry bluebottles through the maelstrom.

I am heading to see Keiichi Suzuki, president of Tsukiji Uoichiba, one of seven auction houses licensed to operate. Most of Tsukiji has been alive with activity since midnight, when trucks unload their supplies and handlers begin laying out the fish for that morning’s auctions. But here, in the market’s administrative centre, the long stone corridor is deserted.

Suzuki, a 70-year-old who has worked in the industry for half a century, is waiting in his office. It is the second time we have met. At our first meeting, in daylight hours, he was wearing a grey tweed suit that matched his neatly trimmed British accent. He spoke unromantically about the market, saying it was being throttled by giant supermarket chains and was in need of modernising. He also spoke in alarming terms about fish stocks, saying that, as China, Russia and others developed a Japanese-style appetite, he feared for the industry - and the planet.

Today, he looks quite different, dressed in blue overalls and rubber boots. “Shall we go?” he asks, trotting off briskly. “First we’ll go and see uni, the sea urchin. Uni are always first.” He opens an unmarked door, and we step into what looks like a gem shop. Arranged in little wooden trays are row upon row of amber- coloured sea urchin, a creamy delicacy mostly served as sushi. In a high-class establishment, a single mouthful can cost anything from $10.

Men, each with a number pinned to their cap, are milling around, inspecting the uni. Each type is slightly different; this one from Russia is paler than that from Hakodate, which differs again from the Aomori, Shikoku and Boston uni. To preserve delicate distinctions, smoking is prohibited.

Suddenly, a few men who have been lolling on child-sized wooden bleachers spring into action, engaging in a series of mysterious hand movements. (The market has its own slang and even its own counting system where, for example, three is geta, after wooden sandals with a three-grooved sole.) Within minutes, the secret gestures stop, and the uni that will be gobbled in Tokyo that day has been sold.

The people in caps are the nakaoroshi gyohsha, the “intermediate wholesalers”, who work for the 1,677 Tsukiji stalls licensed to sell to outsiders. Many of these licences have been in the same family for generations and, without one, it is not permitted to bid, however deep one’s pockets. This makes the intermediate wholesalers one tier in an immensely complex stack of suppliers who aggregate catches from thousands of boats before sorting them on the way to the customer. The nakaoroshi gyohsha stand, according to Bestor, at least two - and as many as five - stages removed from both the boat that caught the fish and the person who will eventually eat it.

After the sea urchin, Suzuki leads me through several other auctions, including live fish and shrimp, to the tuna floor. The vast auction hall is laid out with hundreds of neatly arranged whole tuna, maguro, each with its tail removed and placed like a decoration in the gills. Unlike the flash-frozen tuna hunted by vessels that spend months at sea, these are fresh. A few have been caught off the Japanese coast, but most are from Guam, Sri Lanka, Spain and Mexico. They have been air-freighted in via Tokyo’s Narita airport, “Japan’s leading fishing harbour” as it is jokingly known, so dependent on global fish stocks have the Japanese become.

As the tuna are auctioned off, they are wheeled out on long thin carts to the adjacent stalls. This is the impenetrable, water- soaked labyrinth where Tsukiji’s wholesalers sell to the many thousand buyers from the sushi bars, restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets that keep Tokyo fed.

Among them is Kajibashi-san, and the first thing to know about him is that he is late. He is always late. For more than 20 years, he has been arriving at the market at around 10am, several hours after most buyers have come and gone. He probably would not like the term, but Kajibashi-san is the catfish of Tsukiji, picking up leftovers others have neglected. “At this time of day, we are shoulder to shoulder with housewives,” he says on the morning I accompany him, referring to the few retail customers who venture into the market’s inner sanctum. “The difference, of course,” he says, patting his substantial wallet, “is that I have the buying power and I have the face.”

The second thing to know about Kajibashi-san is that his real name is Andy Lunt, and he hails from Leicester, England. He is a Tokyo institution: the only foreigner to buy regularly from Tsukiji’s intermediate wholesalers, and a constant presence in Shin Hinomoto, a sashimi-and-grilled-fish restaurant wedged beneath an overhead railway line. Kajibashi-san is his yago, the guild name bestowed on each of the Tsukiji regulars.

Lunt, a tall, muscular 48-year-old with a shiny shaved head, cuts a distinctive figure in Tsukiji. Once a rock musician, he came to Tokyo in 1985 with the Japanese bride he had married in Britain. “I arrived on a Saturday and on the Monday I was taken to Tsukiji, where I was told to meet my father-in-law. And that was it,” he says. “I was handed a bag of money and for a year I followed him around the market. At the end of the year he said: ‘Right, you’ve seen the four seasons. Off you go.’”

Lunt makes the rounds of Tsukiji most mornings, prepares fish all afternoon and presides over his restaurant until midnight. The family he married into has owned restaurants for generations, moving to Tsukiji from Nihonbashi when the market was relocated in the 1920s. His father-in-law, who still does the Tsukiji buying run every Monday, conducts business the old way. “He has five or six stalls that he goes to religiously, because they’re the people he can trust to give him a decent deal,” says Lunt, who feels the younger Tsukiji generation has a different take on things. “Those comfortable relationships have just disintegrated. They mean nothing. This is a market. What’s available and the price of everything fluctuates daily according to supply and demand - it’s up to me to take advantage of that.”

Following Lunt around is halfway between a trip to an aquarium and a slaughterhouse. Some 400 varieties of seafood are on sale, many still alive in tanks or shallow vats of water. Live crabs are covered in sawdust to keep them moist; octopuses are kept in mesh bags to stop them from cannibalising each other.

The Japanese are obsessive about freshness, sometimes to the point of eating sashimi while the fish’s tail still wriggles, or swallowing tiny live fish, a style known as odori gui, “dancing in the mouth”. At the back of each cramped stall - whose position in the market is regularly changed by lottery to prevent lasting advantage - is a chopping board. Most are saturated with blood. The squeamish would not last long at Tsukiji, yet even here they acknowledge the term zankoku ryori, “cruel cuisine”. Each year, says Bestor, eel dealers make the trek to Mount Takao near Tokyo to pray at a temple for warding off eye disease. The idea is to stop revenge from the spirits of eels, skinned alive while pinned to the chopping board by their eye.

Lunt is hunting bargains. Today, Iwate oysters, normally pricier than those from Hiroshima, are good value. He picks up some kanpachi, a type of amberjack, and a tachiuo, “belt fish”, a dazzling silver creature as long as a human arm. At another stall, Lunt rejects farmed green sea slugs in favour of wild red ones and debates the quality of monkfish liver, ankimo, a pate-like delicacy. At yet another, he stops for nodoguro, a Japanese blue fish, which he grills whole if he can get the price down.

It turns out that Lunt has been sucked into Tsukiji’s way of doing things more than he realises. He wants to treat it like a spot market but, over two decades, has become entangled in the relationships that bind the market together. His rare days off from the restaurant are regulated by the weddings and funerals of business associates. Despite his protestations, like his father-in- law, he too drops in on the same stalls each morning, even if he doesn’t always buy. “Relationships, yes. They come without you realising. This guy really brought it home to me,” Lunt says, gesturing to a man busily gutting a fish. “We were at the funeral of the grandmother, and we were having a few drinks afterwards, and they started reminiscing about the first time I came to Tsukiji,” he says. “It was honestly the first time I realised that I am part of this world and that their histories and mine are intertwined.”

Not far from Tsukiji, in a back street near Kachidoki Bridge, is a sushi restaurant. One enters through a sliding, slatted door. Behind a long wooden counter stand three sushi chefs, each in white apron and white cap.

In a glass case running the length of the counter are fish from Japan and far beyond: small, precious, quantities of fatty tuna, red clam, octopus, squid, sea urchin, plump orange salmon roe, fluke, horse mackerel, eel, sweet shrimp, yellow tail and more. The chef wields his $1,000 blade in silence, slicing a tiny strip of fish before pressing it, with a daub of green wasabi horseradish, onto a perfectly formed oblong of rice.

The mystery of sushi, as every Tokyoite knows, is that it can only be eaten at the counter, never at a table. I ask the sushi master why. He smiles, perhaps not wishing to offend those customers without a counter seat. “Ah, that’s because of the time and the distance,” he finally ventures. “Sushi loses its taste between here and the table.”

It seems a nonsensical thing to say about a piece of fish that has been shipped hundreds, if not thousands, of miles before ending up in this corner of Tokyo. Yet any sushi addict knows that the fin