through queer eyes

A fine review of Donald Richie's latest book of essays in today's edition of The Japan Times, a review which does justice to his unique insights as a long-residing, non-assimilated foreigner in Japan.

The article doesn't directly refer to this, but it is widely known that Richie's has always been the perspective of a gay man. Hence perhaps his comfort in "the distance of being a foreigner in Japan. . . . This I regard as the best seat in the house. Because from here I can compare, and comparison is the first step toward understanding. I have learned to regard freedom as more important than belonging."

Interesting, no doubt, how Japan has been such a paradise of emotional detachment for so many western... gay men, precisely. Richie's comments on the seedy but also infantilized world of Japanese sex clubs where "anything goes" may provide some suggestive clues about why this has been (and will continue to be) so.

Yet to a straight western woman who has reached her wits' end in Japan, the following remarks are much more significant -- and depressing. They certainly provide valuable clues about why stuffy old Japan is (and will continue to be) such an inhospitable place for independent, liberated women:

Richie is a sympathetic witness to the plight of women in Japan, deploring that they are "frankly regarded as chattel. The double standard is so ingrained that it is taken for granted. The manipulation of women for economic, social, and sexual purposes is openly displayed and its rightness is seldom officially questioned."

Lamentably, "women seem also to subscribe to the rightness of their own oppression. They submit and endure."

[my comment: Chizuko Ueno, one of Japan's most outspoken feminist scholars, once remarked that these Japanese women suffer from a serious form of 'moral masochism'.]

It is precisely the systematic discrimination women suffer, he argues, that makes them consummate actresses. Role-playing is second nature, a coping mechanism as, "From the earliest age she learns to mask her true feelings and to counterfeit those she does not feel."

This comes in handy in pornography where the formula insists that "women must be denigrated and she must deserve to be." He adds that in this realm women are portrayed as hysterical animals: "While she screams, kicks, and in general abandons herself, he remains thoughtful, calm, a dedicated craftsman." Curiously, the genre is "puritanical about the virgin state," while insisting that "women are evil, that sex is their instrument and that men are their prey."


Indeed. I have written on nothing else of late (here, here, here and here e.g.) -- and only wish that the self-imposed geographical distance I will be very soon acquiring will one day allow me to simply laugh at the sheer ludicrousness, backwardness and absurdity of it all.

'the loneliness of the long-distance foreigner'...

I have written ad nauseam on this depressing topic (here, here, here, here, here and here e.g.), but if doubts still remain about how generally unwelcoming and mistrustful of foreigners - of others, tout court - the Japanese are and how difficult (or virtually impossible) it is for westerners to establish long-lasting, reliable friendships with most of these insufferable bores, I cannot but recommend the article reproduced below.

Such things should no longer surprise me after so many years in Japan, and yet I don't cease to be appalled by the emotional atrophy, iciness, rudeness, self-absorption and utter disrespect for basic human feelings - namely trust - that most Japanese (esp. the males) display in their interactions with others. How much lower can these chaps sink?

*       *       *

The loneliness of the long-distance foreigner
By DEBITO ARUDOU
The Japan Times, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011

A few months ago I had beers with several old Japan-hand guys (combined we have more than a century of Japan experiences), and one of them asked an interesting question:

"After all our years here, how many close Japanese male friends do you have?" (Excluding Debito, of course.)

We glanced amongst ourselves and realized that none of us had any. Not one we would count on as a "friend." Nobody to whom we could talk openly, unreservedly, and in depth with, about what's on our minds. Or contact for a place to stay because our spouse was on the warpath. Or call at 3 a.m. to announce the birth of our latest baby. Or ring up on the spur of the moment because we didn't want to drink alone that evening. Or who would care enough to check on us in the event of a natural disaster. Not one.

This occasioned much discussion and theorizing, both at the table and on my blog later (see www.debito.org/?p=8933)

(A quick note to readers already poised to strike with poison pens: None of the following theories are necessarily mine, nor do I necessarily agree with them. They are just to stimulate further discussion.)

One theory was that Japanese salarymen of our age group are generally boring people. Too busy or work-oriented to cultivate outside interests or hobbies, these one-note-Taros generally "talk shop" or resort to shaggy-dog stories about food. We contrasted them with Japanese women, who, thanks to more varied lifestyles and interests (including travel, language and culture), are more engaging and make better conversation partners (even if, my friends hastily added, the relationship had not become physical).

Another idea was that for many Japanese men, their hobby was you. By this, the speaker meant the culture vultures craving the "gaijin shiriaiexperience" or honing their language skills. This was OK in the beginning (especially when we first got here) but it got old quickly, as they realized we wanted to learn Japanese too, and when they weren't willing to reciprocate. Not to mention that we eventually got tired of hearing blanket cultural explanations for individual issues (which is how culture vultures are hard-wired to see the world, anyway).

Another theory was that after a certain age, Japanese men don't make "friends" with anyone. The few lifelong friends they would ever make were in school; once they entered the job market, all other males were treated as rivals or steps to promotion — meaning you put up a mask and didn't reveal potentially compromising personal information. Thus if Japanese men were going to make friends at all, they were going to make them permanently, spending enormous time and energy imprinting themselves on precious few people. This meant they had to choose wisely, and non-Japanese — generally seen as in Japan only temporarily and with unclear loyalties — weren't worth the emotional investment.

Related to this were issues of Japan's hierarchical society. Everyone was either subordinate or superior — kōhai or senpai — which interfered with friendships as the years marched on: Few non-Japanese (NJ) wanted to languish as kōhai, and few Japanese wanted to deal with a foreign senpai. Besides, went the theory, this relationship wasn't something we'd classify as a "friendship" anyway. Conclusion: Japanese men, as opposed to Japanese women with their lifetime coffee klatches, were some of the most lonely people on the planet.

Another suggestion was that this was just part of how life shakes down. Sure, when you're young and carefree you can hang out willy-nilly, spend money with abandon and enjoy the beer-induced bonhomie (which Japan's watering holes are very good at creating) with everyone all night. But as time goes on and people get married, have kids, take on a mortgage and a nagging spouse (who doesn't necessarily want you spending their money on your own personal fun, especially if it involves friends of the opposite sex), you prioritize, regardless of nationality.

Fine, our group countered, but we've all been married and had kids, and yet we're still meeting regularly — because NJ priorities include beers with friends from time to time. In fact, for us the older the relationship gets, the more we want to maintain it — especially given all we've been through together. "New friends are silver, but old friends are gold."

Still another, intriguing theory was the utilitarian nature of Japanese relationships, i.e. Japanese make friends not as a matter of course but with a specific purpose in mind: shared lifestyles, interests, sports-team fandom, what have you. But once that purpose had run its course — because you've exhausted all conversation or lost the commonality — you should expect to lose contact. The logic runs that in Japan it is awkward, untoward, even rude to extend a relationship beyond its "natural shelf life." This goes even just for moving to another city in Japan: Consider it normal to lose touch with everyone you leave behind. The thread of camaraderie is that thin in Japan.

However, one naturalized Japanese friend of mine (who just turned 70) pooh-poohed all these theories and took me out to meet his drinking buddies (of both genders, mostly in their 60s and 70s themselves). At this stage in their lives things were less complicated. There were no love triangles, no senpai-kōhai conceits, no "shop talk," because they were all retired. Moreover they were more outgoing and interesting, not only because they were cultivating pastimes to keep from going senile, but also because the almighty social lubricant of alcohol was omnipresent (they drank like there was no tomorrow; for some of them, after all, there might not be!). For my friend, getting Japanese to lower their masks was pretty easy.

Fine, but I asked if it weren't a bit unreasonable for us middle-aged blokes to wait for this life stage just to make some Japanese friends. These things may take time, and we may indeed have to spend years collecting shards of short interactions from the local greengrocer before we put together a more revealing relationship. But in the meantime, human interaction with at least one person of the same gender that goes beyond platitudes, and hopefully does not require libation and liver damage, is necessary now for sanity's sake, no?

There were other, less-developed theories, but the general conclusion was: Whatever expectation one had of "friends" — either between Japanese and NJ, or between Japanese themselves — there was little room over time for overlap. Ultimately NJ-NJ relationships wound up being more friendly, supportive and long-lasting.

Now it's time for disclaimers: No doubt the regular suspects will vent their spleen to our Have Your Say section and decry this essay as overgeneralizing, bashing, even discriminating against Japanese men.

Fire away, but you'd be missing the point of this column. When you have a good number of NJ long-termers saying they have few to no long-term Japanese friends, this is a very serious issue — with a direct connection to issues of immigration and assimilation of outsiders. It may be a crude barometer regarding life in Japan, but let's carry on the discussion anyway and see how sophisticated we can make it.

So let's narrow this debate down to one simple question: As a long-term NJ resident in Japan, how many Japanese friends do you have, as defined in the introduction above? (You might say that you have no relationship with anyone of any nationality with that much depth, but that's awfully lonely — I dare say even unhealthy — and I hope you can remedy that.) Respondents who can address the other sides of the question (i.e. NJ women befriending Japanese women/men, and same-sex relationships) are especially welcome, as this essay has a shortage of insight on those angles.

Be honest. And by "honest", I mean giving this question due consideration and experience: People who haven't been living in Japan for, say, about 10 years, seeing how things shake down over a significant portion of a lifetime's arc, should refrain from commentary and let their senpai speak. "I've been here one year and have oodles of Japanese friends, you twerpski!" just isn't a valid sample yet. And please come clean about your backgrounds when you write in, since age, gender, occupation, etc. all have as much bearing on the discussion as your duration of time in Japan.

Above all, remember what my job as a columnist is: to stimulate public discussion. Respondents are welcome to disagree (I actually consider agreement from readers to be an unexpected luxury), but if this column can at least get you to think, even start clacking keyboards to The Japan Times, I've done my job. Go to it. Consider yourself duly stimulated, and please offer us some friendly advice.


The Japan Times: Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011
(C) All rights reserved

no fixed address (2)

It takes half a lifetime to learn them, those much discredited qualities – the disregard for borders and hierarchies, the lack of deference, the independence of spirit – and another half to un-learn the little comforts, the numbing routines, the dross.

Yet nothing is more urgent, especially after such a lengthy stay among the most insular, inflexible, unadventurous, heartless of people.

To become enmeshed in the world again, responsive to and responsible for an other, whatever may come.

I wish for nothing else.

*       *       *

One of the questions we need to ask, if we’re to have a future, is “Where, when, in what situations, did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?” One answer is: when we were nomadic. It was when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment. . . .

There can be no return to previous modes of living, no retreat to the traditional as a way of shoring up identity, or denying rationality and the benefits of science. Such retrogression only lands us in kitsch. But there might be ways into previous kinds of thinking. . . .

When Adam Smith talked about the “wealth of nations”, he wasn’t referring simply to money, but to a whole ensemble of requirements to wellbeing. Perhaps, who knows, the materialist progress we have made since urbanisation, and the values existing before it, could meld into some marvellous, unprecedented syncretism. But if that is too much to expect, at least attention to nomadic modes of thinking might get us close to finding whatever solutions to the disintegrations of modern life.

So what are the qualities that nomadic cultures tend to encourage? It seems to me that they are humanistic virtues. The world is approached as a series of complex interactions, rather than simple oppositions, connecting pathways rather than obstructive walls. Nomads are comfortable with uncertainty and contradiction. They are cosmopolitan in outlook, because they have to deal with difference, negotiate difference. They do not focus on long-term goals so much as continually accommodate themselves to change. They are less concerned with the accumulation of wealth and more concerned with the accumulation of knowledge. The territorial personality – opinionated and hard-edged – is not revered. Tolerance, which accommodates itself to things human and changeable, is. Theirs are Aristotelian values of “practical wisdom” and balance. Adaptability, flexibility, mental agility, the ability to cope with flux. These traits shy away from absolutes, and strive for an equilibrium that blurs rigid boundaries.

--Robyn Davidson, ‘No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet,’ in Quarterly Essay, 24 (2006), pp. 48-49.

no fixed address (1)

[O]ne wrong turning occurred when we gave up cultures of movement for cultures of accumulation. I do not mean to say that we should (or could) return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge, and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life, that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.

The French translation of "wandering" is l'errance, the Latin root of which means to make a mistake. By our errors we see deeper into life. We learn from them.

--Robyn Davidson, 'No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet,' in Quarterly Essay, 24 (2006), p. vi.

*       *       *

And how much we would gain in terms of tolerance towards difference, of adaptability, of respect for the environment, of human interconnectedness, if people yielded more often to the impulse to wander, to learn from their own mistakes and from others.

But wandering has nothing to do with this contemporary hypermobility stemming from acquisitiveness and a shallow sophistication. It goes hand in hand with the courage to trust and take risks, to reinvent oneself, to break the chains that constrict one's soul and one's movements-- to fail better.

the marvels and mysteries of Japanese 'soft' fascism

A must-read on today's edition of The Japan Times:

With Japan at a crossroads, it's instructive to recall the Hidaka affair

By ROGER PULVERS
The Japan Times

July 10, 2011

Exactly 30 years ago this month, I had an encounter with a man who became innocently involved in an international incident. That incident may be all but forgotten now, but it's worth recalling here because it highlights the struggle of an individual of conscience to have the truth revealed.

Indeed, we in Japan are currently involved with the very same issues of personal responsibility and collective falsehood.

If we remain silent in the face of injustice or criminal negligence, if we allow unelected bureaucrats and business executives to ride roughshod over our personal welfare — as we are witnessing with regard to the ongoing nuclear disaster in Fukushima — the entire nation's future could be put at risk by recklessness and prevarication.

(full text here)

*       *       *

Pulvers reproduces a comment by Rokuro Hidaka—'The Japanese don't have much of a consciousness of human rights or the rights of the individual. Even the word kenri is not really the equivalent of 'rights.' The Japanese think that insisting on your kenri is an activity associated with egoism'—that is reminiscent of an earlier study by Masao Maruyama, published in the edited book Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London: Oxford UP, 1963). In it, Maruyama argues precisely that modern Japan, upon abandoning democratic institutions and disintegrating into an absolutist state, has never successfully established, as a nation, the primacy of individual rights or the subjectivity of a thinking and historically conscious people. 

This, in turn, has reminded me of Etsuko Yamashita's argument in her book on Itsue Takamura (1988), in which she argues that mother dominance, the cornerstone of Japan's patriarchal society (a topic I have been exploring), is the symbol of a leaderless, diffuse 'soft' fascism: a ruling system of interdependence (amae) in which no one takes responsibility as an individual person. It is no wonder, in this context, that the Japanese Emperor system has so often been perceived throughout history as one of maternal dominance.

What is truly astonishing is not so much the cogency and perceptiveness of these views, but their rarity in a society that has reached such a high level of economic affluence and that claims to be a democracy. Maybe, as Hidaka himself has pointed out, economic affluence has never really managed to translate itself into social prosperity in modern Japan. It is nothing but a shallow, empty form of wealth.

And something must be terribly amiss indeed when the intelligentsia of a (supposedly) democratic country aloofly chooses to turn its back on reality and the world at large to pursue instead its own self-interest and vanity publishing.

a disease of the spirit

And yet another eminent writer puts his finger on the chronic disorder affecting -- and gradually poisoning, destroying -- Japanese society from within, and which often seems to me, as an outsider, a sort of collective schizophrenia: a strangely generalised inability to link thought, emotion and behaviour, leading to withdrawal from reality and human relationships into fantasy and delusion.*

A disturbing inability, also, to learn from past mistakes and tragedies, as well as to really respect and feel solidarity with the suffering of others -- that is, those outside their closed little groups or tribes.

Heartbreaking, in a country that could have had it all.

*       *       *

Novelist Murakami slams nuclear policy
Kyodo

BARCELONA, Spain — Novelist Haruki Murakami criticized his country's pursuit of nuclear energy Thursday during his acceptance speech at the 2011 International Catalunya Prize ceremony in Barcelona, describing the ongoing crisis at the quake-crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant as "a mistake committed by our very own hands."

Murakami said Japan, as the only nation to have experienced the devastation and suffering from radiation through World War II atomic bombings, should have continued saying "no" to nuclear power.

Murakami, the first Japanese to receive the prize given annually by the autonomous Catalan government, said the €80,000 (approximately ¥9.3 million) prize money would be donated to the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami as well as those affected by the nuclear crisis.

"The accident at the Fukushima (No. 1) nuclear power plant is the second major nuclear detriment that the Japanese people have experienced," he said in Japanese. "However, this time it was not a bomb being dropped upon us, but a mistake committed by our very own hands."

The Japanese people, having "learned through the sacrifice of the hibakusha just how badly radiation leaves scars on the world and human wellbeing," should have continued to stand firm in rejecting nuclear power, the novelist, clad in a gray blazer, said.

"Yet those who questioned (the safety of) nuclear power were marginalized as being 'unrealistic dreamers,' " while the Japanese government and utility companies put priority on "efficiency" and "convenience" and turned the quake-prone nation into the world's third-largest nuclear-powered country, he added.

Japan should have pursued on a national level the development of effective energy sources to replace nuclear power. Doing so could have been a way of taking collective responsibility for the atomic bomb victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said.

On a more upbeat note, Murakami said he was confident Japan would rise again to rebuild after realigning its mind and spirit, just as it has survived on many occasions throughout its history.

The Japan Times: Saturday, June 11, 2011
(C) All rights reserved

==============================================

* I'm drawing on the OED comprehensive definition of schizophrenia: a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmention.

Japan admits it was unprepared for nuclear disaster

Or: how the Japanese are always prepared -- painstakingly, obsessively -- for everything, except for what really matters.

It just can't be helped.

*       *       *

Japan Admits Unreadiness for Disaster
By AP / MARI YAMAGUCHI

TIME, Tuesday, Jun. 07, 2011

(TOKYO) — Japan admitted Tuesday it was unprepared for a severe nuclear accident like the tsunami-caused Fukushima disaster and said damage to the reactors and radiation leakage were worse than it previously thought.

In a report being submitted to the U.N. nuclear agency, the government also acknowledged reactor design flaws and a need for greater independence for the country's nuclear regulators. (Fukushima: Twice As Bad As Thought)

The report said the nuclear fuel in three reactors likely melted through the inner containment vessels, not just the core, after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant's power and cooling systems. Fuel in the Unit 1 reactor started melting hours earlier than previously estimated.

The 750-page report, compiled by Japan's nuclear emergency taskforce, factors in a preliminary evaluation by a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency and was to be submitted to the IAEA as requested. "In light of the lessons learned from the accident, Japan has recognized that a fundamental revision of its nuclear safety preparedness and response is inevitable," the report said. It also recommended a national debate on nuclear power.

The report said the flaws in basic reactor design included the venting system for the containment vessels and the location of spent fuel cooling pools high in the buildings, which resulted in leaks of radioactive water that hampered repair work. It also said the vents lacked filtering capability, causing contamination of the air, and the vent line interferred with connecting pipes.

Desperate attempts by plant workers to vent pressure to prevent the containment vessels from bursting repeatedly failed. Experts have said the delay in venting was a primary cause of explosions that further damaged the reactors and spewed huge amounts of radiation into the air.

The melted cores and radiation leaks have irradiated workers, including two control room operators whose exposures have exceeded the government limit. Lack of protection for plant workers early in the crisis and inadequate information about radiation leaks were also a problem, nuclear crisis taskforce director Goshi Hosono said. (Lessons from Fukushima)

The report acknowledged a lack of independence for Japan's nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, and pledged to improve safety oversight, as recommended in the IAEA report last week.

The report comes a day after NISA said twice as much radiation may have been released into the air as earlier estimated. That would be about one-sixth of the amount released at Chernobyl instead of the earlier estimate of one-tenth.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2076171,00.html

NOTE (6/19): Also worth reading 'Fukushima: It's much worse than you think'.

is the Earth trying to tell us something?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/05/puyehue-volcano-chile-erupts-evacuation

Another volcano eruption, this time around in Chile, prompts mass evacuation. After this series of deadly natural disasters and extreme weather -- earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes -- in recent years, I wonder if anyone in her/his right mind can still believe this is all a coincidence and that none of these events are closely related to the Earth's disrupted ecological balance.

While I certainly do not believe in apocalyptic prophecies for a second, I do give credit to those who have been thoroughly researching such phenomena for years and warning of what climate change might have in store for us  -- and much sooner than we would like to think.

Here is one of those people worth listening to (in an article written in 2007).

I'm not so sure, however, as MacGuire seems to be, that there is really still enough time to listen to the Earth's wake-up call. What if things are already well beyond the tipping point, as some others seem to believe?

*       *       *

The Earth fights back

Never mind higher temperatures, climate change has a few nastier surprises in store. Bill McGuire says we can also expect more earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and tsunamis

Bill McGuire
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 August 2007 


Unlike most apparently intractable problems, which have a tendency to go away when examined closely and analytically, the climate change predicament just seems to get bigger and scarier the more we learn about it.

Now we discover that not only are the oceans and the atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms, floods and ever-climbing sea levels, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too.

Looking back to other periods in our planet's history when the climate was swinging about wildly, most notably during the last ice age, it appears that far more than the weather was affected. The solid earth also became restless, with an increase in volcanic activity, earthquakes, giant submarine landslides and tsunamis. At the rate climate change is accelerating, there is every prospect that we will see a similar response from the planet, heralding not just a warmer future but also a fiery one.

Several times in the past couple of million years the ice left its polar fastnesses
and headed towards the equator, covering much of the world's continents in ice sheets over a kilometre thick, and sucking water from the oceans in order to do so. As a consequence, at times when the ice was most dominant, global sea levels were as much as 130m lower than they are today; sufficient to expose land bridges between the UK and the continent and Alaska and Russia.

Each time the ice retreated, sea levels shot up again, sometimes at rates as high as several metres a century. In the mid 1990s, as part of a study funded by the European Union, we discovered that in the Mediterranean region there was a close correlation between how quickly sea levels went up and down during the last ice age and the level of explosive activity at volcanoes in Italy and Greece.

The link was most obvious following the retreat of the glaciers around 18,000 years ago, after which sea levels jumped back up to where they are today, triggering a 300% increase in explosive volcanic activity in the Mediterranean in doing so. Further evidence for a flurry of volcanic action at this time comes from cores extracted from deep within the Greenland ice sheet, which yield increased numbers of volcanic dust and sulphate layers from eruptions across the northern hemisphere, if not the entire planet.

But how can rising sea levels cause volcanoes to erupt? The answer lies in the enormous mass of the water pouring into the ocean basins from the retreating ice sheets. The addition of over a hundred metres depth of water to the continental margins and marine island chains, where over 60% of the world's active volcanoes reside, seems to be sufficient to load and bend the underlying crust.

This in turn squeezes out any magma that happens to be hanging around waiting for an excuse to erupt. It may well be that a much smaller rise can trigger an eruption if a volcano is critically poised and ready to blow.

Eruptions of Pavlof volcano in Alaska, for example, tend to occur during the winter months when, for meteorological reasons, the regional sea level is barely 30cm (12in) higher than during the summer. If other volcanic systems are similarly sensitive then we could be faced with an escalating burst of volcanic activity as anthropogenic climate change drives sea levels ever upwards.

Notwithstanding the recent prediction by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that sea levels in 2100 will be a measly 18-59cm (7-23in) higher, Jim Hansen – eminent climate scientist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies – warns that we could see a one to two metre rise this century and several more in the next. Other climate scientists too, forecast substantially greater rises than the IPCC, whose prediction excludes any consideration of future changes in polar ice sheet behaviour. A worst-case scenario could see a return to conditions that prevailed around 14,000 years ago, when sea levels rose 13.5 metres (44ft) - the height of a three-storey house - in the space of about 300 years.

Such a dramatic rise in coming centuries would clearly spell catastrophe for our civilisation, with low-lying regions across the planet vanishing rapidly beneath the waves. Just a one metre (3.28ft) rise would threaten one third of the world's agricultural land, two metres (6.56ft) would make the Thames flood barrier redundant and four metres (13.12ft) would drown the city of Miami, leaving it 37 miles (60km) off the US coast.

As sea levels climb higher so a response from the world's volcanoes becomes ever more likely, and perhaps not just from volcanoes. Loading of the continental margins could activate faults, triggering increased numbers of earthquakes, which in turn could spawn giant submarine landslides. Such a scenario is believed to account for the gigantic Storegga Slide, which sloughed off the Norwegian coast around 8,000 years ago, sending a tsunami more than 20 metres (66ft) high in places across the Shetland Isles and onto the east coast of Scotland. Should Greenland be released from its icy carapace, the underlying crust will start to bob back up, causing earthquakes well capable of shaking off the huge piles of glacial sediment that have accumulated around its margins and sending tsunamis across the North Atlantic.

The Earth is responding as a single, integrated system to climate change driven by human activities. Global warming is not just a matter of warmer weather, more floods or stronger hurricanes, but is also a wake-up call to Terra Firma. It may be no coincidence that one outcome of increased volcanic activity is likely to be a period of falling temperatures, as a veil of volcanic dust and gas reduces the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface. Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something. It really would be worth listening before it is too late.

Bill McGuire is the director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre. His book Surviving Armageddon: Solutions For a Threatened Planet is published by OUP. His next book, What Everyone Should Know About the Future of Our Planet: And What We Can Do About It, is published by Orion in January next year.


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Cassandras...

To those dear souls who still believe that all-nuclear Japan is a wonderfully safe place to live in this period of widespread seismic activity and that the 3/11 catastrophe was an 'exception', here are some disquieting thoughts.

Perhaps Bill McGuire, one of the world's leading volcanologists who once claimed that 'Tokyo is the city waiting to die', should rephrase his (in)famous motto into something like 'Japan is the country waiting to die'.

(I doubt whether this would do much to awaken this apathetic people, though.)

*       *       *

The Nuclear Disaster That Could Destroy Japan – On the danger of a killer earthquake in the Japanese Archipelago

Hirose Takashi
Translated and with an introduction by C. Douglas Lummis


Translator’s note

(Nuclear) Power Corrupts

A puzzle for our time: how is it possible for a person to be smart enough to make plutonium, and dumb enough actually to make it?

Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years, which means that in that time its toxicity will be reduced by half. What could possess a person, who will live maybe one three-hundredth of that time, to produce such a thing and leave it to posterity to deal with? In fact, “possess” might be the right word. Behind all the nuclear power industry’s language of cost efficiency or liberation from fossil fuel or whatever, one can sense a kind of possession – a bureaucratized madness. Political science has produced but one candidate for a scientific law - Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. But the political scientists haven’t noticed that the closest thing we have to absolute power is nuclear power. Nuclear power corrupts in a peculiar way. It seems to tempt the engineers into imagining they have been raised to a higher level, a level where common sense judgments are beneath them. Judgments like (as my grandmother used to say) “Accidents do happen”.

At their press conferences, the Tokyo Electric Co. (Tepco) officials say, as if it were an excuse, that the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan were “outside their expectations”. Look it up in the dictionary; that’s the definition of “accident.” For decades common-sense opponents of nuclear power, in Japan and all over the world, have been asking the common-sense question, What if there is an accident? For this they were ridiculed and scorned by the nuclear engineers and their spokespersons. We, suffer an accident? In our world there are no accidents!

Playing with nuclear power is playing God, which is by far the most corrupting game of all.

In Japan, one of the loudest, most persistent and best informed of the voices asking this common sense question has been that of Hirose Takashi. Mr. Hirose first came into public view with a Swiftean satire he published in 1981, Tokyo e, Genpatsu wo! (Nuclear Power Plants to Tokyo!).(Shueisha) In that work, he made the argument that, if it is really true that these plants are perfectly safe (“accidents never happen”) then why not build them in downtown Tokyo rather than in far-off places? By putting them so far away you lose half the electricity in the wires, and waste all that hot water by pumping it into the ocean instead of delivering it to people’s homes where it could be used for baths and cooking. The book outraged a lot of people – especially in Tokyo – and revealed the hypocrisy of the safety argument.

In the years since then he has published volume after volume on the nuclear power issue – particularly focusing on the absurdity of building a facility that requires absolutely no accidents whatsoever, on an archipelago famous as the earthquake capital of the world. Again and again he made frightening predictions which (as he writes in the introduction to his latest book Fukushima Meltdown (Asahi, 2011) he was always praying would prove wrong. Tragically, they did not. In the present article he reminds readers that the recent earthquake was not the last, but one in a series, and that the situation at Japan’s other nuclear power plants is as dangerous as ever. The nuclear power industry would like us to believe the 3/11 catastrophe was an “exception”. But all accidents are exceptions – as will be the next. CDL

C. Douglas Lummis is the author of Radical Democracy and other books in Japanese and English. A Japan Focus associate, he formerly taught at Tsuda College.

===============================

Earthquakes and Nuclear Power Plants

The nuclear power plants in Japan are ageing rapidly; like cyborgs, they are barely kept in operation by a continuous replacement of parts. And now that Japan has entered a period of earthquake activity and a major accident could happen at any time, the people live in constant state of anxiety.

Seismologists and geologists agree that, after some fifty years of seismic inactivity, with the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (Southern Hyogo Prefecture Earthquake), the country has entered a period of seismic activity. In 2004, the Chuetsu Earthquake hit Niigata Prefecture, doing damage to the village of Yamakoshi. Three years later, in 2007, the Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake severely damaged the nuclear reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. In 2008, there was an earthquake in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures, causing a whole mountain to disappear completely. Then in 2009 the Hamaoka nuclear plant was put in a state of emergency by the Suruga Bay Earthquake. And now, in 2011, we have the 3/11 earthquake offshore from the northeast coast. But the period of seismic activity is expected to continue for decades. From the perspective of seismology, a space of 10 or 15 years is but a moment in time.

Because the Pacific Plate, the largest of the plates that envelop the earth, is in motion, I had predicted that there would be major earthquakes all over the world.

And as I had feared, after the Suruga Bay Earthquake of August 2009 came as a triple shock, it was followed in September and October by earthquakes off Samoa, Sumatra, and Vanuatu, of magnitudes between 7.6 and 8.2. That means three to eleven times the force of the Southern Hyogo Prefecture Earthquake. As you can see in the accompanying chart, all of these quakes occurred around the Pacific Plate as the center, and each was located at the boundary of either that plate or a plate under its influence. Then in the following year, 2010, in January there came the Haiti Earthquake, at the boundary of the Caribbean Plate, pushed by the Pacific and Coco Plates, then in February the huge 8.8 magnitude earthquake offshore from Chile. I was praying that this world scale series of earthquakes would come to an end, but the movement of the Pacific Plate shows no sign of stopping, and led in 2011 to the 3/11 Earthquake in northeastern Japan and the subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.

Is the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant Safe?

There are large seismic faults, capable of producing earthquakes at the 7 or 8 magnitude level, near each of Japan’s nuclear plants, including the reprocessing plant at Rokkasho. It is hard to believe that there is any nuclear plant that would not be damaged by a magnitude 8 earthquake.

A representative case is the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant itself, where it has become clear that the fault under the sea nearby also extends inland. The Rokkasho plant, where the nuclear waste (death ash) from all the nuclear plants in Japan is collected, is located on land under which the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate meet. That is, the plate that is the greatest danger to the Rokkasho plant, is now in motion deep beneath Japan.

The Rokkasho plant was originally built with the very low earthquake resistance factor of 375 gals. (Translator’s note: The gal, or galileo, is a unit used to measure peak ground acceleration during earthquakes. Unlike the scales measuring an earthquake’s general intensity, it measures actual ground motion in particular locations.) Today its resistance factor has been raised to only 450 gals, despite the fact that recently in Japan earthquakes registering over 2000 gals have been occurring one after another. Worse, the Shimokita Peninsula is an extremely fragile geologic formation that was at the bottom of the sea as recently as the sea rise of the Jomon period (the Flandrian Transgression) 5000 years ago; if an earthquake occurred there it could be completely destroyed.

The Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant is where expended nuclear fuel from all of Japan’s nuclear power plants is collected, and then reprocessed so as to separate out the plutonium, the uranium, and the remaining highly radioactive liquid waste. In short, it is the most dangerous factory in the world.

At the Rokkasho plant, 240 cubic meters of radioactive liquid waste are now stored. A failure to take care of this properly could lead to a nuclear catastrophe surpassing the meltdown of a reactor. This liquid waste continuously generates heat, and must be constantly cooled. But if an earthquake were to damage the cooling pipes or cut off the electricity, the liquid would begin to boil. According to an analysis prepared by the German nuclear industry, an explosion of this facility could expose persons within a 100 kilometer radius from the plant to radiation 10 to 100 times the lethal level, which presumably means instant death.

On April 7, just one month after the 3/11 earthquake in northeastern Japan, there was a large aftershock. At the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant the electricity was shut off. The pool containing nuclear fuel and the radioactive liquid waste were (barely) cooled down by the emergency generators, meaning that Japan was brought to the brink of destruction. But the Japanese media, as usual, paid this almost no notice.

The Hamaoka Nuclear Plant and the Approaching Killer Earthquake

The Hamaoka Nuclear Plant is located at Shizuoka City, on Suruga Bay. Despite predictions of a magnitude 8 earthquake on Suruga Bay, it has continued in operation. If you look at the illustration showing the configuration of the plates beneath the Pacific Ocean, you will see that there is a point at which the Philippine Sea Plate, the huge Pacific Plate, the North American Plate, and the Eurasian Plate all meet; directly over that point is the Japanese Archipelago. And the very center of the area where these four plates press together is Shizuoka.

As shown in the chart below, large scale earthquakes in the eastern and southern seas have occurred regularly at intervals of between 100 and 250 years. Today in 2011, 157 years have passed since the Great Ansei Earthquake of 1854, so we are in a period when the next big one could come at any time. And the predicted center of this expected major earthquake is – though this is hard to believe – exactly under the location of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant. (Editor’s note: On May 6, 2011, following a request from Prime Minister Kan, the Hamaoka Plant was temporarily closed in light of the prediction that there was an 87% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or more would strike the area in the next thirty years.)

And sonar readings at the site indicate that from thirty years back the Eurasian plate has been bending, which means that it is in a condition where it can be expected eventually to spring back.

--Hirose Takashi and C. Douglas Lummis, "The Nuclear Disaster That Could Destroy Japan – On the danger of a killer earthquake in the Japanese Archipelago," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 21 No 2, May 23, 2011.

aestheticization and its pitfalls, again

Image source: http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/view.pl?id=114346

The Japanese fashion everything: They twist chopsticks; they wrap the trunks of trees and rocks; they redesign the shape of ponds and waterfalls to make them look realer than real. They hold a long and carefully rippled mirror up to nature.

It is no wonder that the world has been astounded by anime, manga and all varieties of Japanese presentational design. All Japanese culture is fantasy. A fantasy that is as real as it gets.

--Roger Pulvers, 'Fantasy really is reality in many aspects of Japanese life and culture', in The Japan Times, 24 April 2011.

*       *       *

Many, way too many Western scholars seem to find endless pleasure in extolling and popularising the qualities of Japanese aesthetics while neglecting or altogether omitting its underside (which would no doubt alienate their audiences, at least in Japan). As far as the appreciation of nature is concerned, I wonder if these scholars would be as enthusiastic and light-hearted if they really realised some of the disturbing implications of the attitudes they so readily praise.

Pulvers overstates his case when he says that the Japanese 'fashion everything' in nature. They do fashion certain things you can put on a list - say, a limited number of scenic sites (the Nihon sankei e.g.), cherry blossom viewing in the spring, moon viewing in autumn, and so on and so on. However, the general ugliness of Japan's cities and towns, with their flat sterile surfaces and exposed power lines, their wasteful, chaotic proliferation of vending machines, convenience stores and neon signs, as well as the pitiful sight of mountains, rivers and seashores increasingly choked with concrete, belie the famed Japanese love of and 'oneness' with nature. 

What all these things show instead is an appalling aesthetic and ecological insensitivity to those parts of nature which have not been popularised in the collective consciousness and thereby subject to strict rules of seeing and experiencing that generally rule out the unpredictable. While the Japanese delight in viewing the cherry blossoms in spring and know exactly how to behave and what to say under these highly structured circumstances, seldom does such admiration extend to a broader, spontaneous appreciation of and concern for the natural world outside certain collectively favoured features. They only seem to be comfortable when touching 'nature' from a safe distance, by freezing and putting walls around things.

These risk-averse attitudes certainly stem from the harshness of living in an overcrowded land at the mercy of nature's unpredictability and prone to earthquakes, typhoons, floods, mudslides. Yet they can also be seen as an integral part of the ingrained Japanese tendency to focus on the instant or small detail, as epitomised in a haiku poem. While this ability to 'narrow the focus' has a praiseworthy dimension in its elegance and perfectionism, it also has a dark underside. As Alex Kerr, citing the architect Sei Takeyama, puts it in his Dogs and Demons, this leads the Japanese people to ignore and become desensitised to the ugliness in their environment:

You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it. 

[...]

Photographers and moviemakers in Japan must carefully calculate how to frame each shot to preserve the illusion of natural beauty. The Japanese are surrounded by books and posters that feature precisely trimmed shots of nature - mostly close-ups of such details as the walkway into an old temple grounds or a leaf swirling in a mountain pool - with accompanying slogans praising the Japanese love of nature, the seasons and so forth.

[...]

It is impossible to get through a single day in Japan without seeing some reference - in paper, plastic, chrome, celluloid, or neon - to autumn foliage, spring blossoms, flowing rivers, and seaside pines. Yet it is very possible to go for months or even years without seeing the real thing in its unspoiled form. Camouflaged by propaganda and symbols, supported by a complacent public, and directed by a bureaucracy on autopilot, the line of tanks moves on: laying concrete over rivers and seashores, reforesting the hills, and dumping industrial waste. (pp. 74-76)

  

And thus are some of the disquieting aesthetic and ecological implications of favouring 'fantasy' - and... er... 'narrow focus', I'd add - over the truth. Then there is also, of course, the ethical dimension of it all, but that's another long story, about which I've already written more than enough.

Perplexities, in a word.

transience, 'gaman' and the naked human heart

Falling cherry blossoms at Yasukuni shrine
Photo by DK

This is the unstable world and
we in it unstable and our houses
  --Basil Bunting, from Chomei at Toyama.*


Time out of mind, East and West, the aestheticisation of transience - that is, the aesthetic association of human impermanence with evanescent phenomena of nature like the mutability of seasons, snow, the changing colour of leaves, falling cherry blossoms - has been a way of coping with uncertainty, decay, suffering, loss, and all sorts of predicaments and catastrophes beyond our control.

In Japan it has been an integral part of the country's cultural tradition, shaped by the Buddhist worldview and invariably revived at times of national disaster and soul-searching, as epitomised in the opening lines of Kamo no Chomei's poignant evocation of the great earthquake of Genryaku, which in 1185 wrought havoc in the Kyoto region:

The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings. It might be imagined that the houses, great and small, which vie roof against proud roof in the capital remain unchanged from one generation to the next, but when we examine whether this is true, how few are the houses that were there of old. Some were burnt last year and only since rebuilt; great houses have crumbled into hovels and those who dwell in them have fallen no less. (Hojoki / An Account of My Hut; trans. by Donald Keene)

It isn't thus surprising to find articles such as this recent one anticipating the coming cherry blossom viewing season as a source of both sorrow and solace under the current devastating circumstances. I have no doubt it will be so. Yet, at the same time, I feel somewhat perplexed and uneasy when I read passages like the following, unwittingly linking cherry blossoms with national identity - with a quintessential Japaneseness:

Consider this Japanese paradox: The delicate cherry blossom was also the symbol of the samurai, the epitome of Japanese valor.

The warrior class liked the flowers because they didn't cling to life, but rather showed up for the briefest spell, and fell at the peak of their splendor. In this way, they embodied the spirit of bushido — the way of the warrior that combines stoicism, bravery, and self-sacrifice.

These days, people invoke bushido less often than the common man's down-to-earth version — "gaman." It means gritting your teeth and just getting on with life. When people refer to Japan's salarymen as modern-day samurai, it's taken not so much in a swashbuckling sense but for the way these men in suits endure crushing, monotonous toil, and display unwavering loyalty to a common cause.

And amid death, people of all stripes here are plowing ahead with life, in an orderly and cooperative way. Many are already starting to return to the sites of their devastated homes, and thinking coolheadedly about how to start over amid Japan's biggest catastrophe since World War II.

Scenes of gaman abound: the homeless family sitting around a makeshift fire as snow falls at night, their stoic faces lit up by orange flames. The old man walking his bicycle through an ankle-high lake of mud, his son's wedding picture in the basket. Drivers waiting patiently in line for hours for scarce gasoline in quake-ravaged areas.

--from 'Season of special poignancy: Earthquakes, cherry blossoms traditional reminders of mortality' by Joji Sakurai, The Associated Press, in The Japan Times (29 March 2011). 


And the reason why I feel so discomfited is because while I deeply admire these characteristics in the light of the ongoing crisis, I can't help remembering how the intimate connection between cherry blossoms and Japanese national identity, alongside the aesthetic appreciation of transience, were once utilised by the military and politicians of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to promote nationalistic sentiment and its resultant disastrous actions. The Japanese militaristic ethos was recurrently metaphorised through the cherry blossoms' 'virtue' of 'not clinging to their blooming', and utilised for instilling perseverance in hardship, inconvenience, deprivation and self-sacrifice in the name of the Emperor.

In other words, the nationalist aesthetics of the cherry blossoms was a powerful ideological tool for sweetening the bitter pill of servitude under a totalitarian regime.

As Yuriko Saito reminds us in her wonderful book Everyday Aesthetics, the belief that cherry trees embody the Japanese spirit and soul even led the military government to plant cherry trees on those Asian soils that Japan colonised and on the ground of the infamous Yasukuni shrine, which is believed to house the souls of the war dead. And, of course, this aestheticisation of falling cherry blossoms also ultimately served 'as a potent and poignant symbol for falling Kamikaze pilots, whose death was praised and celebrated by the wartime nation' (p. 195).

In view of the radical contrast between the current catastrophe and the Second World War situation, I fully endorse Saito's remark that the aestheticisation of transience can be a lofty and worthwhile goal from a spiritual and existential point of view - as Joji Sakurai argues in reference to the present crisis - but that it can also have dire consequences when utilised for certain social and political purposes, in particular the promotion of nationalism requiring citizens’ sacrifice of their own lives.

In any case, and because history has taught us that all too often cultural-aesthetic nationalism easily and dangerously slides into political nationalism, I'd rather refrain from aestheticising suffering, loss and gaman altogether, including at the present moment.

In this respect, it's worth remembering Ango Sakaguchi (1906-1955), a writer who in the wake of Japan's defeat analysed at length the role of bushido during the Second World War, and outspokenly argued that the country's postwar decadence was more truthful than a wartime Japan built on dangerous illusions like bushido with its extolling of self-restraint and self-sacrifice as not only virtuous but also beautiful (美徳/bitoku = beauty and virtue).

Indeed, I find that Sakaguchi's passionately anticonformist questioning may contain a valuable lesson for the present time:

What is true human nature? It is simply desiring what one desires and disliking what one dislikes. One should like what one likes, love the woman one loves, and get out of the false cloak of what is said to be a just cause and social obligation, and return to the naked heart. Finding this naked human heart is the first step toward restoring humanity. (qtd. in Saito, p. 193)

Japan has already amazed the world with its dignified stiff upper lip and gaman in the face of terrible adversity. Yet wouldn't it be even more amazing if this unspeakable catastrophe acted as a catalyst for restoring the country's lost humanity and shedding some of its past illusions and masks?

Because not accepting one's lot by questioning, criticising and rebelling against injustice is, after all, an integral part of being human, whose recurrent repression entails too high a cost in the long run. As the Irish poet W. B. Yeats phrased it:

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
.........................
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

--from 'Easter 1916'.



And who wants to live in such a stone-hearted society among emotionally atrophied people?


==============================
*Bunting's 1932 verse translation of the 13th-century Japanese prose work Hojoki / An Account of My Hut by Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216).

“And then we came out to see once more the stars”...?

An absolute must read by one of the few, very few Japanese intellectuals who still does his job properly: to rock the boat.

And who can blame him for conflating all these things - Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Bikini Atoll tests, Fukushima - when the nuclear trauma is so deeply seared into the national psyche?

*       *       *

TOKYO POSTCARD
HISTORY REPEATS
by Kenzaburo Oe

The New Yorker

MARCH 28, 2011


By chance, the day before the earthquake, I wrote an article, which was published a few days later, in the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun. The article was about a fisherman of my generation who had been exposed to radiation in 1954, during the hydrogen-bomb testing at Bikini Atoll. I first heard about him when I was nineteen. Later, he devoted his life to denouncing the myth of nuclear deterrence and the arrogance of those who advocated it. Was it a kind of sombre foreboding that led me to evoke that fisherman on the eve of the catastrophe? He has also fought against nuclear power plants and the risk that they pose. I have long contemplated the idea of looking at recent Japanese history through the prism of three groups of people: those who died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who were exposed to the Bikini tests, and the victims of accidents at nuclear facilities. If you consider Japanese history through these stories, the tragedy is self-evident. Today, we can confirm that the risk of nuclear reactors has become a reality. However this unfolding disaster ends—and with all the respect I feel for the human effort deployed to contain it—its significance is not the least bit ambiguous: Japanese history has entered a new phase, and once again we must look at things through the eyes of the victims of nuclear power, of the men and the women who have proved their courage through suffering. The lesson that we learn from the current disaster will depend on whether those who survive it resolve not to repeat their mistakes.

This disaster unites, in a dramatic way, two phenomena: Japan’s vulnerability to earthquakes and the risk presented by nuclear energy. The first is a reality that this country has had to face since the dawn of time. The second, which may turn out to be even more catastrophic than the earthquake and the tsunami, is the work of man. What did Japan learn from the tragedy of Hiroshima? One of the great figures of contemporary Japanese thought, Shuichi Kato, who died in 2008, speaking of atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, recalled a line from “The Pillow Book,” written a thousand years ago by a woman, Sei Shonagon, in which the author evokes “something that seems very far away but is, in fact, very close.” Nuclear disaster seems a distant hypothesis, improbable; the prospect of it is, however, always with us. The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity; they should not draw from the tragedy of Hiroshima a “recipe” for growth. Like earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural calamities, the experience of Hiroshima should be etched into human memory: it was even more dramatic a catastrophe than those natural disasters precisely because it was man-made. To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims.

I was ten years old when Japan was defeated. The following year, the new Constitution was proclaimed. For years afterward, I kept asking myself whether the pacifism written into our Constitution, which included the renunciation of the use of force, and, later, the Three Non-Nuclear Principles (don’t possess, manufacture, or introduce into Japanese territory nuclear weapons) were an accurate representation of the fundamental ideals of postwar Japan. As it happens, Japan has progressively reconstituted its military force, and secret accords made in the nineteen-sixties allowed the United States to introduce nuclear weapons into the archipelago, thereby rendering those three official principles meaningless. The ideals of postwar humanity, however, have not been entirely forgotten. The dead, watching over us, oblige us to respect those ideals, and their memory prevents us from minimizing the pernicious nature of nuclear weaponry in the name of political realism. We are opposed. Therein lies the ambiguity of contemporary Japan: it is a pacifist nation sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella. One hopes that the accident at the Fukushima facility will allow the Japanese to reconnect with the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to recognize the danger of nuclear power, and to put an end to the illusion of the efficacy of deterrence that is advocated by nuclear powers.

When I was at an age that is commonly considered mature, I wrote a novel called “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.” Now, in the final stage of life, I am writing a “last novel.” If I manage to outgrow this current madness, the book that I write will open with the last line of Dante’s Inferno: “And then we came out to see once more the stars.” ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/03/28/110328ta_talk_oe#ixzz1HZhhIUYz

hostage to its own hubris

And yet more disquieting questions (and some wishful thinking).

*       *       *

Spare us shoganai as we face an ominous spring
By Stephen Hesse
The Japan Times
Sunday, March 27, 2011

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fe20110327sh.html

Excerpt:

It is telling that in Japan we don't so much fear human malfeasance, guns in the wrong hands, thieves or murderers; the things that scare us most are the terrors of nature.

As an outsider who has been on the inside here for more than 20 years, it seems to me that the Japanese most fear the deadly power and destruction of nature when it comes without warning, without reason or recourse. Earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and floods would undoubtedly top the list.

And there is something about earthquakes in particular that permits a sort of mass abdication of responsibility.

Earthquakes just happen. The newest cellphones pulse and buzz when geological sensors around the country register that a quake is imminent. But the warnings often come when the shaking has already begun — or just as often, they don't come at all.

We are able to build sturdy, steel-frame houses, but much of each day is spent in offices, schools and on public transportation — all places where safety and structural sturdiness vary from excellent to questionable.

We do what we can to prepare, and we leave the rest to the architects, civil engineers, bureaucrats — and fate. In Japan, fatalism is culturally ingrained, and one of the most commonly used expressions in all manner of circumstances is shoganai (it can't be helped). For foreigners, this can be exasperating, especially for those from nations that embrace "pulling yourself up by your own boot straps." But that's the way it is and we get used to it. It can't be helped.

As a result, when disatrous temblors strike Japan, as they do relatively often, there is minimal finger-pointing. Japanese know that no one is perfect, and nature's wrath surprises even the best of us.

This time, however, Japan has become hostage to its own hubris.

Japan depends on nuclear power for about 30 percent of its electricity, second only to the United States and France. Until now, the threat of a nuclear reactor meltdown has been an abstract gamble that most Japanese citizens, politicians and business leaders have been willing to take.

Nuclear power oversight by the government and inspections by utility giants in the Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe) and Kanto (Tokyo and Yokohama) regions have long been suspect, and since nuclear power was first introduced in 1966, there have been cracks, leaks, injuries and deaths.

Nevertheless, most Japanese — and, in large part, the country's media, too — have turned a blind eye to these failings. After all, we all need electricity.

Ask Japanese what they like most about Japan, and many will reply, "It's safe and convenient."

"Safe" is relative, of course, but it means that we do indeed have few thieves, and no shooters or bombers.

"Convenient" means we can get just about anything we want 24/7. In most cities, electric trains run often and on time, and for as much as 20 hours a day; 24-hour convenience stores sell almost anything you might need, and vending machines save us trips to convenience stores.

We have cellphones that give us 24-hour connections to family, friends and colleagues, to train schedules and tickets, to social networks, global positioning and, of course, pizza delivery.

We have kitchen appliances that perform even the simplest of tasks on our behalf, and we have heated toilet seats with numerous functions that spray, wash and dry.

We have elevators, escalators, electric vehicles — and world-famous neon — as well as high-tech, state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities nationwide.

So as Japan rebounds and rebuilds, one multi-billion-dollar question that must be answered is this: In a society that is totally dependent on electricity and has become wedded to the notion that convenience is the backbone of modernity both now and in the future, how will Japan satisfy its energy needs in the decades to come? U ntil now, about 60 percent of Japan's electricity has been generated using fossil fuels, while about 30 percent has come from nuclear power, and about 8 percent from hydro power. Other renewable sources provide only 2 percent.

Eager to stabilize and reduce carbon emissions, and because fossil fuels, in particular oil and gas, will inevitably become less abundant and more expensive worldwide as time goes on, Japan has been aiming to raise nuclear power generation to 40 percent of its overall power-supply mix.

Worldwide, too, because of growing concern about climate change due to human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, as well as other man-made chemicals, nuclear power has been getting a second look from many governments.

Japan in particular faces a power squeeze. It is one of the top three energy consumers in the world, behind the U.S. and China, but is only 16 percent energy self-sufficient, and it has yet to make a strong commitment to developing alternative energy sources.

Japan's future prosperity depends on electricity — lots of it. More efficiency can help, but at present, oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear energy power this nation. Now, with the spectre of radiation spreading across the Kanto plain and its 40-odd million people, Japanese citizens are going to need a whole lot of convincing that nuclear reactors can be made fail-safe.

The government can no longer cow its citizens as easily as it once could. And, who knows, even the media may start to actively fulfil its duty in a democracy to seek out and share information with the public, and call for accountability when appropriate.

[my emphases]

are the Japanese different?

Not that I fully agree with all the viewpoints expressed, but this article is a must read under the current circumstances (and beyond).

The text, however, neglects a key point that is behind many of Japan's current woes and troubles: the Japanese hypersensitivity to criticism (esp. when it comes from foreigners) as well as their ingrained inability to gracefully deal with it and act accordingly.

*       *       *

Are the Japanese different?
By Kevin Voigt, CNN
March 25, 2011

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/25/Japan.quake.culture/index.html?hpt=C1

Excerpt:

The Fukushima plant problems points toward Japan's "information problem ... the unwillingness to openly discuss bad news and to play down, disguise or even lie about unfortunate or embarrassing news," said Alex Kerr, an American who has spent much of his life in Japan. "That has been absolutely endemic in the nuclear industry here, and in other domestic industries.

"There's been a lot in the international press at this point at the lack of clarity (in the Fukushima situation),"said Kerr, a cultural critic and author of Lost Japan and Dogs and Demons, the latter which focused in part on Japan's nuclear problems. "What they may not be aware is it's endemic and built into the system -- they simply know no other way."

That sentiment can even be found in Japanese art. "They talk about the shinkei of Mount Fuji," Kerr said. "This is the perfect shape that Mount Fuji should have, the truth, an ideal -- not the actual look of Mount Fuji."

[emphases and links are mine]

the tsunami, the atom, and the cherry blossoms

To those who read French, I vividly recommend this recent text by one of the leading scholars on Japan's cultural geography and landscape:

'Le tsunami, l'atome et les cerisiers', by Augustin Berque
http://culturevisuelle.org/catastrophes/2011/03/19/le-tsunami-l’atome-et-les-cerisiers-augustin-berque/

disquieting questions

... that speak volumes of Japanese politics, its lack of leadership and of democratic and transparency standards.

*       *       *

Japan Extended Reactor’s Life, Despite Warning

Just a month before a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the center of Japan’s nuclear crisis, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the six reactors at the power station despite warnings about its safety.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22nuclear.html?_r=1&hp



TEPCO, Credibility, and the Japanese Crisis

Since the 9.0 quake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11 and the situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant rapidly degenerated, Fukushima residents and politicians, those most afflicted by the current crisis, have criticized the lack of information provided by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the government. Prefectures with a concentration of nuclear power plants like Fukui and diverse citizens’ groups have also sounded off, condemning the lack of information and delay in releasing critical facts to the public. A particular concern is that the government initially left far too much up to the company, was slow in establishing a headquarters to coordinate joint response, and initially accepted TEPCOs vague description of the situation and assurances, many of which have since turned out to be suspect.
http://japanfocus.org/events/view/52



Japan's Nuclear Crisis: Status of Spent Fuel at Exploded Reactor Buildings Unclear

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) is asking an important question about Japan's nuclear crisis that seems to have been ignored by the media and in announcements from the Japanese government and Japan's nuclear power industry: What is happening with the spent fuel pools located at the top of the buildings housing the Unit 1 and Unit 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant facility? Both reactor buildings have lost their upper structures due to explosions possibly caused by a hydrogen gas build-up (Unit 1 on March 12, Unit 3 on March 14).
http://japanfocus.org/events/view/51

Galapagos syndrome...

... or the beginning of a new sakoku?

Credit: Eddie Gerald/Alamy 

'Galapagos syndrome': Japan's gaze turns inward

27 January 2011
The Times Higher Education Supplement
Castigated for its timidity, a 'risk-averse' generation shuns study abroad, Michael Fitzpatrick writes


The yen has never been mightier and their country never more tied to the global economy, but Japanese students increasingly are turning their backs on studying abroad.

Figures for the UK show that the number of Japanese students has fallen by more than a third in five years, from 6,800 in 2003-04 to 4,505 in 2008-09, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

In a country with a shrinking population - the number of children under 15 has declined for 28 consecutive years - some of the fall can be attributed to demographics, but analysts in Japan see the trend as part of what has been termed "Galapagos syndrome".

Originally said of the country's highly advanced mobile phones that failed to find buyers outside the domestic market, the term is now also applied to a country said to be isolating itself from the rest of the world.

As commentator and blogger Mariko Sanchanta writes: "An official at one of Japan's leading banks recently confided that it was impossible to get young employees to study abroad - fully funded by the bank - or even to do an international stint. They feel like they'll fall behind their peers if they go overseas. 'It's so stupid,' grumbled the official, who came from a generation when Japan's best and brightest were dispatched to (the US) to learn English and gain perspective by living overseas."

The decline in the number of Japanese students in the US is even more pronounced than in the UK. According to the US-based Institute of International Education, the country had 30,000 Japanese students in 2008, approximately 60 per cent of the number studying in the US a decade earlier.

Many in Japan are worried about what the figures mean for its export-driven economy, and there is much soul-searching in the media. This has focused on what such reticence says about the country's young - particularly men, who have been variously labelled as "herbivore males", "grass-eaters" or simply Ojo-man ("girly men").

A study by university researchers for the publisher Benesse on the attitudes of children seems to support some of the speculation. It says that Japan's young are less adventurous than previous generations.

"Children fear that in a society with a widening gap between the rich and the poor, making a big mistake will prevent them from moving up in the world, which diminishes their ambition," said Kiyoshi Takeuchi, a professor of educational sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Not only are young people more risk-averse, a belief that home is safe (anzen) and abroad dangerous (abunai) is gaining traction.

Meanwhile, books such as the sensationally titled Don't Let Your Daughter Study Abroad (2007), aimed as an antidote to the unrealistic expectations of young Japanese hoping to study English abroad, do little to promote overseas education.

It is one of a number of books that detail the "horrors" of studying abroad. Its author, Mitsuko Takahashi, a coordinator for overseas Japanese students, paints a dark picture of life outside Japan.

Other texts about foreign perils include the Manual for Women Students Regarding Depravity (1995), published by the Research Institute on the Delinquency Problem. It warns Japanese women to avoid men while studying abroad because "they don't have money" and "want a lot of sex".


Source: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414933