Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

The Ogre

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi exerting efforts for Confrontation, Utter Devastation, and Imposing All Kinds of Sanctions including Economic Sanctions against Myanmar - If she declares to give them up, the Senior General will personally meet her.

Headline in The New Light of Myanmar, the government-controlled newspaper, 5th October 2007.

The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man.

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The Ogre cannot master speech:

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

W.H Auden, August 1968

The Saffron Revolution?

"It is a fascinating moment, fraught with promise, when this spirit of the times, dozing pitifully and apathetically, like a huge wet bird on a branch, suddenly and without a clear reason ... takes off in bold and joyful flight. We all hear the shush of this flight. It stirs our imagination and gives us energy: we begin to act."

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Read: 'Nuns join Saffron Revolution'

The Killers in the Killing Fields

I have never seen the sites of the Nazi Holocaust, but S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, is one of the most impressive and disturbing memorials to a historical event that I've ever visited. I thought of it again yesterday after the arrest of Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, and the man held by some historians as most responsible for 200,000 executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

As a place of commemoration, it derives its power from its modesty: the banal location in the quiet Tuol Sleng suburb; the shabbiness of the concrete cells and the crudeness of the clumsily forged bars and shackles; and above all, the hundreds of black and white photographs (of 6000 which survive) of the doomed prisoners simply displayed on the walls.

Immediately after my own visit I read Voices from S-1: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David Chandler, which is remarkable for combining scholarship with compellingly personal reflection on the broadest significance of the cruelty which was practised there. "As a historian and a student of literature I have tried over the years to control the data I deal with and to comprehend the writings that I read," he records. "When I have immersed myself in the S-21 archive, the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning."

Peace in our time

Last year, in an essay on the writer, Donald Richie, I remarked on an interesting aspect of intellectual life in Japan: the absence of an lasting work of ex-patriate literature, of a gaijin to match Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway or Paul Bowles. It's too early to be sure, but I think I may have found one. He's 40 years old, he comes from Ossett in West Yorkshire, and his name is David Peace.

Mr Peace has lived in Tokyo for 13 years. Steadily and quietly, he has built a reputation with six uncompromising and distinctive works of fiction: the Red Riding Quarter, four novels about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, GB84, about the Miners' Strike and The Damned United about Brian Clough and Leeds United. I haven't read his earlier books (except for an extract in Granta - David Peace was one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in their last reckoning of that list four years ago). I will now. His latest novel, Tokyo Year Zero, is the best novel in English about Japan that I have seen.

I wish that I had time to write a full, formal review because there is much to say. It needs to be pointed out at the start that this kind of writing is not everyone's bag of senbei. On the face of it, it is a historical crime novel, based on the true story of Yoshio Kodaira, a prodigious sex murderer of US-occupied Tokyo (whose tale is also told, briefly, but rather effectively, in Mark Schreiber's Shocking Crimes of Post-War Japan), and the Tokyo detectives who investigated his crimes. There is a developing plot, much suspense, and a denouement in which things are revealed to have been not what they seemed. But crime fiction in itself has never interested me all that much, and the brilliance of this book lies not in its plotting, but in its language, and the atmosphere which it conveys - the clotted, choking, migraine world of Tokyo in August 1946, a product not only of the intense physical heat, but of the neurotic, guilt-stricken atmosphere of fear and lies in the year after the end of the war.

Oink! Oink!

The flap over Princess Masako, Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne, a book about the Japanese Imperial family by the Australian journalist, Ben Hills, seemed to have come and gone rather quickly. It was last February.that Mr Hill's Japanese publisher, Kodansha, dropped its plans to publish a translation of the book, after the Imperial Household Agency threw a wobbly over its sneering portrayal of life inside the Palace. (see my post on the subject here). But six months later, the book has found a new Japanese publisher, and stirred predictable outrage among the sound truck-driving, Yasukuni Shrine-loving, Nanking Massacre-denying classes.

As the Kyodo news agency reports:

'Princess Masako' author, publisher threatened ahead of translation

SYDNEY, Aug. 21  KYODO   
     The Australian journalist who wrote a controversial biography of Japan's Crown Princess Masako has received death threats ahead of the release of the Japanese translation of his book.
     The Tokyo-based publisher of the translation, Daisan-Shokan, has also reported being targeted in protests by right-wing nationalist groups.
     The translation of ''Princess Masako, Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne'' by Ben Hills is due to be published in early September.
     Hills told Kyodo News he has received several e-mail death threats, via his website, in the lead-up to the Japanese publication.
     ''I have had death threats. They were saying things like, 'Die white pork!' They were quite racist,'' Hills said.

None of that is particularly surprising except for one thing.

WHITE PORK?

What is going on with Die white pork?

Farewell, Great Pole

Few writers, of fiction or non-fiction, have made as great an impression on me as the Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last week. I shy away from gooey words like "inspiration", but that is what he was to a generation of journalists from the time his work started appearing in English translation in the laste 1980s Granta in . Many journalists spend their lives inwardly despising the mundane, factual material with which they work, and yearning for the freedom to create something imaginative and transcendent. Kapuscinski showed that out of the day to day gleanings of an overstretched hack (could there be a correspondent's job less glamorous than working for the Polish Press Agency?), books of intense intellect and literary brilliance could be fashioned. He did for reporters what Faulkner did for postmasters and T.S. Eliot for bank managers. After him, there are no excuses.

Kapuscinski had many imitators (me - to a certain extent - included), and it is when you try to emulate his writing that you fully realise how much there is to it. The personal courage in hair-raising situations, the evocations of the state of extreme personal fear (doused in benzene at the burning roadblocks, stumbling through the snow a few minutes away from freezing to death) are what many readers remember. But plainly risking one's life doesn't in itself make anyone a good writer. Many of the obituaries have emphasised Kapuscinksi's role as a reporter of under-reported places and people in the Third World, but that doesn't explain him either. For a start, there are serious questions about the factual accuracy of some of his work (he seems, at the very least, to have omitted and embellished for dramatic effect - see here and here, for example). Africa and Latin America are the two regions of the world in which I have least interest and less general knowledge, but The Soccer War, which is largely about forgotten names such as Nkrumah and Lumumba, one of the most remarkable pieces of reportage I have read.

Kapuscinski's subject matter is not the most important thing about him. His brilliance is in his gift for dramatic narrative, knitted together with moments of intense emotion and flashes of analytical clarity; his passion for that "knowedge such as one gathers at the crossroads of history and philosophy"; and the bizarre, seemingly disjointed, rag-bag forms in which he structured his books, which do so much to convey the confusion and complexity which was his true subject. Kapuscinski reported from the ground, then read and read and read on and around and over the subject, and then wrote it up with just enough of himself, and never too much, and with the ambition, not of being comprehensive or balanced, or even fair - but of being thrilling.

I could go on . . . Quicker, though, to list a few of the greatest Kapuscinskian quotations and moments.

Ars Amoris Nipponica

Nowhere else in Tokyo do Japanese and foreigners interact so intensely as in that great cosmopolitan melting pot known as Roppongi. Lotus-eating paradise to some, to others a pathetic pick-up strip, Roppongi is the place where J-Girls and foreign Charisma Men congregate every weekend to find one another. It's an erotic jungle, as hazard-strewn as Borneo, New Guinea or the Upper Amazon. But finally, a Japanese publisher has come up with a Baedeker to guide the first timer through Roppongi's elaborate mating rituals.

It's called Roppongi English and it has been fully scanned in by the excellent Japan Probe blog. No young Japanese lady on the pull can afford not to read it, immediately.

Watashi wa ... Charisma Man .... desu

Committed - and apparently rather angry - Asia Exile reader Andrew Milner posted the following comment below my last post.

Those 'international brand' malls in Tokyo (or even Karuizawa) can be better than a bar when it comes to "chatting up chicks". But don't waste your time with White women. They wouldn't respond even if you were the last man on earth on the earth's last day. Misogynist? Male chauvinist? What me? Just hard won experience. If White women don't dump feminism soon, the Caucasian race is en-route to being subsumed by Asia.

Whoooah, Andrew! Easy, Tiger! I throw the question open to readers of this blog, essay-style. "'White feminists are endangering the Caucasian race.' Discuss."

Is Andrew right that the Feminazis are losing the genetic race to lovely J-Chicks? Or could it be that Andrew - goodness, I hesitate to suggest it! - has allowed personal complications while "chatting up chicks" to colour his view of Womankind?

You, the committed reader, shall be the judge.

Pondering Andrew's observation, I was reminded of one of the most beloved and enduring figures of gaijin popular culture, the cartoon superhero, Charisma Man.

(r) The Big Black Hole: Two books on North Korea

[Originally posted December 2005]

THIS IS PARADISE: My North Korean Childhood
by Hyok Kang with Philippe Grangereau, tr. Shaun Whiteside
Little, Brown, £9.99; 164pp

ROGUE REGIME: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea
by Jasper Becker
Oxford University Press, £16.00, 300pp

During the catastrophic food shortages of the mid-1990s, as North Korean towns and villages slithered unstoppably from hardship to hunger and into outright famine, children like Hyok Kang found ever more grotesque and ingenious ways of fending off starvation. Floods, drought and corruption had made rice and meat so scarce that they were unaffordable. Creeping like thieves to avoid vigilant adults and guard dogs, already scooped and stunted by malnutrition, Hyok and his gang of little friends tested the limits of the edible.

Chickens, dogs and cats quickly disappeared from towns and farms. At harvest time, children ran out into the fields to pluck the freshly sown seeds from the furrows. They feasted on raw sparrows and quails; crows they fried on a brazier. But soon the birds had deserted the barren fields and the perch and loach had been fished to extinction in the ponds.

Then they started on grasshoppers and dragonflies (“Grilled,” Hyok Kang tells us, “the flesh of fat dragonflies tastes a bit like pork.”) Rats were hunted down, not only for their flesh, but for the grain and corn cobs which they stored in their underground larders. Families drank soup made out of boiled pepper leaves, and the verges were stripped of pigweed and dandelion.

Smilingly Excluded: an essay on Donald Richie

[This piece appears in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. A taster is attached below: to read the full review click here.]

The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 by Donald Richie ed. Leza Lowitz · Stone Bridge, 494 pp, £13.99

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents, chief among them the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of sub-Hemingway machismo and lumbering Japonaiserie (‘he picked up his katana, made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own – isn’t this odd?’ Over sixty years in Japan, he has been a reporter, tour guide, cinema critic, film director, print-maker, novelist, travel writer, editor, teacher, subtitler, public speaker and actor. Apart from fiction, both short and long, and countless newspaper columns and reviews, he has published books about film, art, Zen, history, tattoos, gardens, temples, phallic symbols, food and bonsai. He has been a friend to famous and talented foreigners and to a cross-section of the most interesting Japanese of the second half of the 20th century. The index to The Japan Journals consists of a list of Richie’s acquaintances, followed by their professions. The first page alone includes Akihito (emperor), Akira (barboy), Tadashi Asami (tattooed man), John Ashbery (poet), Richard Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author).

He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from all over the city because the intervening buildings had recently been incinerated by American bombs; he is still going strong today, as the Japanese nervously brace themselves for their third period of postwar economic growth. Hardly a month passes in Tokyo without a public appearance by Donald, implausibly spry and dapper at 82, reading from his new book of criticism at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club or introducing a season of Ozu films at International House. Why then – outside Japan, at least – should he be so little known?

Read on . . .