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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 . . .

Nightwork, fieldwork

Among the smaller, but more intriguing, sub-genres of writing on Japan are books by foreign authors who have worked in the mizu shobai – the ‘water trade’ or Japanese night time entertainment business. Since the death of Lucie Blackman, the young British woman allegedly killed in 2000 by a man she met while working as a club hostess, it’s reasonable to guess that there won’t be many more of these. But three or four of the most interesting books on my Japan bookshelf fall into the category, plus a couple more I haven’t yet got round to reading.

Most of these, naturally enough, are by women, because women occupy the central place in the mizu shobai. John David Morley’s autobiographical novel Pictures from the Water Trade is a fine and underrated book, but it is about a visitor, rather than a worker, in the Floating World. The first, and the best, account I know of is Angela Carter’s essay ‘Poor Butterfly’ in her non-fiction collection Nothing Sacred. The crime novelist Mo Hayder worked as a hostess in Roppongi to research her luridly packaged novel Tokyo (which I haven’t yet read), and even the extravagantly bespectacled Sarah Dunant, post-modernist’s crumpet, late of BBC2’s Late Show, did a stint in a Ginza hostess club. (She wrote an interesting piece about for The Times after the discovery of Lucie Blackman’s body in 2001 which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be on line.)

I have just read the book which, as a far as I know, is the only academic treatment of the modern mizu shobai (excluding writing about the world of the geisha). Anne Allison is a professor at Duke University who spent four months in 1981 working in ‘Bijo”, the pseudonym she gives to an up market hostess club in Roppongi. In 1994, she published Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club, an anthropological study of girls who light cigarettes, pour whisky, and flirt for a living, and the men who pay them to do it.

A mode of style, an exquisite fancy

Years ago I came across a quotation from Oscar Wilde to the effect that the Japanese do not exist - they are "an exquisite fancy of art". I've been on the look out for the source ever since. Now, of course, it is just a Google away.

It turns out to be from an 1889 essay of Oscar's called The Decay of Lying: An Observation. It's in the form of a dialogue between two typically irritating aesthetes named Cyril and Vivian. It begins thus:

A DIALOGUE

Persons: Cyril and Vivian
Scene: the Library of a country house in Nottinghamshire

CYRIL: [coming in through the open window from the terrace] My dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

VIVIAN: Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her . . . blah, blah, blahedy-blah . . .

Vivian is a chap, by the way.

It takes a bit of getting used to but, as usual with Oscar, perseverance is quickly rewarded. The passage on Japan comes towards the end. When I first saw the quotation from it years ago, I took it to be an example of what has become known as Orientalism, the distancing and exoticising of a foreign culture,a habit to which the imperial British over the years have been particularly prone. In fact, the opposite is true.

Here is the passage (it's Vivian speaking, as usual):

Elementary, my dear Peepo

Among its many unique institutions, Japan has the cuddliest police force in the world. They really are sweeties, the Japanese rozzers, and just the sight of them provokes feelings of tender protectiveness more often aroused by children or small, appealing animals. There they go, in their neat, bright uniforms and their clunky, old-fashioned bikes, toddling up and down the highways of the world’s least crime-stricken society. It’s hard to believe that their guns are real, and impossible to imagine them ever being fired (prudently, they are attached to their uniforms by a cord, like a child’s mittens). They are one of the things that impart to Tokyo it’s quaint, Trumpton atmosphere: a tribe of earnest boy scouts, protecting the city from evil-doers.

For giving directions to tourists, lending train fares to stranded drunks, and adding to the general level of cosiness, the Japanese police cannot be faulted. When it comes to solving crimes, however, the record is patchier.

Take the murder of Hitoshi Igarashi, which will enter legal oblivion on 11th July, as the fifteen year statute of limitations reaches its deadline.

The Queen and the Geisha

Mineko Iwasaki describes herself as the finest geisha of her generation, but she owes her fame beyond the narrow world of Kyoto's Gion quarter to a young American who visited her in the 1990s. His name was Arthur Golden, he was the well connected friend of friends of hers, and he was struggling to novel a book about geisha. Mineko told him all she could, without much expectation that a book would ever appear. Years did indeed pass, and she heard nothing more.

Then Memoirs of a Geisha was published, and became a bestseller all over the world. The Japanese translation contained fulsome thanks from Arthue to Mineko for all her help and inspiration. She was enraged.

The reason was the account in Golden's novel of a practice he calls mizuage, the selling of a young geiko's virginity to the highest bidder. Mineko claimed that, since the novel was clearly based on her life, readers would assume that she herself had prostituted herself as a young woman. Arthur Golden's denials notwithstanding she sued him. Eventually, tthey reached an out of court settlement which both refuse to talk about.

I interviewed Mineko around this time. She transmitted an icy, spiky, controlled fury. A spate of geisha books followed in English, cashing in on the success of Memoirs, and eventually the Spielberg-produced film. And Mineko herself published a ghost-written book: Geisha of Gion: The Memoir of Mineko Iwasaki, which I have been looking at this morning. It's not a particularly compelling read, but it does contain a curious anecdote about Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

Mineko, who comes across as what used to be called "a spirited girl" (or less politely as "a stroppy cow"), had already had one run in with the British Royal Family. Prince Charles was being entertained by her at a famous Kyoto restaurant and, without being asked signed her fan.

Mineko blew her stack.

The Big Black Hole: Two books on North Korea

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.

Blogs of Innocence and Experience

I was a hesitant recruit to blogging, but after a week and a half I am enjoying this. It is one more demand on time, of which there is never enough in the day anyway. I like to polish and worry over what I write, whereas a blog is, or should be, fifty per cent spontaneous. But perhaps it will suit me, for I am a show off, if a shy one. And then there is the novelty of working in this unfamiliar, marginal writing space, unconstrained by word count, time and the wisdom or folly of editors.

A newspaper article is an artefact, fixed and finished as soon as it is printed, but a weblog is provisional, a work-in-progress; almost alive. It can be constantly refined and updated. Errors of fact and lapses of style can be corrected at a stroke. And then there are images and moving pictures, and sound files, and links... It feels like the birth of a new literary medium, which doesn’t happen many times in a lifetime, and it’s exciting to get stuck in before the conventions become fixed and the hierarchies established.

Thomas Nashe would have had a weblog, if he’d been born 400 years later, and so would Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. William Blake would have had an extravagant multi-media website, complete with audio files recording his conversations with angels, and George Orwell would have been a furious blogger, although clueless about the technical aspects. Who else?

Some of what I will write about here will fall under the category of ‘Current Affairs’, but not all. Much of it will be about Japan, where I live, but also about Korea and south-east Asia, the other places I am paid to worry about, as well as the conflicts I am sent to cover from time to time, such as Iraq. Perhaps I’ll also write about this strange, untethered life I lead: in Asia, but not of it, looking out at the world from inside a soap bubble floating one floor up above west-central Tokyo.

I’ll try to post something most days. Comments, criticism, ideas and links are welcome.