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Greens denounce 'Knight of the Chainsaw'

Environmental groups are demanding that the Queen withdraw the award of a knighthood to a Malaysian tycoon accused of making his fortune from the illegal destruction of huge areas of tropical rainforest.

The announcement of the honour for Tiong Hiew King, billionaire chairman of the Rimbunan Hijau conglomerate, comes just six weeks after Prince Charles launched an internet initiative to preserve the world’s dwindling rainforests and prevent “catastrophic climate change”.

To add to the embarrassment, Mr Tiong has been calling himself “Sir” Hiew King although, as the recipient of an honorary, rather than a full, knighthood, he is not entitled to use this style.

“Tiong Hiew King is commonly known to be one of the chief people responsible for widespread illegal logging in both Papua New Guinea and other countries,” said Lukas Straumann of the Bruno Manser Foundation, which campaigns for the indigenous inhabitants of the rainforests. “He is unfit for a knighthood and we call upon the Queen to deprive him of this honour.”

Mr Tiong, 71, was rated by Forbes magazine as the 20th  richest man in south-east Asia with a net worth of US dollars 1.1 billion in oil palm plantations, information technology, hotels and travel and newspapers in thirteen countries, including China, Indonesia and Russia,. But his biggest business is the one with which he founded his conglomerate in 1975 - logging tropical timber.

Particle Plague: Hay Fever in Japan

[It's the beginning of one of the two most beautiful times of the year in Japan. But out on the Musashi Plain, the cedar trees are vomiting forth clouds of pollen. Times readers will have seen my important story last week about how, as well 32 million humans, Japan's Snow Monkeys are being tormented by the pollen allergy. Here is a piece I wrote for the Independent a few years ago about life with kafunsho.]

It begins as it does every year in this season: on the first of the sunny days of March, I am woken from sleep when, with a brief tickle of warning, my nose explodes. Between bed and bathroom, I sneeze another half a dozen times; by the time I've got my hands on a piece of tissue paper, my nose is drooling and my eyes feel as if they are being gently buffed with sandpaper. I have had only one other experience like it - six years ago, when I caught a dose of the notoriously powerful tear gas used by the South Korean riot police. This is peaceful Tokyo, but for these few weeks - between the first of the spring sunshine and the passing of the cherry blossom - it is takes on the look of a place under chemical and biological attack.

Outside, people wear white surgical masks over their mouths and noses; even those with perfect eyesight have wide protective spectacles. Salarymen weep into their newspapers; office ladies fumble with nose sprays and eyedrops. For this is the season of hay fever, and across Tokyo millions of people are suffering like me.

British Minister: Global Warming Could Bring War

[Here's a fuller version my piece from today's paper, which ran rather small . . .]

Global warming will increase the risk of war, conflict and terrorism and represents perhaps the greatest challenge to stability and security in the world, the British foreign office minister, Bill Rammell warned an international gathering yesterday.

Speaking at a conference on climate change and security in Tokyo, Mr Rammell said that climate change could ruin livelihoods, force entire populations out of their homes, and pitch poor nations against rich ones, increasing competition for land, food and resources. He predicted a ten-fold increase in piracy as suffering populations seized scarce resources form the high seas, and increased radicalisation of impoverished people leading to future terrorist attacks.

“Who, hand on heart, can say for sure that countries wouldn’t decide to use armed force to ensure that their citizens had access to life-giving resources taken away by their neighbours?’ he asked the audience of politicians, military officers and defence officials from Britain and Japan. “It’s not difficult to imagine how the ‘have-nots’ could be radicalised by someone saying, ‘Those rich western countries created global warming, and now they are buying up the world’s food stocks, leaving us to starve.’

He added: “We know all too well that it doesn’t take many radicals to disrupt our way of life – and that borders, or even oceans, are no barrier to those bent on killing innocent people and damaging our way of life.”

Days of The Rat: Predictions for 2008

[Tokyo, late December, the blackest hour of the night. At the door of my apartment, a feeble, scratching knock. Outside stands a man so ancient that it is impossible even to guess his age. His dark skin is papery and wrinkled, his eyes are brown pools, and his earlobes hang loose from the weight of the polished rhinoceros horns which pierce them. He presses an object into my hand, picks up his blow pipe, and melts into the night.

It is a twist of parchment containing three or four lumps of a dried out, woody substance. My sniffs of gratification turn into cackles of triumph. My wishes have been granted. My dreams have come true. The future is mine!

Every year this blog solicits predictions for the year ahead from Asia’s most renowned prophets and soothsayers. The results have been lamentable. The Sage of Singapore, whom I consulted for 2006, was a bit of a disappointment. Madam Sosostris, last year’s featured soothsayer, was a disgrace! What was the fatuous old trout on about?

This year I decided to take matters into my own hands. Through contacts among the Dayak people of Borneo, I acquired certain . . . substances, harvested from the rain forest by the timanggong, or animist wizards. When inhaled, in combination with the correct incantations, they open invisible doors which allow glimpses of the future. Men of weak spirit would be driven mad by such visions, but this is a risk which I am prepared to take for you, my readers.

I drop the woody lumps, as instructed, into a cauldron of snake blood, and heat it slowly, breathing in the fumes and muttering the eldritch syllables inked on the parchment. Within moments, I am transported to the jungle. Faces painted with blood and clay flash before my eyes. My ears are filled with the sounds of insects and the screams of animals and humans. The Great Lord of the Forest taps me on the shoulder and whispers in my ear . . . Here is what I see in 2008, Heisei 20, the Year of the Rat . . . ]

Burning Bright

Four of us were driving on Sunday from Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra, to the town of Calang on Aceh’s western coast. It was a seven hour drive; we were five hours in. The road ran along the coast past wide empty beaches of pale sand, and then over high cliffs where gibbons dangled from the trees. It had been almost three years since I was last in Aceh, in the weeks immediately after the tsunami. At that time the destruction of the towns and villages here was complete; even now, there were stretches of the coast which looked as if a disaster had just struck them, with the tall skinny stumps of palm trees jutting up out of inundated marshy swamp.

One hundred and seventy thousand people – the number is no exaggeration – died along this coast in the space of a few minutes on Boxing Day morning. It was the largest single tragedy any human being alive has ever seen. Emotionally, it’s an experience that I hardly began to digest.

But three years later, what had been destroyed was being restored. Houses had been rebuilt, and rice fields had been cleansed and replanted. It was stirring and touching to see it all around. I met a woman whom I had last seen in a refugee camp, stunned with grief after the loss of her three children; now she had a new home and new 16 month old daughter. I saw the mosque which had been the only thing left standing in her village. The community had left a corner of it broken and unrestored, in case people should ever forget about the tsunami.

It had been a long, exhausting journey and the four of us in the jeep were quiet as the sun set and darkness came down. But I was filled with thoughts of how lucky I was to be here, how thrilling it was to be driving along this bumpy road through the bush – here, now, alive, with friends, surrounded by the timeless sea and trees. The road turned away from the coast and up through the forest, with a steep cliff above to the right and a thicketed plunge below to the left. The lamps of the jeep cast a wide oval on the road ahead. I was daydreaming (I really was) about travellers of long ago, who spent days and weeks rather than mere hours making journeys like this, and of the dangers and monsters which threatened their imaginations.

To the right of the road, a dim shape became suddenly visible. At first I took it to be a dog – but it was much too big to be a dog. Quickly it moved across the road and its shape and colour flared up in the illumination of the headlamps. At the same moment, everyone in the car exclaimed.

Dreams in Bali

[Hello again. Here's a post I wrote for another Times blog, 'Across the Pond', about US poltiics and the presidential elections.]

On the face of it, Asia is an unlikely place from which to pontificate on the US presidential election, and I am an unlikely pontificator. Drastic barriers of culture and language, the world’s largest ocean, and hours of time difference and separate Tokyo, Beijing and Bangkok from Washington, New York and LA. Compared to Europe, the US, for better or worse, has few historical, colonial associations with Asia. Personally, I have set foot in America three times in my life, and never for more than a few days.

But the lives of people in Asia have been profoundly affected by political decisions made in the United States. To a greater extent than Europeans, American actions over the past sixty years have been a marked blight, as well as a blessing. Twice in living memory, in Vietnam and in Korea, American troops have fought disastrous wars on Asian soil. Large concentrations of US troops remain in South Korea and Japan, arousing mixed feelings, at best. Of course, the brightest Asian students still compete to win places at US universities, American ideals of self-betterment and democracy inspire Asian politicians, and people of all backgrounds are avid consumers of American popular culture. In Europe, sentiments towards the US tend to veer between extremes of admiration and contempt; in Asia, the polarisation is less extreme, but there is an general and often unstated ambivalence about the vastness of American US power, and a scepticism about how much the American public and American their politicians understand or even care about the world’s largest continent.

The interaction between US politicians and Asia has been one of the most interesting things about a frequently boring and frustrating event – the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, where I write this. Here representatives of the negative American stereotype – arrogant, indifferent and patronising – have intersected with other Americans making an effort to putting over a very different image of responsiveness and responsibility.

I touched on some of this in my piece in this morning’s newspaper. To oversimplify: 190 governments have gathered in Bali to plan the next stage in the struggle against global warming. The European Union favours the kind of approach to the reduction of greenhouse gases on which the European Union has been created – rules and targets and commitments, agreed in detail, and legally binding on everyone. The US, at least the Bush administration, prefers a situation in which countries come up with their own targets, if any – if there are to be binding goals, it certainly doesn’t want any of them agreed this week.

The final document is being negotiated as I write. I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the two arguments (although the alert among you may be able to work out where my sympathies lie). The Bali International Convention Centre is full of environmentalists heaping contumely on the US; it is important to filter most of this out. But, honestly, in its press conferences at least, the US delegation has failed to impress.

It is led by Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs at the State Department. The expansive vagueness of this job description leads me to suspect that she is valued for her PR and presentational skills – and Ms D does have a certain auntyish charm. Attending one of her press conference is like standing as a five year old in front of your primary schoolteacher as she tells you it doesn’t matter that you have wet your knickers, but that you should try to make sure that it never happens again.

The real star is a bloke called James Connaughton, who opens new universes of meaning in the world oily.

Hot News

It's very hot in Japan, in fact it has literally never been hotter. Today in the otherwise obscure municipality of Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture, a temperature of 40.9 degrees centigrade was measured, higher than the Japan Meteorological Agency's previous record of 40.8 C (Yamagata, 1933).

Steeping outside into the sun you feel as if you have been boffed on the head by a large, sweaty, sand-filled sock. It's not just the heat and humidity so much as the thought of the solar radiation beating down around and into you. You can almost feel it cooking your insides, like a plastic container of curry rice in a convenience store microwave.

No wonder, then, that so many people are seeking relief in swimming pools like the one at Tokyo Summerland, pictured above.

Yes, underneath the rubber rings, trunks and congealing Ambre Solaire, that's a swimming pool.

The funniest thing of all is when they switch on the wave machine. Click here to see what happens.

(Clip by CScout Japan, via Plastic Bamboo.)

'The Tide is High'

Anyone interested in the plight of the Carteret Islands should look at a podcast by the estimable Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, with whom I travelled there last December. Beautiful images and an interesting commentary, including interviews with the Carteret islanders themselves.

The picture above was taken on the fishing boat which took us over to the islands. Jeremy is on the right.

Blubber on their faces

Greenpeace is too shrewd and media-conscious an organisation to display any outward sign of satisfaction at the news today that the Japanese feet is abandoning its whaling hunt after a disastrous fire – their statement a few hours ago was dignified and measured, rightly containing expressions of condolence for the loss of the Japanese sailor who died in the accident. But behind closed doors the environmentalists must giving thanks to the Green Gods.

The fire and the abandonment of the hunt is an unqualified disaster for the Japanese side, coming as it does during an aggressive push to force a lifting of the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. When the accident happened the whalers were looking rather good, after their encounter with the self-styled environmental “pirates” of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Sea Shepherd’s militant, confrontational tactics make Greenpeace look like a bunch of old ladies, but this time they backfired. After squirting the Japanese decks with acid “stink bombs”, two of the activists got lost for seven hours in icy seas and were only found after a search in which the whalers, in gracious and seamanlike spirit, also took part. Sea Shepherd backed off soon after, having run out of fuel, and the Greenpeace boat Esperanza chugged into the picture. Then, on 15th February, came the devastating fire.

The Institute of Cetacean Research, the Japanese government’s whaling propaganda arm, has given few details about the accident – and so feeble and compliant is the Japanese media on such matters that they have not been pressed for any. But it was clearly a bad fire. One man died (apparently of asphyxiation, rather than burns). And the Nisshin Maru, the factory ship and hub of the whole operation, was crippled.

This was a gift for Greenpeace. They no longer had to ask the whalers to stop killing whales, since such activity was now out of the question. They were able to offer their own help in towing the stricken vessel away – while repeatedly pointing out the danger which a damaged and oil-laden ship posed to the purity of the Antarctic landscape and a nearby colony of nervous penguins. In this, they were backed up by the prime minister of New Zealand, Helen Clarke, who helpfully demanded that the Japanese leave pronto.

For a fortnight, the whalers frantically fiddled and tinkered with their maimed ship, but it was no good. The Japanese government’s irrational insistence on pushing the whaling cause (in a country whose people aren’t actually interested in eating whales) makes them look bad enough. Now, apart from being (unfairly) characterized as bloodthirsty killers of blubbery cuties, they look, in addition, careless, incompetent and environmentally reckless.

The image above is Turner's Ship on Fire.

Elegy for the Snow Country

Japanese people have a much-remarked upon habit of explaining to foreigners that in their country there are four seasons, as if this was a unique accomplishment and a source of justified pride. It used to irritate me until I realised how powerfully distinct the seasons (five, if you include the tsuyu, or summer 'rainy season') really are here, in their temperatures, their sounds, their colours, and the sensation they impart to the skin. The droolingly humid, relentlessly hot green summer with its wingeing cicadas; the crisp, mild autumn of reddening trees and intermittent typhoons; cold, bright, sparkling winter, so dry that it seems to suck the moisture out of your face; and pale pink, windy, showery spring. The sludgy, drizzly, glomy north European autumn/winter/spring is blurred and unconvincing by comparison.

The seasons! I feel
a 17 syllable
poem coming on.

Last week, for the first time this year, the sun over Tokyo had some warmth in it. But spring won't arrive with much of a bang this year, because there has been no winter. Literally, there has not been a winter.