Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

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.

Farewell to Groom-Tossing

We have known for long enough, of course, about the potential effects of climate change. But it only really strikes home when it effects something close to you, a place or a tradition which will never be the same again. Such examples seem to arise every day, most recently in Tokamachi in Niigata Prefecture, where global warming is threatening a hallowed custom - the Bridegroom-Tossing of Matsunoyama Onsen

Days of the Boar: Predictions for 2007

[Madame Sosostris, the renowned clairvoyant, is very bunged up when I call on her, but even dosed up on Sudafed and Flu Strength Lemsip she remains one of the most brilliantly gifted ladies in the expanded Europe Union, and her Tarot pack is (for want of a better word) wicked.

Her parlour is in a narrow gritty street in Shoreditch, a quarter of minicab offices and kebab shops, unencroached upon by rising rents and yuppification. A mute man in his sixties (said to be Madame S's son by a famous matinee idol) answers my ring and leads me into the dim room where she sits, an ancient figure wreathed in scarves, her black eyes sparkling in a mask of powder and mascara. She croaks a greeting, and directs me to the leather armchair at her side. A cup of bitter tea is offered in a brittle China cup. I hand over the agreed amount which she counts with supple fingers.

"So, my dear," she wheezes. "What's it to be? To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits? To report the behaviour of the sea monster? Describe the horoscope? Haruspicate or scry?"

"I seek, Madame, to know what will transpire in the Orient in the twelvemonth ahead."

"In the Orient, eh?" she says, shuffling the Tarot deck. Cards flash and are covered, some of them familiar to me. The drowned Phoenician Sailor; Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks; the man with three staves; the one-eyed merchant. "I do not find The Hanged Man," she says in a tone of puzzlement. "Curious, in the circumstances."

Here, then, are Madame Sosostris's predictions for 2007, the Year of the Boar.]

Journey to the Carterets (Words and Photographs)

This month the photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert and I travelled to the Carteret Atoll, a collection of tiny coral islands far off the coast of Papua New Guinea. For at least 20 years now it has been obvious that the Carterets, and their population of 2,600 people, are sinking into the sea. As usual, it's difficult to state with absolute confidence why this is happening. Is it because of a submarine volcano which is causing changes in the level of the sea bed? Or is because - as this research demonstrates - global warming is causing sea levels in the South Pacific to rise steadily?

You can read my piece from Thursday's paper here; Jeremy's put a few of his photographs on his blog here, here and here; and a few of my own follow.

Click on any of these images to enlarge. (All photographs are the copyright of Richard Lloyd Parry.)

In the sea of stones

We need tales of Wonders - encounters with extreme experience, man-made or natural, which inspire or appal, and impart a sense of human smallness and  insignificance. A jungle forest, burning out of control. An entire town, wholly consumed and washed away by a wave. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

A yacht, sailing the Pacific, came across such a Wonder. "Early afternoon, somewhere east of the Lau Group in Fiji," wrote its captain, Fredrik Fransson. "We are sailing south of the island group to avoid having to pass through it during night. Yesterday we saw the birth of an island, most likely we were the first humans to see the new creation."

Success so huge and wholly farcical

For the past year or so, a plot in Aoyama in central Tokyo, a hundred yards from the groovy Omotesando boulevard, has been sheathed in plastic awnings while cranes and drills rumble behind it. Nothing surprising about that - the proliferation of new construction is the most obvious sign of Japan's (or at least the capital's) cautious economic recovery. Then the other week, the drapes were removed to reveal this:

It's St Grace "Cathedral", Japan's newest medieval art treasure.

Spamming for Borneo

Last week, with my London-based colleague Devika Bhat, I wrote a story about a remarkable letter sent to the British building supplies company Jewson. Its signatories were seventeen headmen of the Penan, a small and dwindling Dayak tribe, who live in the deep interior of Borneo and include among their number some of the last true nomads in the world. The letter - signed with thumb prints, because most of its signatories are illiterate - begged Jewson to stop buying plywood from a Malaysian company named Samling. Jewson sells the plywood to builders for hoardings and construction sites, but the hardwoods which go into its manufacture are ripped from the virgin rain forest where the remaining Penan scrape an increasingly difficult living. “Without our forest, we, the Penan, cannot survive,” the chiefs wrote to Peter Hindle, Jewson’s managing director.

We depend on the clean water from our rivers, the wild boar we hunt in the forest and the fruits and the jungle produce we collect from the old trees, the sago palms and the rattan vines . . . By purchasing Samling timber, you and your company are making yourselves part of the crimes committed against us . . . The Samling group is extracting timber from our forests against our declared will and without our consent . . . Despite our repeated protests, Samling does not respect our boundaries, continues to encroach on our traditional land and disregards our native customary rights.

Now it seems that the story has had curious consequences.

Out of the heart of Borneo

[Here's a fuller version of a story which was truncated in this morning's paper.]

Future treatments for diseases such as cancer, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are being jeopardised by the accelerating destruction of tropical forests in the huge island of Borneo, the international conservation group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned in a new report yesterday.

Drugs for serious illnesses have already been developed from jungle plants by scientists known as “bio-prospectors”, who draw on the traditional knowledge of indigenous people. But plant species which have yet to be discovered or fully analysed are threatened by logging and plantation companies as they destroy the forests for short-term profit, according to the WWF.

“Borneo will continue to be an important source for new bio-discoveries for the next centuries,” says the report which was released yesterday. “If sustainably managed, the area could be a source for valuable plant species that can be cultivated and commercialised for new foods and medicines. But if we lose the Heart of Borneo, it will take its secrets to the grave.”

The Dams on the Salween River: Useful Links

Some more information and links for those interested in my story in this morning's paper about the campaign by the Karen and Karenni people of eastern Burma against the proposed dams on the Salween River - 'Sold down the river: tribe's home to be a valley of the dammed'.

The best source on the web is www.salweenwatch.org (although this has been crashing on me - is anyone else having this problem?). I can still access the PDF of the recent report on the dams, by a group of Karenni NGOs, 'Dammed by Burma's Generals'.

The Southeast Asia Rivers Network (SEARIN) has also done a lot of work on the subject, both in Thailand-Burma and on the upper stretches of the Salween in China, where it is known as the Nu. Their website has the PDF of their 2004 report ''The Salween Under Threat: Damming the Longest Free River in Southeast Asia'.