Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

You don't want to think about it

The front pages of yesterday's British and Japanese newspapers carried a common story - the hanging of Saddam Hussein's lieutenants, Awad al-Bandar and Barzan al-Tikriti. But virtually all the Japanese versions made a remarkable omission. They made no mention whatsoever of the most remarkable fact about the execution - that the head of al-Tikriti, Iraq's former intelligence chief, was severed from his body by the executioner's noose.

In the Sankei - nothing. In the Mainichi - nothing, and nothing in the Yomiuri. The English-language Daily Yomiuri ran a story from the Associated Press, which certainly did mention the decapitation. But the DY's sub-editors had carefully removed this paragraph in the version they ran, along with all subsequent references to the decapitation. While newspapers across the world were reporting on the international condemnation of the execution, and its botching, the Japanese media had - nothing. Only the liberal Asahi mentioned this most extraordinary thing - that, accidentally or not, a democratically elected government, set up with the military support of Japan, ripped a man's head off his shoulders at the end of a rope.

Why should conscientious newspapers of record omit such a fact?

Bright Young Things

I have always suspected that Tatler, the house journal of the Sloane Ranger movement, is in fact a cunning spoof perpetrated by a contemporary Jonathan Swift or perhaps by the publishers of Viz magazine. As a self-parody it is too perfectly pitched and subtle. It’s not the more obvious fictional absurdities, such as feature writer “Ticky Hedley-Dent” (I know, I know – I’m not in a position to sneer at people with double-barrelled names). It’s the subtler, marginal satire - fashion assistant “Emily Thin”, for example, and film critic “Patrick Neate”? Plainly such people cannot really exist outside the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

Then there’s the rampaging political incorrectness (“Skilled designers are using fur this winter”), the lengthy profiles of cosmetic surgeons, and the pages and pages of party photographs, featuring radiant strumpets cavorting with hideous, gurning 45-year old “bachelors”. But in the January issue I have my final proof.