Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

Understanding the supervillain: Kim Jong Il's poignant evil

 

[My op-ed on yesterday's North Korean missile launch ran here in today's newspaper. I originally wrote it for Saturday, but it wa sheld over - so here below is the slightly variant version which would have run then.

There's an analysis piece in a different vein here. For a different view, see the piece in last Friday's International Herald Tribune by the brilliant Brian Myers of South Korea's Dongseo University (I can't find it Online - cananyone help?). The best things I read on the whole silly affair were the report by the International Crisis Group and this piece by Tim Brown on GlobalSecurity.org.]

Twenty years after the demise of the communist Evil Empire, the world has begun to struggle when it comes to credible international super villains. Robert Mugabe? Horrible, certainly, but also rather pathetic. Vladimir Putin – sinister, perhaps, but hardly foe to all humanity. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran lacks the edge somehow, and it’s been far too long since Osama bin-Laden put in an appearance. In the global obnoxiousness rankings there is only one serious contender, leagues ahead of anyone else: the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il.

He’s got the bizarre personality cult (“Dear Leader”, “Lodestar of the Twenty-First Century” etc). He’s got the crazed haircut and Dr Evil pantsuit. He’s got the devastating superweapons (about half a dozen nuclear warheads, by most estimates). And sometime in the next few days, puny mortals will quail in terror as his latest evil scheme streaks across the sky – the firing of an intercontinental rocket high in the atmosphere above Japan.

This, if the previews are anything to go by, is the most dastardly act of villainy since the days of Goldfinger and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Britain, the US and South Korea have sternly warned the North Koreans to put down their rocket and step away from the launch pad. Sanctions have been threatened in the UN Security Council. The Japanese military, which has never fired a shot in anger since the Second World War, has ambitiously announced that it will shoot the rocket down if it strays near its own territory. But this near hysterical reaction, and the crude caricaturing of Kim Jong Il, serve only to distract from the reality of North Korea as it confronts the world, and to blind us to the very few feasible solutions.For Kim Jong Il is neither a madman nor a fool. Understood on his own terms, his actions have a logic and even a warped wisdom, and have seen him through a decade-long emergency which would have put paid to a lesser leader. No one could ever reasonably defend the North Korean regime, which competes with the worst in history for its cruelty and absurdity. But it is time for the rest of the world to try a bit harder to understand Mr Kim’s actions, as well as condemning them.

The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World? Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double A-bomb victim

[A NOTE ON COMMENTS: I encourage vigorous debate, and this is a subject which provokes strong and divergent views. My policy has been to post every comment, regardless of content. But from now on I'm not going to put up any which contain obscenity, racist language, and personal invective about other commenters. They will be deleted.]

[Kyodo reported yesterday that Tsutomu Yamaguchi, one of the handful of people to survive the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has finally been recognised as such by the Nagasaki local government. Four years ago, shortly before the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, I interviewed Mr Yamaguchi, and two of his fellow double-hibakusha, over the course of several days. Here is the long piece which I wrote about them for the Times Magazine. See below a photograph of Mr Yamaguchi next to a replica of the "Fat Man", by an outsanding photographer, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, who has also blogged on our assigment here.]

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato are either the luckiest or the unluckiest men alive, and after three days in their company and long hours of conversation, I still had no idea which. It is sixty years since their monstrous ordeal and all three are well into their ninth decade. Mr Sato, who is 86, uses a wheelchair after injuring his back, and 89-year old Mr Yamaguchi is almost deaf in one ear. But all of them exude the dignified vigour of elderly Japanese, the world’s healthiest and longest living race. “I was a heavy smoker,” Mr Yamaguchi told me during our first meeting, “but I gave up smoking and drinking when I was 50. I didn’t expect to live to 80. And now I’m well over 80.” The miracle is not that he is alive now, but that he made it past the age of 29.

Mr Yamaguchi and his friends are freaks of history, victims of a fate so callous and improbable that it almost raises a smile. In 1945, they were working in Hiroshima where the world’s first atomic bomb exploded 60 years ago this morning, on 6 August 1945. 140,000 people died as a result of the explosion; by pure chance, Mr Yamaguchi, Mr Sato and Mr Iwanaga, were spared. Stunned and injured, reeling from the horrors around them, they left the city for the only place they could have gone – their home town, Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west. There, on 9th August, the second atomic bomb exploded over their heads.

In a century of mass killing, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the beginning of a new age. The end of the world was transformed from an imaginative notion, the fancy of poets and prophets, into a real and living possibility. Three men survived the beginning of the end of the world, not once, but twice. Sixty years later, all three of them are alive.

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 father in Japan "was not responsible for baby's death"

A British man charged with shaking to death his infant son told a Japanese court yesterday that he never intended to hurt the child and that he was suffering at the time from trauma caused by physical abuse in his childhood.

Anthony Buckley, 21, faces up to 20 years in jail for the alleged killing of his 12-day old son, Yoshimitsu, in his Tokyo home in June last year. According to prosecutors, he pinched the baby’s legs, hit him, violently shook him, and struck his head twice against a table in a fit of frustration with his crying.

Yoshimitsu suffered a broken rib and died the following day from bleeding in the brain. At first Mr Buckley claimed that he had accidentally dropped the child in the bath while bathing him, but under police questioning he admitted shaking him.

“The defendant was exhausted by stress and insomnia,” the prosecution told the panel of three judges at the Tokyo District Court. “He was isolated and unmotivated . . . [But] he was capable of taking responsibility for his actions.”

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.”

Pride and Chuffedness in Japan

[POSTSCRIPT, 6th March 2009. The subject of this post - the painful sensitivity of Japan to its treatment by Barack Obama - has been cast in ironic relief by Gordon Brown's visit to Washington which has revealed (well, well, well) - the agonised sensitivity of Britain to its treatment by Barack Obama. For a fine summnary, of British humiliation over the decades, see my colleague Alice Miles's piece here.]

One of the touching, and sometimes disturbing, things about living in Japan is the extent to which people here experience a sense of personal responsibility for things - which, by my dry, individualistic, Western standards - they deserve no credit or blame either way.

I'm thinking of those scenes after the arrest of a murderer/fraud/arsonist where the malefactor's parents, siblings and even employer bow deeply before the cameras and apologise for his deeds - as if it was all their fault. I have the same kind of reaction when people of any race express "pride" in being an American or Yorkshireman, for example, or in China's Olympic medal success, or in the number of Oscars won by British films. In what sense (I always want to ask) do you deserve credit for states of affairs in which you played no personal part whatsoever? I might feel lucky to be a true-born half-Welshman, but as for being proud - well, one might as well take pride in being being right-handed, or bipedal, or in giving birth to live young, rather than incubating them from eggs.

In Japan, this is all tied up with an unusually pronounced concern about how the rest of the world views the mother country, and a baffled suspicion that We Japanese don't quite get the way They all regard Us. Hence the equal delight and surprise when a Japanese wins a Nobel Prize (extra editions of the newspapers, awards from the Emperor) - or, as this week, an Oscar. If a British cabinet minister drunkenly disgraced himself in public, there would be as much hilarity as disgust - and very few people would experience a sense of personal shame. But when Shoichi Nakagawa got publicly blotto the other week, there was a feeling that, rather than just the government or the political class, all Japanese were somehow diminished by it (headline in the Asahi: 'Japan is more embarrassed than Nakagawa').

Which brings me to the question: why is Japan so flipping chuffed about its recent diplomatic interactions with the United States?

The Cost of Everything

Wednesday's paper contained my piece about an experience, familar in Japan, which seems to be about to impose itself upon Britain: living with deflation.

One reader complains that I must have got it all wrong - on a visit to Japan in December, Peter of Phuket reports, everything was "horrendously expense". This is a natural misunderstanding. For, while the cost of living for Japanese has unquestionably remained very stable, for short term visitors, and those of us long-termers who are paid in sterling, it depends not on inflation or deflation, but on the foreign exchange rate.

If you spend yen purchased with pounds then you are the slave of an exchange rate which changes day by day. When the British currency is strong, you get lots of yen for each of your pounds, and Japan is cheap. When the pound is weak, the opposite is the case.

Since the financial crisis last autumn, the pound has been weak. Not just a little tired, or even rather exhausted, but completely shagged out and barely able to open its lips and croak for help. Against the yen it is lower than it has been for thirty years. For those of us spending sterling, the effect is dramatic.

In 2007 one pound bought ¥235 (on average - some of the time it was higher still). As of this writing, according to XE.com, it is worth ¥133 yen (and the rate actually offered by a credit card company or high street bank is worse still). In other words the pound is worth 57 per cent of what it used to be. Which is to say that anyone paid in pounds has experienced a 43 per cent pay cut.

I don't like to whinge, but this kind of thing really concentrates the mind. A few examples:

Under the influence

Shoichi Nakagawa's display of public drunkenness (sorry, I mean public intoxication with "cough medicine") is one of the most extraordinary self-humiliations by an international statesman I can recall. You have to go back to the last days of Boris Yeltsin to find a similar spectacle (even the former leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, didn't make such a fool of himself). It is tempting to chuckle off the whole thing as just one of those sillinesses that foreign politicians get up to every now and then. But the more I think about it, the more serious and appalling it comes to seem, and in so many different ways, far beyond the usual run of "gaffes" perpetrated from time to time by Japanese leaders.

Watch the video of Mr Nakagawa's appearance, and read Leo's account of it here.

At the most obvious level, it is evidence of unforgivably poor judgement on the part of everyone concerned. Mr Nakagawa's own irresponsibility hardly needs to be spelled out. He is in charge of the world's second biggest economy at a time of utmost crisis. His decisions affect the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, not only in Japan, but in all the other countries with which its economy is interlocked. As a member of the cabinet his responsibilities don't end with financial matters. If Japan has to respond to a major earthquake, a terrorist attack, or go to war, Mr Nakagawa will be in the room when the plans are made. On Saturday night (and I am unconvinced that it was the only occasion), he was unfit to drive, let alone lead.

Even more alarming than his obvious intoxication (and MPs from the opposition Democratic Party have publicly rejected the suggestion that he was rendered thus by just a "taste" of wine) was his apparent conviction that he could get away with it. He really must have thought that no one would notice. Being drunk off duty in one's own time is one thing, being drunk on duty is another, but Mr Nakagawa on Sunday appeared to be in an even more extreme category: so drunk that he don't know he was drunk.

Is this arrogance? Or naivety? Or alcoholism? Whatever the answer, it should not be allowed to mix with that degree of power.

The love that dares to squeak its name

Happy Valentine's Day from Tokyo.

My own small attempt to stand against the tsunami of overpriced chocolate, unnecessary wrapping paper and merciless commercialism is below, a piece which also appears in this morning's paper here.

I had always assumed that Japan had the most nauseating Valentine's Day in the world. In researching this story, I learned that in South Korea it is far, far worse. They have taken Valentine's Day and White Day and added half a dozen more spurious Days of their own.

There was interesting sight on Omotesando Avenue this morning, just in front of Gap at the crossing with Meiji Dori, which I cack handedly photographed with my phone.

Apologies for the quality of this image. It shows a young man holding up a sign which reads in Japanese Give me chocolate. On his T-shirt, almost invisible in this picture, ate the English words No Wari.

Valentine's Day in Japan being the day when fanciable young chaps receive choco from their sweet hearts, I take him to be one of the Himote, the anti-Valentine's movement whom I describe below, engaged in a sarcastic act of satrical performance art.

Or perhaps he just had no girlfriend. And no chocolate. I hope he found some. None of the many, many passers-by paid him the least attention. But, true to his T-shirt slogan, it didn't seem to wari him at all.

Can an Angel save a Zombie?

Taro Aso has been in bother almost since he became Japan's prime minister but in 2009, by general agreement, he has passed the point of no return. In an opinion poll in yesterday's Yomiuri, he registered an approval rating of below 20 per cent (other polls had him sink below that threshold last month.) This, according to the punditerati, is unrecoverable. In Japanese political terms Mr Aso is Captain Scott, sitting in his snowbound tent, waiting for the blizzard to overwhelm him. He is not even a Lame Duck; he is an Undead Duck. The mirrors in the Prime Minister's Residence don't reflect him anymore; at official banquets, the whiff of garlic sends him gibbering from the room.

This is the Tokyo consensus and, as recently as a few days ago, I was espousing it myself. But since then I've started to wonder. The fact remains that Mr Aso doesn't have to call an election, which at present would be completely unwinnable, until September this year. September is seven months away - and a lot can hapen in seven months. Isn't that, after all, the the whole point about the Undead? They are not dead yet.