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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.

A pink oasis in the rush hour

I rarely have to leave home early enough to travel during Tokyo’s notorious rush hour, and for this blessing I thank the Shinto gods. We’ve all heard the ghastly stories: about the station staff whose job it is literally to squeeze commuters onto the trains; about carriages so packed that they would choke a sardine; and about the notorious chikan, or gropers, whose filthy fingers inflict misery on female passengers. So it was with trepidation that I rose early the other morning for the 7.30 Tube journey to work.

The train was on the platform as I bounded down the escalator, and the doors were closing as I slipped between them. I gripped the overhead strap and buried my nose in my newspaper. And quickly I became aware of something that surprised me – that travelling on the Tokyo subway in the rush hour isn’t half bad.

There were none of the discomforts I had anticipated, and in several ways the journey was positively pleasant. Instead of a fetor of armpits and bad breath, the carriage was infused with a light haze of perfume. It was certainly full, but there were no arms poking my ribcage – in fact, my fellow passengers seemed to be going to some trouble to make space for me. A few them, it’s true, looked a bit unfriendly – but at least they weren’t shedding dandruff over my jacket or exhaling last night’s saké into my face. It was only when the guard arrived and firmly escorted me off the train that I understood the explanation for all this – they were all women.

Back on the Bike

Writing a weblog is a bit like being a member of a gym. When you do it regularly, you feel superb - flab melting away, muscle swelling, posture improved, sexy endorphins surging around your body. But when you stop, even for a few days, you start to feel uneasy. After a couple of weeks, you feel guilty. After a month or more, you are assailed with feelings of shame and self-loathing.

For the past six weeks I have been a very bad blogger. But that is all behind me now. I stand before you, in my scraggy shorts and trainers, metaphorical man boobs sagging, and I remount the dialectical exercise bike that is Asia Exile. The first few sessions may be tough (be at hand, paramedics). But bear with me and watch a digital Adonis emerge from this pulpy virtual exterior.

I haven't been completely idle for six weeks.

In that time, I have:

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.)

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.

Podded

In February, I spent a happy few days as a guest of 'Words and Ideas', the writers' and readers' segment of the Perth International Arts Festival, sponsored by Curtin University. One of my contributions, a conversation with the journalist, David Cohen, followed by questions and answers, can be downloaded as a Podcast here. (I hope that this link works - if not download it from this page.)

It last about an hour and consists mostly of a discussion of my book, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos (click on the image above for enlargement), although at one point, for no very good reason, I also start talking about my career as a teenage UFOlogist. A bit cringe-making in parts, but it could be worse. Interestingly, my voice becomes lower in pitch towards the end of the hour than it is in the beginning. Not smooth and cholcolatey exactly but less ... piping.

Ten minutes from the end, it goes completely silent for a while but that's because some damn fool member of the audience failed to speak into the microphone. The other effect of this is that the reaction of the audience is almost inaudible. You'll just have to take it from me that they were almost constantly applauding or issuing forth chortles of appreciation.

US Amazon link for the book is here, Japanese Amazon (for the English language edition) here. It's also been translated into Dutch as Indonesia: Tijden van waanzin.

Here's a smattering of reviews from The Times, TIME magazine, The Observer, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian and a long and well informed one from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Your Christmas present problems, solved at a stroke! Buy, buy, buy . . .

Pyongyang Busted

Haneda airport in Tokyo, at 10.45 yesterday morning. I have just landed back in Japan after my jaunt to Mt Kumgang-san in North Korea last week, and a night in the South Korean capital, Seoul. At the customs desk, the uniformed officer asks me how long I've been away.

'Four days."

"Have you been to any countries other than South Korea?"

"Well, yes ... North Korea."

"North Korea,” he said slowly. “North Korea. Did you buy anything when you were there?”

“Just some souvenirs."

“North Korean souvenirs, eh? Could you show me?”

And then it dawned on me – I was a sanctions buster!

A Life in the Day

[Here's a piece that I contributed to the October issue of Number 1 Shimbun, the magazine of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.]

My mobile phone, which is also my alarm clock, buzzes under my pillow, and I twitchily turn it off. The vibrating “manner” function is supposed to be less jarring than the bell, but first thing in the morning it is like waking to find a fat and angry wasp in your bed. It does its job anyway. I scan overnight emails, then take a shower with the BBC World Service coming through over the Internet. If it’s early enough I might read or write in my diary for half an hour or so. This is the peaceful part of the day.

What happens after that depends on where I am.

Watashi wa minai. Watashi wa ... kawanai*

One of the pleasures of Japanese cinemas, apart from the deep comfy seats, the abundant booze and Ladies' Night (females pay just Y1000 on the first Wednesday of the month) is the world's most hyperbolic public information broadcast. It begins with the face of a young Japanese woman who looks as if she has just received extremely bad news - perhaps her chihuahua has died, or the Japanese football team has lost one-nil to Saudi Arabia or, at the very least, her husband has run off with a member of Morning Musume.

Doomy music is playing. Tears began to roll down her bonny cheeks. And - horror of horrors - they are black!

Help! Gurgle!

'So why am I leaving?'

An old friend of mine, Laura Holland, recently left Japan after fifteen years as a student, journalist, editor, publisher, and promoter of Sailor Moon, the cartoon schoolgirl with the disturbingly shapely hips. At her sayonara party, instead of the conventional speech of valediction she handed out a written statement. It will ring true with anyone who has ever asked themselves the crucial question, 'Have I been in Japan too long?' With Laura's permission I reproduce it here, lightly bowdlerised and glossed for readers unfamiliar with Japan, Japanese and the world of the gaijin (foreigner in Japan).

So why am I leaving?

Imagine a nice comfy armchair. You know you should go jogging, but it's cold and wet outside. The armchair is Japan. The cold wet jog is England.

You know which one is better for you long term but it's hard to leave the present comfort of the armchair.

• I was feeling lazy and uninspired
• I missed unconditional, lifelong relationships with old friends and family
• I wanted more work responsibility and respect than I was getting here
• I didn’t want to end up a bitter old gaijin trout moaning down the pub about not getting laid.

The Lion King and I

The World Economic Forum, that gathering of politicans, plutocrats and intellectuals which meets every year in the Swiss town of Davos, is holding a meeting in Tokyo. Last night I went to a welcome reception at the Prime Minister's Residence, the Sori Kantei. It's an outstanding piece of modern architecture, a soft, gentle structure of wood, glass and concrete with stands of bamboo and miniature rice paddies planted around it. In the twilight, washed by gushing, rainy season rain, it looked very beautiful.

The Davos fat cats were in their suits and ties, but Koizumi, of course, wore only an open-necked shirt. June sees the beginning of the "Cool Biz"campaign which he set in motion last year, whereby office workers are encouraged to discard their jackets and ties in order to save on the air conditioning. Koizumi is stepping down in September, and he had just emerged from his last parliamentary session as prime minister. "I feel very relaxed  because at last I am done with fielding questions in the Diet," he said as he greeted the Forumists. "I think that no prime minister in the world has to respond to so many questions as the Japanese Prime Minister."

After his remarks he began to mingle with the crowd. I was standing in the front row beside two very tall Americans. I'm 6' 3", and they each had a couple of inches on me. Koizumi approached; this was our exclusive conversation:

Foreign Service

One of the few sources of light relief during foreign disasters is the opportunity they provide for sniping, sniggering and sneering at British diplomats. Bomb, earthquake or revolution - almost inevitably stories will emerge of Brits on the ground let down by the flakiness and arrogance of their local embassy. Ah, how we journalists love to smirk at those complacent envoys, with their diplomatic bags and wine cellars and their general chinless air of inheriting the earth!

So it is with pain and reluctance that I report an oustanding case of diplomatic assiduousness.

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.

Smorgasbord of the Vanities

From this morning's newspaper ... (A far more serious and reverent account of the Tapas Molecular Bar can be read here.)

The whiff of truffle on tissue paper: a sure sign that the glory days are back

TOKYO NOTEBOOK by Richard Lloyd Parry

FOR THOSE of us who were just too young to experience them as adults, the boom years of the late 1980s have a glittering, almost mystical, allure. That was the era of Wall Street and the yuppie, of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Martin Amis’s Money. To work in London or Manhattan, if the myths are to be believed, was like living in a 24-hour Duran Duran music video, complete with champagne, yachts and an excess of hair gel. And nowhere was the consumption more gross and conspicuous than in Japan.

Old timers sigh wistfully about the delicious excesses of Bubble-era Tokyo even now — the night clubs staffed by beauties from across the planet, with gold-leaf sprinkled on the cocktails and mink covers on the lavatory seats. Back then, they say, the sushi was not considered edible unless it was eaten off the naked body of a young beauty queen. But then the Bubble burst, and those of us who arrived here late found ourselves in a pallid and uneasy city, struggling with the funk of recession and unemployment. Finally, though, I have incontrovertible evidence that the glory days are back.

Outstanding Intellectual of the Twenty First Century

You'll find this hard to believe, but until the other day I had no idea that mine is one of the most remarkable minds of our present epoch. I know, I know - it seems ridiculous to me too, now. The alert but serious expression, the taste for films with subtitles, the extensive collection of polo necks - the signs of genius were there all along. But it took Nicholas S. Law to remove the scales from my eyes.

Mr Law is Director General of the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England, and the force behind that masterwork of global reference 2000 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 21st Century. "The Oxford English Dictionary," his letter begins, "defines intellectualism as the 'doctrine that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from pure reason' and it follows by saying that an intellectual is a 'person possessing good understanding, enlightened person'."

"Only two thousand intellectuals can be featured from across the world," he continues. "I invite you to take your place within its pages."

Kiss of the Mosquito

I'm sorry for vanishing from this space so suddenly last week. The truth was that, by the time of Mr Thaksin's resignation last Tuesday night, I was feeling very peculiar, to an extent that could not fully be explained by my elation at witnessing history in the making.

I had a drumming headache, tiredness, aches in the limbs and joints, a fiery thirst, and the shakes - in other words, I felt exactly as most male British tourists in Bangkok do for most of the time. Taking a shower on my last morning was easy enough, although towelling myself dry afterwards required a lot more effort, and packing my three shirts and two pairs of trousers aged me by several decades. At the airport, I looked enviously at the complacent elderly trundling by in their wheelchairs. I spent the flight back to Tokyo shivering under two blankets.

At home on Thursday night I told myself that I'd go to the doctor if I wasn't feeling better by Monday. On Friday afternoon I made an appointment for that evening. On Saturday morning, the tests confirmed what would have seemed obvious days ago to one better in tune with his own health - I had malaria.

A petal loosens, falls

The cherry blossoms came into flower in Tokyo late on Sunday, and on Tuesday they were at their most perfect. In the morning it threatened rain, but the cloud cleared and it was sunny all afternoon. So at lunchtime we sent out hasty email invitations to The Times cherry blossom viewing party in Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo.

The cemetery is the resting place of two of our distinguished predecessors: Major-General Henry Spencer Palmer, correspondent of The Times in Yokohama from 1885 to 1892; and Captain Francis "Frank" Brinkley, the paper's first ever Tokyo correspondent (1897-1912). Palmer was an astronomer, naturalist and officer in the Royal Engineers, who died in 1893 while constructing the port of Yokohama. Brinkley was the founder of the English langage Japan Mail (which later merged with the Japan Times) and a scholar of Japanese language and customs. Both men are the object of deep reverence in the Tokyo Bureau, and their names are frequently invoked in moments of surprise or high emotion. Regularly, my colleague Leo Lewis will bang down the phone with the words, 'Holy Palmer! The Nasdaq index of technology shares has dropped by 1.3 per cent' or 'Whiskers of Brinkley! A daikon, or Japanese giant radish, has been discovered which resembles Marilyn Monroe!'

We sat at a table behind a yakitori stall close to the crosses, scrolls and Biblical verses of the Foreigners' Section of the cemetery. It was short notice, but friends came and went, and the party was still going when I left at half past nine. A Japanese friend who had lived in the United States told me about Washington DC, another city famous for its cherry blossoms. They are the Somei-Yoshino variety, donated years ago by the government of Japan and they bloom profusely, but somehow it is not the same. For one thing, they are too pink. And they last as well, for week after week. The whole point of Japanese cherries is that they are perfect and then they are gone, and that if you don't tale the opportunity when it presents itself you will miss the chance to appreciate them.

We had planned to intone sutras and pour libations of sake at the graves of Palmer and Brinkley, but in the end we didn't get round to it.

Later, I came home to work, and just after half past ten there was an earthquake -

The Whale of London

Saturday morning. Thirty-six hours after flying in from Tokyo, I woke up in London at 5.30 in the morning, jet-lagged and ill-tempered. I turned on the TV; later, I walked out for an early morning coffee and a read of the papers. The breakfast news and front pages were dominated by the same story, about the Northern Bottlenose Whale which had strayed far from its ocean home and swum up the Thames where, increasingly ill and exhausted, it was struggling to swim back out to sea.

Police and animal welfare officers in reflective jackets tracked its spout from motor launches. People gathered on the bank to watch with their children. The ticker at the bottom of the TV screen carried lines such as ‘Whale almost beached twice’ and ‘Whale swam past Houses of Parliament’.

Viewers were invited to phone in with suggestions. Why not use recordings of whale songs to lure it back out to sea? Why not zap it with sonar and drive it towards the estuary? How ridiculous, I thought: all the suffering and corruption and uncertainty in the world, and the entire country finds itself fixated on a lost fish (sorry, mammal). I formulated a sarcastic viewer suggestion of my own: why not place on stand-by a team of Japanese sushi chefs so that, if the rescue efforts should sadly fail, at least the deceased cetacean will not go to waste?

A twinkling in every lung

As I wheezed on the treadmill in the gym (Gold's Gym on Omotesando Avenue in Tokyo, the one above the big branch of Zara), the randomly shuffling iPod plucked out a track I hadn't listened to for a while: Breathing by Kate Bush.

It is a creepily disturbing song about an in utero foetus whose mother is exposed to a nuclear explosion. Remarkable that she was 21 when it was released and still younger when she wrote it. If foetuses could sing then I am sure that they would sound like Kate Bush at this stage in her career, with a voice between that of a little girl and Mrs Thatcher at her most indignant:

Camera in the jungle

For thousands of years, our of the plants, trees and animals of the forest, the Iban people of Borneo have created a beautiful and delicate art. Rattan vines from the jungle are woven into strong, supple baskets with geometric patterns. The bony casque of the hornbill bird is carved into tiny sculptures of men and creatures. Softwoods are shaped into the famous Iban war shields with their symmetrical designs of Iban heroes. But last week, on a visit to an Iban longhouse in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, I discovered a new accomplishment of these remarkable people: Iban photography.

Headhunter in the town on the river

Kapit is not exactly the end of the line in Borneo, but it is half way there. The Rajang River is the longest in Malaysia, 350 miles from its muddy mouth in the South China Sea to its source in mountains close to the border with Indonesia, and Kapit is as close to the mountains as the sea. There's a flight once a week in a little prop plane, but otherwise the only way in and out is by boat. So at least part of the reason for writing this is simply to demonstrate that at the fag end of the year 2005, half way to the end of the line in the rainforests of Borneo, I can still make a posting to my weblog.

We were in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, and the choice was whether to spend the days between Christmas and New Year going into the jungle or on the beach. But you don't come to Borneo for the beach.

Christmas in Borneo

The Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, where I passed a relaxing and tranquil Christmas Day, is the least conventionally festive country in the world.

Climatically, it is as far from Lapland as it is possible to get – a small humid enclave between the tropical rain forests of northern Borneo and the South China Sea, where reindeer, or anyone dressed in a thick red overcoat with white fur trimmings, would quickly collapse of heat exhaustion to die slowly of dehydration within a few hours. Its religion is orthodox and faithfully observed Islam – in the capital, Bandar Seri Begawan, most of the women wear head scarves, and the city is dominated by two huge and opulently beautiful mosques. But one thing above all militates against the traditional British Christmas –

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.