Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

Cluster bombs of the Secret War

Last week I made my first visit to the beautiful and neglected country of Laos to learn about these vicious objects:

. . . unexploded cluster bombs. My story appeared here in Saturday's Times. I attach a longer version below.

Thanks to the many people who helped to organise the trip. Those interested in learning more about the issue can look at their various websites.

I was invited by the International Committee of the Red Cross which is campaigning for an outright ban on all cluster munitions. Our host were the Lao government's National Regulatory Authority UXO and Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme which struggles on bravely in the face of an impossible task. The United Nations Development Programme also supports demining in the country.

A fascinating part of the story, which I had too little space to dwell on in my piece, is the effort by the Lao government and UNESCO to aquire World Heritage Status for the  Plain of Jars, a beautiful and mysterious archaeological site which, in my view, was plainly constructed by extraterrestrials.

I encountered two NGOs doing valuable work in Laos - the Mines Advisory Group (which tries to defuse the cluster bombs before they go off), and COPE Laos (which helps the victims after they do). In this picture, Joe Pereira of COPE displays some of the prosthetic limbs which the organisation makes for injured Laos.

All these photographs were shot for the ICRC by the excellent Vientiane-based photographer, Jim Holmes.

Continue reading for my story . . .

The Saffron Revolution?

"It is a fascinating moment, fraught with promise, when this spirit of the times, dozing pitifully and apathetically, like a huge wet bird on a branch, suddenly and without a clear reason ... takes off in bold and joyful flight. We all hear the shush of this flight. It stirs our imagination and gives us energy: we begin to act."

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Read: 'Nuns join Saffron Revolution'

Man of the moment

Below I attach my piece about Homer "Yasuo Fukuda" Simpson from this morning's paper. It's written in the assumption that he will defeat Julie "Taro Aso" Walters in Sunday's LDP presidential election, and such assumptions can be very dangerous, of course. But the only thing that could stop Mr Fukuda now would be a full-scale three-in-a-bed, coke'n'tarts sex scandal. I think we can agree that he is not the type. (Aso, on the other hand . . .)

My first assumption was that Fukuda's reluctance was just a pose, a conventional piece of pseudo-humility. Now, though, I'm persuaded by it. I think that he genuinely didn't particularly want to be prime minister. Whether that is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.

[Thanks to Camera Otoko, Fi-Wi and Sarah for Homer and Julie.]

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.

'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.

Surgery

[By the way, here's my story from yesterday's paper about an old former member of the Imperial Navy who has owned up to carrying out the vivisection of live prisoners of war in the Philippines.

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, who took the photpgraphs, tells the backstory of the interview on his blog today.]

Dissect them alive: chilling Imperial Order that could not be disobeyed

Richard Lloyd Parry in Hirakata

For 62 years Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he had done. But to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he experienced such misery during the Second World War? He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team.

Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan. After number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines — she called me ‘war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frail old man who lives alone in Hirakata, near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.”

Only in the twilight of his life has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret he carried for more than 60 years. In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Imperial Navy, he was stationed on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort — the medical dissection of living prisoners of war.

Stroky, stroky: On the Six Party Talks

Watching the TV pictures of the Six Party negotiators just now, I was struck by something that I hadn't noticed yesterday.

At the end of their past meetings, if they had anything remotely like an agreement to celebrate, the six chief delegates would stand before the cameras in the strange pose illustrated above (this picture is from a few years ago, not yesterday). Not quite a handshake, not quite a clasp. Each Six Party Talker thrusts forward his hand and sort of it bunches it in with all the others. It looks uncomfortable in every sense.

So yesterday, nice, patient, quietly spoken Christopher Hill, the US assistant secretary of state (third from the right in the picture above - apparently he's become something of a sex symbol for middle-aged Chinese ladies) reached in for the ritual patting of the palms. Standing to his right was his North Korean delegate, Kim Kye Gwan (second from the right above). Mr Kim had just signed what everyone has been calling a "landmark" agreement. And he has always done this claspy-touchy thing before.

But this time, he refused to play along. He beamed warmly and nodded encouragingly, but his hands remained at his side. Since he was in the middle, the two plenipotentiaries to his right couldn't clasp either. This produced an awkward situation in which half the delegates stroked one another's hands, and half didn't.

Mr Kim didn't hold hands.

Why didn't he want to hold hands?

Below is my op-ed piece from this morning's paper. For a much more positive view of the US government see this morning's leader.

If anyone finds a web image of the group photograph from yesterday, could they send me the link? Thanks.

I'm not talking to you

My news story about the resumption of the Six Way Talks on North Korea nukes was a little squeezed in this morning's paper, so I attach it below in fuller form. I'm amazed (but then perhaps I'm not surprised at all . . .) how little comment there has been on this about-turn by the Bush administration. For the past four years, despite the pleas of diplomats, Democrats, Korea experts around the world, and the South Korean president, the US government has stood firm in its rejection of any talks with North Korea.

Result: stalemate.

Beginning two weeks ago year in Berlin, and this week in Beijing, it abandoned that policy and held lengthy and detailed bilateral negotiations with the Norks.

Result: things start moving . . .

Having the slime of their lives

Below is my piece in this morning's paper about the ongoing natto boom.

For the record, I like natto quite a lot.

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.)

G*** M******, Vietnam

[UPDATE: Tuesday 21st, noon. From my hotel in Dong Hoi I can access the website now, although I couldn't from the Internet cafe in town 20 minutes ago. Inconsistent censorship on different servers? Or am I imagining the whole thing?]

I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that The Times is been censored online in Vietnam. I’m sitting in an Internet café in Hanoi airport and, although I can access this blog page, anything beginning www.timesonline generates an error message – although the other British papers load as usual.

I think I know the reason why – the piece I wrote for Saturday's newspaper about cyber-dissidents and the way they are using (and being persecuted for using) the Internet.

Fast work by the censors - but up yours, anyway, boys!

Is there anyone reading this in Vietnam who can check this? Meanwhile, for those who are unable to read it on the newspaper website, here is the piece in question . . .

Into the Diamond Mountains

[Here's my piece from yesterday's paper about my trip last week to Mt Kumgang in North Korea.I'll try to post more on this in the next few days, along with some pictures by The Times photographer, David Bebber.]

The cosy, the frightening, the cute and the sinister

From Richard Lloyd Parry

At a tourist resort at Mt Kumgang, North Korea two worlds collide

The journey to Mt Kumgang in North Korea, the world's most bizarre mini-break, begins at dawn in an atmosphere of menace and confrontation. Electrified fences and tank traps line the road on the South Korean side of the border, and the forest on either side is strewn with mines. Travellers are given stern instructions about conduct on the far side: don't take photographs from the coach windows; don't speak to the North Korean officials at immigration; whatever you do, don't talk about politics.

Passports and bags are scrutinised and x-rayed, and one by one we are admitted to the world's most impenetrable country, a rogue state notorious for oppression, xenophobia and most recently, for nuclear proliferation. And there among the granite-faced soldiers, waving his paw in a gesture of cheery welcome, is a man dressed as a giant brown teddy bear.

The morning after

[Below is my analysis piece from today's paper. The splash by James Bone and I is here; plus sterling background and analysis from Bronwen Maddox (on the world's limited options), Richard Beeston (on the potential for a nuclear arms race), Mike Evans (on the technicalities of delivering a bomb) and Jane Macartney (on China's dilemma).]

At times of hunger, when the rice has gone and all the dogs and cats have been eaten, North Korean schoolchildren scavenge the fields around their villages for crows, dragonflies and rats. The countryside is littered with abandoned factories – not only is there no fuel for the machinery, but all the metal from the power cables has been stripped and sold. Diplomats in the capital Pyongyang worry about sending their cooks out to shop for dinner parties because the few hundred pounds they carry with them is the equivalent of several decades’ wages for the average worker.

Economically, North Korea is a husk of a country, poor by the standards of sub-Saharan Africa, let alone those of booming East Asia. But yesterday, despite ideological bankruptcy, growing diplomatic isolation, and a famine in the 1990s which killed as many as 3 million people, it became the ninth member of the nuclear club. Whatever else is true about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il – and there is no doubt that he is a tyrant and a killer on a historic scale – it is impossible to deny his genius in playing the weakest possible hand of cards with maximum shrewdness and skill.

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.

So Farewell Then, Jun-chan

[Here's a brief comment I wrote about Koizumi in today's Japan Times. You can see it in situ here, along with wisdom from my fellow correspondents.]

A professional disaster

Richard Lloyd Parry
The Times
From a foreign journalist's point of view, the loss of Koizumi is a professional disaster. Reporting on Japanese politics can be hard, boring work, but Jun-chan made it a fascinating pleasure.

At first the hook was his obvious "maverick" qualities -- the perm, the love of Elvis -- and his hysterical popularity in the first year (remember the lines of high school girls queuing in front of LDP HQ for "Lion King" mobile phone fobs?).

But he has been a genuinely, rather than just superficially, transforming figure. Koizumi's genius was to realize that the post-1955 political dispensation was a con trick and a bluff -- a set of cozy conventions benefiting an elite, but with no solid basis in law and little support from the public.

Why do Cabinet ministers have to be chosen form the factions? They don't -- and so he didn't. Why is compromise regarded as valuable in itself? It's not, and when Koizumi crushed the "forces of resistance," he was cheered. I simplify, of course (and he did make plenty of compromises), but he demonstrated that a Japanese prime minister can actually lead.

I don't believe that Koizumi is a reactionary, revisionist, neomilitarist. He went to Yasukuni for his own, rather eccentric, personal reasons. Unfortunately the effect has been to liberate and inspire authentic reactionaries, a very nasty bunch who, temporarily at least, are riding high. The question of how serious this turns out to be, and how damaging the rift with China, is one which his successors will answer -- in a sense, it is they who will determine how we will remember Koizumi.

In 10 years time, will he be regarded as a revolutionary, a transitional figure who started the job which others completed -- or just a passing fashion, a curiosity, an aberration?

Why I wish it had been a girl

The mother and child are reported to be healthy and in good spirits. The happiness of the well wishers outside the Imperial Palace was unfeigned, and the pregnancy even brought about a huge spike in the share price of manufacturers of baby-related goods. But for one reason, and one reason only, the birth of a baby boy to Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko yesterday was a disappointment – the fact that the 2.6kg, 49cm baby boy turned out to be a boy in the first place.

Japan was on the verge of a huge symbolic change – the change, after centuries of male succession, to a system in which a female member of the imperial family could reign as an empress. The country’s outgoing prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was in favour of it. A government appointed panel of eminent persons had presented in detail their reasons for supporting the reform. Public support for the move was as high as 80 per cent, and opposition was limited to a minority of – admittedly vocal – traditionalists and right wingers. But yesterday, thanks to an accident of chromosomes, the noisy minority won.

Smilingly Excluded: an essay on Donald Richie

[This piece appears in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. A taster is attached below: to read the full review click here.]

The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 by Donald Richie ed. Leza Lowitz · Stone Bridge, 494 pp, £13.99

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents, chief among them the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of sub-Hemingway machismo and lumbering Japonaiserie (‘he picked up his katana, made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own – isn’t this odd?’ Over sixty years in Japan, he has been a reporter, tour guide, cinema critic, film director, print-maker, novelist, travel writer, editor, teacher, subtitler, public speaker and actor. Apart from fiction, both short and long, and countless newspaper columns and reviews, he has published books about film, art, Zen, history, tattoos, gardens, temples, phallic symbols, food and bonsai. He has been a friend to famous and talented foreigners and to a cross-section of the most interesting Japanese of the second half of the 20th century. The index to The Japan Journals consists of a list of Richie’s acquaintances, followed by their professions. The first page alone includes Akihito (emperor), Akira (barboy), Tadashi Asami (tattooed man), John Ashbery (poet), Richard Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author).

He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from all over the city because the intervening buildings had recently been incinerated by American bombs; he is still going strong today, as the Japanese nervously brace themselves for their third period of postwar economic growth. Hardly a month passes in Tokyo without a public appearance by Donald, implausibly spry and dapper at 82, reading from his new book of criticism at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club or introducing a season of Ozu films at International House. Why then – outside Japan, at least – should he be so little known?

Read on . . .

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.

Shame of the Chihuahua (and more cyberstalker news)

From this morning's newspaper. See kitaryunosuke's response here. Photograph courtesy of Aiful.

How much is that chihuahua in the window? The one with the 29% sting?

TOKYO NOTEBOOK  by Richard Lloyd Parry

Neurotically pampered dogs are a daily sight in Tokyo these days, and of all the breeds none is more popular, or more horrid, than the Chihuahua. They are bad enough in their natural state, mincing along behind their owners with that infuriating jiggly walk. Dress them up, as many Tokyo pet lovers do, in dog coats, dog hats and dog sunglasses and they become even more loathsome. So it is satisfying to report the shame that has been heaped upon the Chihuahua, which has gone from being an icon of simpering cuteness to a symbol of thuggishness and usury.

The story begins with a series of commercials which became one of the most popular in Japan’s television history. In episodic, Nescafe Gold Blend-style, they tell the story of a middle-aged man whose life is transformed by his love for a white Chihuahua. The creature is named Qoo-chan, after “Kuu”, the Japanese word for the noise which Chihuahuas make. In the course of the ads, he purchases the hound, outfits him in a morning suit, and adopts his mate and litter of pups. All of these expenses are made possible by the company behind the ads, a “consumer loans” firm called Aiful.

Qoo-chan triggered a wave of Chihuahua-buying and a spike in business for Aiful who plastered their mascot on posters and credit cards. Until last month, when it became clear that the company is less of a Chihuahua, than a growling, slavering Rottweiler.

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.”

kitaryunosuke responds

Forn a few hours, I though that Ryunosuke Kita must have overslept. It was lunchtime before he got around to translating my piece about him from this morning's paper and his response to it, which I reproduce below. Too bad that he won't meet me for a drink. But I'm touched that he refers to me twice as "dear". I don't really mind if you call me names either, chucky egg . . .

The following is copied from here. Both the English and Japanese are those of the troll. Explanations in square brackets are mine. 

"Ooooo, that's scary (･∀･)," he begins. "いやーん、こわーい(･∀･)。

"I'm gonna cry, if you write such a bunch of lies, really.
そんな嘘八百書いたら、龍之介、泣いちゃうから。

Who translated for you, dear? A pretty Japanese girl friend? A memeber [sic] of the "absolutely fabulous" FCCJ [Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, another of Kita-kun's betes noires], perhaps? nudge nudge, wink wink...
だれが翻訳してくれたのかな？可愛らしい日本人ガールフレンド？「超セレブ」FCCJのメンバーかな、もしかして？つんつん、ウィンクウィンク…

I loved the last line, by the way, you know? "Fool! You are noisy!"... oh dear, really... I could weep.
ところで、最後の一行、気に入ったね～…ほんと。『ばーか！うるせーんだよ！』…って、あんたまったく…涙出ちゃうね。

I don't really hate anyone (too busy for that), but I really despise anyone who are stuffed with biased ideas.
私は誰も憎みはしないよ（忙しいんでね）。だが、バイアスがかった考えで一杯の連中を本当に軽蔑している。

Do the research! Come on!!
リサーチしろよ！どうしたんだ！

Come out, come out, wherever you are . . .

From this morning's newspaper . . .

Where does The Times keep its private parts? Look no further . . .

Tokyo Notebook by Richard Lloyd Parry

After a few years, the strain of living in the world’s politest and least confrontational society really takes it out of a man. Which of us, from time to time, does not relish a healthy argument or a nice, tension relieving screaming match? And yet in Japan the simple pleasures of invective, sarcasm and rudeness are cruelly denied.

This is a country in which someone who is incandescent with rage will, as a very last resort, denounce his antagonist as ‘baka’ – a word no stronger than the word “fool”. While an English speaker can choose between “Put a sock in it”, “Shut your mush” or “Zip it”, Japanese is restricted to the anaemic ‘urusai’, which means nothing more than “You are noisy”. It is claustrophobic to find oneself in a country without insults – or that is what I thought until I encountered the work of Ryunosuke Kita.

Mr Kita (or “kitaryunosuke”, as he signs himself) plays a unique part in my life – he is my conscience, my nemesis and the closest thing I have had to a stalker.