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Sorry about the Sage

Three hundred and sixty four days ago, the Sage of Singapore, most potent and eldritch of the Wise Men of Asia, vouchsafed to me his prophecies for 2006 - and as he predicted, so it happened.

In January, there was indeed a rift within the Japanese Imperial Family about proposed changes to the succession law - as the Sage prophesied. In February, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, went AWOL, provoking anxious speculation about his whereabouts - and you read it here first. In March, mysterious man apes were seen in villages in Malaysia - the Sage of Singapore had seen it all BEFORE IT HAPPENED!

Sadly, after playing a blinder early on, he completely fell to pieces for the rest of in the Year of the Dog,

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.

Please don't let me fall

As expected, Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore this morning. As I write this, his body will be lying on a trolley in Changi prison with a label tied to its toe, before his family come to collect it.

Capital punishment is always wrong however it carried out and whomever it is inflicted upon. Yet somehow it does make it worse that Nguyen Tuong Van was young, and naive, and so obviously redeemable. And as a method of execution there is something uniquely bowel-churning about the gallows.

The ghastly drill of weighing and measuring the prisoner, testing the trapdoor and the knot; the pitiful emptying of the bowels and bladder at the moment of death; the rope burns to the neck. But these are valuable and necessary reminders of what it is to kill a human being. In their neatness and efficiency, the automated, mechanised, medicalised methods such as injection and electrocution are even more disgusting.

Here, just as a reminder, are three accounts of hangings.

The People Call for Hangman Lee

Something shocking happened last weekend and, ever since the first rumours surfaced, I have been unable to think about anything else. After 46 years and more than 850 executions, Singapore has sacked its hangman.

Darshan Singh, whose feats of asphyxiation have earned him the admiration of the execution community worldwide, has stretched his last neck. After rashly speaking to a journalist, Mr Singh’s photograph was splashed all over the papers, to the fury of his employers. The timing could not be worse – just a few hours from now, he was to officiate at the execution of NguyenTuong Van, a young Australian sentenced to death for drug smuggling.

This is the country that dangles more people per head of population than any other state in the world. Terminating drug smugglers is to Singaporeans what yodelling is to the Swiss or Tango to the Argentines, and Singapore without a hangman is like America without Mickey Mouse. There has been talk of importing one from Malaysia, or entrusting the task to young and inexperienced junior wardens. But I have a far better solution.

Step forward Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong!