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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.

Where War Could Begin

No shots were fired, no one was injured, and the most potent weapon employed was a water hose. By the standards of modern war, Sunday’s encounter between a US surveillance vessel and a group of Chinese naval ships in the South China Sea, was a drop in the ocean – but 48 hours later the ripples were still spreading.

The Pentagon accused the Chinese of “harassment” in international waters; Beijing denounced the Americans for operating illegally in its exclusive economic zone. Most strikingly, the price of oil rose by $3 a barrel. What is it about this particular patch of ocean that generates such heat and anxiety over an apparently trivial incident?

[Click on it for a larger version of the spooky black map.]

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?

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 . . . ]

Dreams in Bali

[Hello again. Here's a post I wrote for another Times blog, 'Across the Pond', about US poltiics and the presidential elections.]

On the face of it, Asia is an unlikely place from which to pontificate on the US presidential election, and I am an unlikely pontificator. Drastic barriers of culture and language, the world’s largest ocean, and hours of time difference and separate Tokyo, Beijing and Bangkok from Washington, New York and LA. Compared to Europe, the US, for better or worse, has few historical, colonial associations with Asia. Personally, I have set foot in America three times in my life, and never for more than a few days.

But the lives of people in Asia have been profoundly affected by political decisions made in the United States. To a greater extent than Europeans, American actions over the past sixty years have been a marked blight, as well as a blessing. Twice in living memory, in Vietnam and in Korea, American troops have fought disastrous wars on Asian soil. Large concentrations of US troops remain in South Korea and Japan, arousing mixed feelings, at best. Of course, the brightest Asian students still compete to win places at US universities, American ideals of self-betterment and democracy inspire Asian politicians, and people of all backgrounds are avid consumers of American popular culture. In Europe, sentiments towards the US tend to veer between extremes of admiration and contempt; in Asia, the polarisation is less extreme, but there is an general and often unstated ambivalence about the vastness of American US power, and a scepticism about how much the American public and American their politicians understand or even care about the world’s largest continent.

The interaction between US politicians and Asia has been one of the most interesting things about a frequently boring and frustrating event – the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, where I write this. Here representatives of the negative American stereotype – arrogant, indifferent and patronising – have intersected with other Americans making an effort to putting over a very different image of responsiveness and responsibility.

I touched on some of this in my piece in this morning’s newspaper. To oversimplify: 190 governments have gathered in Bali to plan the next stage in the struggle against global warming. The European Union favours the kind of approach to the reduction of greenhouse gases on which the European Union has been created – rules and targets and commitments, agreed in detail, and legally binding on everyone. The US, at least the Bush administration, prefers a situation in which countries come up with their own targets, if any – if there are to be binding goals, it certainly doesn’t want any of them agreed this week.

The final document is being negotiated as I write. I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the two arguments (although the alert among you may be able to work out where my sympathies lie). The Bali International Convention Centre is full of environmentalists heaping contumely on the US; it is important to filter most of this out. But, honestly, in its press conferences at least, the US delegation has failed to impress.

It is led by Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs at the State Department. The expansive vagueness of this job description leads me to suspect that she is valued for her PR and presentational skills – and Ms D does have a certain auntyish charm. Attending one of her press conference is like standing as a five year old in front of your primary schoolteacher as she tells you it doesn’t matter that you have wet your knickers, but that you should try to make sure that it never happens again.

The real star is a bloke called James Connaughton, who opens new universes of meaning in the world oily.

How do you spell Jap?

Be sure to read this characteristically intelligent piece in the Japan Times by David McNeill about the lurking racism in British and American media coverage of the Lindsay Hawker murder. A few extracts:

This story brimmed over with the best front-page ingredients: a violent crime with a hint of salacious color, a beautiful victim and a poisonous, clever villain who got away. It also had one other, more troubling component: race.

. . . To prove that underneath the stiff salaryman suit of everyman Japan lurks a slavering fantasist, several foreign journalists were dispatched to interview white hostesses in Roppongi, Tokyo's "social hub," as it was described in a British newspaper. After explaining that Hawker had been "repeatedly beaten over several hours" in a flat owned by Tatsuya Ishihashi (sic), The Daily Mail said that many of the hostesses were also worried about "weird" Japanese men.

"While some British women described the attitude of the men they encounter here as strange, uncomfortable and unpredictable, others talked of the awe and mystique Western women hold for the Japanese male," the reporter wrote.

The "taller" and "more liberated" British women have to "constantly put up with unwanted male attention — such as the endemic groping on trains."

"They want you to belong to them, but there is a frustration there because they know they can't have you," said one hostess. "The Japanese are so very different to us that I wonder if we will ever really understand them," said another.

Step carefully through the minefield of racial cliches. The devious, inscrutable Japanese man too cowardly to come out and ask for what he really wants: to have sex with an Englishwoman. And ask the obvious questions: Why visit a club district to investigate the life of a language teacher; why should a place designed to exploit and magnify sexual fantasies for money yield honest insights into racial relations; and what did the men think? We don't know because the reporter never bothered to interview a single Japanese person.

. . . A group of agitated Japanese bloggers dubbed this "Japan bashing." A less kind description might be racism.

Flying Seoul-o

Writing about foreign stereotypes last week, I made sceptical reference to the popular notion of Japan as a land awash in bizarre pornography, where every other salarymen spends his lunch break hunched over rape manga, downloading bukkake videos, and purchasing schoolgirls' underwear from his office vending machine. Japanese smut is certainly distinctive, I acknowledged, but if it really is more widely consumed than in the rest of the world - show us the evidence.

Committed Asia Exile reader Joseh Miller has taken up the challenge by sending me a link to this fascinating page on the website Internet Filter Review. It goes some way towards answering a profound question: who are the world's biggest wankers?

The answers will amaze and appal you.

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 . . .

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!

They went and did it

It's just before noon, a misty early autumn day, and I'm waiting to cross the road opposite City Hall in central Seoul. A lot of policemen are standing around, and the lights are taking an unusually long time to change. Suddenly there's a buzz of motorbikes and black-windowed limousines with little Rising Sun flags flapping. It's Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, just arrived after his rather successful summit meeting in Beijing.

I walk to the bank and change my Indonesian rupiah (the left overs of last week's holiday money) into Korean won. Then back around the corner to meet Dr Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert from Kookmin University, for lunch. "Did you hear?" he says. "They've gone ahead with the nuclear test."

It's not a surprise (although I hadn't expected it this early). And yet, stepping back a yard or two, how remarkable - that a country like North Korea, a starving, maimed wreck of a country, should have become a nuclear state. From the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France, down through Israel, India and Pakistan, and now - North Korea. It's like a nuclear armed Cambodia or Albania. Whatever you think of Kim Jong Il, what an amazing thing he has achieved.

How this happened and what happens next will be picked over for years, and I'll be writing more soon. Here's my brief instant reaction, largely based on my conversation with the admirable Dr Lankov, and a few thoughts to bear in mind while picking your way thorugh the self-righteous and inane guff that is already spewing out of CNN et al.

In the next few months there will be endless and tedious tough talking about how bad BAD BAD the Norks are, and what a spanking the "international community" is going to give them. There will be probably be an attempt at sanctions, but they won't make any difference. Nothing the rest of the world can do will make any difference.

There is nothing anyone can do about North Korea's nuclear test.