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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 . . . ]

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.

The Missiles of July

Yawn. Stretch. Scratch. I wake up, the morning after the Great North Korean Missile Launch. And Tokyo - and I presume the rest of the world - is still here! Based on the loose-bowelled reaction to yesterday's missile tests I had expected to awaken in a glowing post-nuclear city of crazed mutants - or at least in a country under martial law, with streams of refugees fleeing the city for the relative safety of Tokyo Disneyland. Last night, I even went to sleep listening to Ultravox's apocalyptic classic 'Dancing With Tears In My Yeyes".  But no apocalpyse! What in Bush's name is going on?

Click here for my sensible, sarcasm-free analysis of the missile test firing yesterday.

Despite my flippancy, it is serious of course. But it's been serious for years, and the events of yesterday morning make little difference except symbolically. This is what it boils down to, in a very simplified and condensed form. The only way to make progress in defanging North Korea and luring it out of its isolation is by engagement - the kind of 'Sunshine Policy' enacted by Clinton and the former South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung. Yes, the North Koreans will lie and cheat and generally take the piss. But what is the alternative?

The alternative is what we've got now - a situation of rudderless drift in which the US pats itself on the head for not "rewarding" North Korea with talk and concessions, while Kim Jong Il meanwhile builds up his nuclear arsenal. The ironies are so immense it's easy to stop noticing them. To repeat only the most obvious: we went to war in Iraq over WMD which didn't exist; meanwhile North Korea boasts of building nuclear weapons, and we find ourselves powerless. Like so much current US foreign policy, we will look back on all this in calmer decades to come and shake our heads at the idiocy of it all.

Another loosely connected thought. The official version has it that six medium range missiles were fired yesterday and one Taepodong 2 which "failed" after 40 seconds. But did it really fail, or was it destroyed in flight by the North Koreans themselves?

As far as I can tell, there is a single source for all the technical information about the flight of the missiles - the Pentagon. And of course it suits the Pentagon to portray the Taepodong as a laughable failure. But it all seems a bit too neat to me.

Having cranked up their missile, the North Koreans had to do something with it. But it was clear that if they fired it all the way - up over Japan and towards the United States - a furious and decisive reaction would have followed. Perhaps they chose to lob it a little bit of the way and then ditch it - enabling them to test the launch mechanism and the first stage of the rocket, and to make their gesture of defiance, but without unequivocally inviting retaliation.

I don't know . . .

There's good sensible commentary by the sage John Gittings on The Guardian website here.

Meaning of the madness in Memphis

[UPDATE: Moving images of Zany 'Zumi's Graceland antics can be viewed here, on the Channel 4 website. The report includes bowel-melting archive footage of David Owen and other Liberals chortling along to Elvis at their 1983 party conference.]

I can't make up my mind about the true meaning of Junichiro Koizumi's Elvis pilgrimage to Graceland with Bush, Laura and the Presley women yesterday (drolly reported by my colleague Time Reid here). I don't know whether to blush or to cheer, to punch the air or bury my face in my hands. As I see it, there are two opposite, but equally arguable interpretations of the extraordinary events in Memphis.

Interpretation Number One:

It was a disaster, a well intended self-humiliation by Koizumi, which will have the effect of obscuring his many achievements - as well as his disastrous failures.

I applaud Jun-chan for his unselfconsciousness and his passion for life outside the world of politics. On the whole, with his upright demeanour, well cut grey suits and air of mysterious detachment, he is a very dignified character. But yesterday - well, even Lisa Marie and Priscilla looked embarrassed.

From an extremely full account in the Washington Post:

By the time he got to the Jungle Room, decorated after Elvis's memory of Hawaii, Koizumi was ready to perform.

He smiled at Lisa Marie, her brown hair streaked with blond.

"You look like Elvis," he told her.

Why shouldn't North Korea test the Taepodong?

Taking everything into account, balancing up the pros and the cons, all things considered - I am anti-intercontinental ballistic missile.

Long, metallic, phallic objects, charged up with jet fuel, and mounted with nasty warheads - they give me the willies. When they are in the hands of unreconstructed Stalinists, with bad hair and gulags, then my unease multiplies. Much better all round to melt them down to make Meccano kits for underfunded schools, or spend the money on improved broadband internet access for Pyongyang.

All that said, I can't understand why North Korea shouldn't conduct a long range missile test.

We may not like the North Koreans, but there are certain facts about them that we have to accept. They have a large military, as does the United States. It possesses, and is developing, ballistic missiles (like Britain and the United States). Obviously, it is going to test them - Britain does, and the Americans do too. It may be alarming, but it is hypocrisy to claim that they are not entitled to do so.

The argument then becomes one about proliferation. The rest of the world, it is claimed, is trying hard to limit the spread of powerful and destructive long range weapons; the North Koreans cannot be allowed to flout these principles and make things more dangerous for for everyone else. But legally this isn't true - it is three years since North Korea pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it is certainly not signed up to anything promising not to test conventional weapons (the so-called "ban" on testing in 1999 was nothing more than a voluntary, self-imposed moratorium).

And who really is making the world dangerous? Kim Jong Il is not my cup of tea, but I believe that he is a rational man and I can see that he finds himself in a difficult position. He was already stranded by history, marooned on a shrinking iceberg of communist rhetoric with no obvious way of stepping off and maintaining his power. His economy was failing, his people were starving, and his military was grinding to a halt. Then George Bush appeared and unambiguously announced, in the "axis of evil" speech, that Kim was in his sights. He demonstrated the kind of thing he had in mind by invading Iraq the following year.

In such circumstances, how would you expect a leadership to react? To quietly roll over and surrender (as anti-American resistance was supposed to have done so after the defeat of Saddam)? Or to leverage what few military resources it has at its disposal and at least give its declared enemy something to think about?

Read The Village Where Nothing Happened

[Read the next post first - Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened. What follows is the version which I dictated to the copy taker by phone, rather than the edited version eventually printed in the newspaper. There may be small differences.]

Printed in The Independent on 4th December 2001, under the headline, 'A village is destroyed ... and America says nothing happened'

By Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Eastern Afghanistan

The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village, so obscure that no one can agree on whether it is called Kama Ado or Mado, has ceased to exist.

Sing The Village Where Nothing Happened

The single newspaper story of which I am most proud was published in The Independent on 4th December 2001. It was a month after the fall of the Taleban, and I was in the Afghan city of Jalalabad close to the border with Pakistan. Anti-Taleban mujahideen, friends of the Americans, were fighting a ragged battle against a remnant of al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the Tora Bora caves in the Spin Ghar mountains to the south. There were a few commandos of the American and British special forces on the ground, but allied support was largely limited to massive air raids on the mountains by B-52 bombers.

I was staying with a group of foreign reporters in a hotel in Jalalabad. Every few hours, the ground shook with the explosion of the massive bombs, 40 miles away. At night the horizon was illuminated with orange fire. We all wanted to go to the mountains to see the battle for ourselves. But the mujahideen, who more or less tolerated us as a necessary and amusing nuisance, said that it was too dangerous.

Then one morning, we were summoned to the Jalalabad residence of one of the mujahideen commanders. I remember arriving there by taxi to see a pick up truck pulled up in the drive. It was full of dead, dusty bodies - young mujahideen fighters in their thin pyjama-like robes and sandals. It was explained that they had been staying in a house, close to Tora Bora which, out of the blue, had been struck by a bomb from one of the B-52s. I remember the face of Haji Zaman, the mujahideen commander as he told us this. He was a hard, sarcastic, unlikeable and wholly untrustworthy man, but as he spoke he seemed to be close to tears.

The same thing happened the next day. Then at the beginning of December, we were told that an entire village had been destroyed by the Americans. From the safety, and relative comfort of our hotel, we reported these claims. They were flatly denied by the Pentagon, in the least ambiguous terms: "it just didn't happen".

We asked once again if we could go down and see for ourselves. Haji Zaman agreed.

Three others went, apart from me: Chris Tomlinson of AP, the photographer Yola Monakhov, and a CNN correspondent whom, for reasons which will become clear, I will not name.