Notes on Japan: 6
In my last post I raised the question of how nations could become psychopathic. Why take this despicable, cruel alternative rather than a more benign route? Each year, on the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb, the Mayor of Hiroshima sends a telegram to every head of state, reminding them of that appalling crime and pleading for peace and an end to nuclear testing. He does the same whenever a nation joins the elite club of nuclear protagonists. Hiroshima, after a sentence of death for over a hundred thousand of its citizens, chose the humanitarian, route of peace and love. One of the handful of buildings that survived, stood beneath the hyper centre of the blast and is now a preserved, gutted skeleton, an epitaph to that appalling day. Around it is a tranquil Peace Park. The museum is a paean to human sorrow. In it the citizens of Hiroshima, still ongoing victims of the great obscenity of a weapon of mass destruction seek restitution for the whole human race.
Why have the Jews of Israel, sufferers on an unimaginable scale from man's inhumanity to man, developed their own nuclear bombs? Why have they become one of the world's cadre of inhuman military aggressors? Why did Hiroshima go down one road and Jerusalem, another?
Gotcha! 250,000 killed in American bombing!
Notes on Japan: 6
When you have been to the Peace Park in Hiroshima you wish that every politician in the world could be dragged to its museum and made to look at the images of devastation following the dropping of the atom bomb on the city. A quarter of a million people died here and Nagasaki. These are some facts I didn’t know (I now realise I was fed propaganda in the fifties as a growing youth!).
Truman and his aides discussed warning the Japanese. They didn’t.
The US Government discussed up to ten potential sites. They chose these two because there were no prisoner of war camps nearby.
Both sites sat in a topography that would result in greatest carnage.
The bombs were dropped to explode at an optimum height (500-800 ft) to maximise civilian and material destruction.
Despite knowing the devastation of Hiroshima, the US dropped a further bomb, the next day, on Nagasaki.
There was a US spin that said that dropping the bombs shortened the war by two to three years and probably saved lives. Yet, the Japanese had run out of military resources.
The million or so Japanese troops would have fought to honourable death, it is said but the enormity of the bomb meant that they were saving their families by dishonourable surrender, thus justifying civilian carnage.
I haven’t read any plausible grand theory concerning the psychopathy of nations. The US. Nazi Germany. Stalinist Russia. China. The Japanese, themselves. Darfur and countless other African genocides. The British in Australia. And on and on back through time for the last however many thousand years.
To close down the intelligence in another person’s eyes, forever, is among the most obscene acts of which a human being is capable. To do it on the scale of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is beyond any comprehension.
Yet, there are among us, on this globe, as many who try to protect the sanctity of life as degrade and destroy it. Almost everywhere we look we see governments that are cynical, indifferent, callous and capable of dehumanising the so-called enemy, thus justifying whatever gross acts that might be committed. But among their own citizens are countless kind, considerate and humane individuals.
As long as we are taught to differentiate people into us and them and fail to see that there are no essential differences worth a pinch of salt between any two human beings (after all we all come from the same genetic ancestor!), then carnage is always likely. Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, communists, capitalists, black, white, brown, will seek, when times are hard, to devalue the humanity of others, in any way different from themselves.
To see ourselves in others’ eyes is the first premise of civilised existence.
Who could then press the red button over Iran?
Labels: Using nuclear weapons on Iran
Tips for eating:
Notes from Japan: 4
One of those irritants that keeps me consistently inflamed in life, is tipping. In our UK, class-ridden society the argument is rarely about the principle of tipping, it is about the degree: whether ten percent or fifteen percent, usually. I have a non-mathematical friend who argues that inflation means that it should now be fifteen percent!!! I have other friends who argue that tipping, particularly in a well-frequented restaurant, produces better service and, often, better food. Then there are those friends who reserve tipping for particularly well-prepared and presented meals, as though good eating cannot be taken for granted. They thus elevate themselves to gourmets, with all the attendant snobbery that this entails.
When I worked as a waiter all those years ago in Newcastle, I felt consigned to serfdom by the ignominy of relying upon tips as a means of making a reasonable wage. Hell is others, said Sartre and there seems to me to be plenty of evidence that Purgatory, at least, materialises whenever ‘others’, that is most of the UK population, have the opportunity to lord it over those less fortunate. Tipping is the perfect arena for this often subtle form of class discrimination. Imagine Dear Reader, whatever your job, be it doctor, teacher, company director, judge - how you would feel if your salary was made up by voluntary subscriptions from your clients. Would it change your sense of personal value and social status? I think so. Sorry to single out certain professions among this blog’s faithful readership but other readers, perennially made to feel lower in society’s invidious pecking order, presumably don't need the iniquities of tipping, spelled out to them!.
Empathise with this curmudgeon’s delight to discover that there is no tipping in Japan. I have no idea whether this means that everyone has a reasonable wage (as should be the case, everywhere) but customer service was uniformly high, enthusiasm for doing the job well, abundant and I never felt I was being pressured into a dominant/subservient role play which exists in all tipping societies. It made the act of eating (Japan’s cuisine is an undoubted glory) an almost transcendental pleasure.
Labels: The art of happy eating...
Zen garden, Kyoto
Notes from Japan: 3
Outside Kyoto, up in the hills, there is a Zen garden some 500 years old called Riyoanji. I saw it at a fairly early hour – that is, before the tourist buses arrived. The setting is peaceful, in the middle of hectares of lake and trees. I viewed the rectangular artifact from a shady wooden pagoda, sitting on well worn planks. There was no place from which my eye could take in its entirety, despite it being only about the size of a tennis court.
The garden is, as one might imagine, a paradox. It represents nature's garden by displaying no natural growth, save moss that adheres to the shadows of rocks placed on its shale. The shale is raked long-ways and is pale grey. The rocks are of varying sizes and they seem to have no obvious pattern in their distribution. I struggled to recover the original conception that coalesced in the mind of the monk who laid them this way. In other words, for me it became a physical version of a Zen koan, a metaphor for the impenetrability of existence. The experience forced me to sit and meditate – not in the usual sense of the act, as part of some spiritual quest – but in an unforced, serendipitous way that crept up on me.
Now, back in the UK, I think of having experienced all those art installations in their gallery-laid post-modernity, premised on the desire to make me think. None has held a candle to this gently disturbing encounter near Kyoto.
Labels: Being and nothingness...
Not just a load of old bollocks...
Notes from Japan: 2
In Innsbruck there is a memorial to the Emperor Maximilian in which a series of statues, larger than life, clutter the side walls of a little church. They all represent heroes of one kind or another and are cast in gunmetal black. Curiously, one of them is our own - or French, depending on your nationality - King Arthur. What is especially striking about this moral and chaste Head of the Round Table are his well hung orbs. Unlike the rest of the tall effigy, his sacred testicles are golden and are only this colour because of the incessant attention given to them by the furtive fingering of young women, seeking successful conception.
I was reminded of these burnished baubles at a Shinto shrine on the edge of Kyoto. In the woods there are the broken-stone hind quarters of a horse statue. They are wrapped in red cloth, as though to heal them. As I watched, an elderly couple arrived and stood behind the horse, in turn. They rubbed its hind quarters first and then their own thighs. A young couple followed suit. All four crawled under it's half-belly, having to squeeze awkwardly between stone and earth in a final act of atonement to the god, thus represented, together with (I guessed) a prayer that their own infirmities might be eased.
Nearby there is a shrine with lines of blank wooden foxes' faces which require its supplicants to inscribe their features, offer coins and prayers. At another a stone ball rests on a ledge and after a monetary appeasement, the believer guesses its weight and wishes for some happy outcome to a current impasse. If it is lighter, the result will be propitious. If it is heavier then the outcome may be bleak. At a Buddhist shrine it is possible to 'buy' a a twist of paper, with your fortune written on it. If it's optimistic you keep it but if the augury is poor, then you can drop further coins in a slot and pin it to a wire where a monkey god will rescind its awkward news.
Throughout time all cultures, whether they be the so-called advanced nations or those patronisingly termed 'primitive', have externalised their hopes and fears by creating icons upon which they could project their hopes and desires. Alongside scientific reason, magic and superstition continue happily to occupy the human imagination.