Recently in Japan Category
"'I saw people trying to balance on the rooftops like surfers,' she said. 'It didn't work. It was like hell.'" Boston's Big Picture offers a survey of the horrifying images out of Japan since the earthquake/tsunami double-whammy of last Friday. [Part 2, Part 3.]
"'It's way past Three Mile Island already,' said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. 'The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion." And, in unfortunately related news, an animated infographic at the NYT explains exactly what engineers are trying to avoid at Fukushima Daiichi right now. (It's not as bad as you may have heard, but, Lordy, it's not good.)
Next week, Foreign Policy magazine and its editor-in-chief Susan Glasser will be releasing its 2nd annual roster of the world's greatest thinkers and doers in foreign policy. I have seen the list -- and it's impressively creative and eclectic. There is one name that is not on the FP100 who should be -- and that is Chalmers Johnson, who from my perspective rivals Henry Kissinger as the most significant intellectual force who has shaped and defined the fundamental boundaries and goal posts of US foreign policy in the modern era."
The Washington Note's Steve Clemons remembers one of his friends, colleagues, and mentors: Asia scholar, critic of empire, and coiner of the "developmental state," Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010. (See also James Fallows' remembrances on his passing.) Argued Johnson in 2009: "Make no mistake - whether we're being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it."
"This can be a moment of opportunity for North Korea. If North Korea continues to make the right choices, it can repair its relationship with the international community -- much as Libya has done over the past few years. If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and our partners in the six-party talks will respond accordingly." In a Rose Garden statement yesterday, Dubya announces the lifting of trading sanctions against North Korea, on account of Pyongyang seemingly agreeing to nuclear disarmament as outlined in recent multilateral talks. But don't get the wrong idea, folks: Talking to our enemies is still an act of horrible, dirty appeasement. Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan surveys the deal.
"'Inhumane deeds should be fully acknowledged,' said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee...'The world awaits a full reckoning of history from the Japanese government.'" The House passes a resolution calling for Japan to apologize for its WWII "comfort women" program. [Text.] "Lawmakers want an apology similar to the one the U.S. government gave to Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. That apology was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Reagan in 1988." Well, I'm all for offically recognizing historical sins in the past -- *cough* slavery *cough* -- but, unfortunately, no mention was made in this bill of our own possible complicity in Imperial Japan's ugly system of forced prostitution. The resolution might carry more rhetorical force if it did.
"'As expected, after it opened it was elbow to elbow,' the history says. 'The comfort women...had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just yesterday were the enemy, and because of differences in language and race, there were a great deal of apprehensions at first. But they were paid highly, and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully.'" The continuing furor in Asia over Japan's ignominious use of "comfort women" (re: forced prostitution) during WWII reaches America, as it comes to light that occupation Japan created a similar "comfort system" for American GI's in the year after the war (until MacArthur shut it down in the spring of 1946.) "An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan's atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war...Although there are suspicions, there is not clear evidence non-Japanese comfort women were imported to Japan as part of the program."
While I thought most critics lavished too much praise on Pan's Labyrinth, the very similar swells of appreciation for Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima are, surprisingly, much closer to the mark. Eastwood's first crack at Iwo Jima in 2006, Flags of our Fathers, was to my mind a well-meaning dog, one made particularly lousy by the heavy-handed fingerprints of Paul Haggis all over the film. But (perhaps due to the different screenwriter, Iris Yamashita), Letters is really something quite remarkable. A mournful, occasionally shocking testament to the inhumanity and absurdities attending war, and a elegiac dirge for those caught in its grip, even on the other side of the conflict, Letters from Iwo Jima is an impressive -- even at times breathtaking -- siege movie. And strangely enough, elements that seemed trite or intrusive in Flags -- the desaturated landscape, the minimalist piano score -- are truly haunting and evocative here. In fact, Letters from Iwo Jima is so good it even makes Flags of our Fathers seem like a better movie just by association, which, trust me, is no small feat.
As you probably know by now, Letters from Iwo Jima follows the famous World War II battle, ostensibly depicted in Flags, from the Japanese side. Here, nobody cares about artfully raised flags or the Ballad of Ira Hayes -- the emphasis instead is on honor and survival. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe, as captivating here as he was in The Last Samurai) has been ordered to lead the defense of the island against the Americans. To this task, he fully devotes himself, despite fond memories of his earlier days on US soil. But it only takes a few walks around Mt. Suribachi for Kuribayashi to figure out it's pretty much a no-win scenario -- the Americans are too many, too productive, and too strong. And once word leaks out that the Japanese fleet has been broken at Leyte Gulf, Kuribayashi and his men -- most notably friendly grunt Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), and former Kempetai Shimizu (Ryo Kase) -- must slowly come to grips with the fact that they're not digging cavern defenses so much as their own tomb...a tomb in which many Japanese officers, and not least the headquarters on the homeland, will expect them to die with honor.
What's particularly surprising here is how unafraid Eastwood is to invert the usual sympathies of a World War II film. It's not just that the Japanese are the "good guys" here -- True, Letters dramatizes the soldiers' plight by portraying them, particularly Saigo, as just like our fun-loving GI's at heart. But it also doesn't shy away from examining a cultural emphasis on dying well that seems completely foreign to the American mind. And, although a wounded American serviceman shows up later in the film, for the most part the US forces are -- surprisingly -- portrayed here like something out of The Empire Strikes Back, all gleaming, remorseless battleships and Fiery Death from Above. (Some have argued that Eastwood elides over Japanese atrocities in this film, but I'm not sure that's really fair, unless I somehow just missed the Dresden firebombing subplot in Saving Private Ryan. This is not to say that all war crimes are equivalent or that both sides are equally guilty (although Lord knows it got ugly) -- that gets into a moral calculus well outside the bounds of this review -- only that Letters seems more interested in portraying war itself as an atrocity, and that enough reference is made to ugly tactics (aiming at medics, for example) that the film doesn't feel to me like a whitewash.)
The sobering truth at the heart of the grim, moving Letters from Iwo Jima is captured in its penultimate image. (Alas, like too many WWII films, Eastwood opts for an unnecessary contemporary bookend, but it's not as distracting as the Greatest Generation stuff in Flags. In fact, you might argue that it plays very well off those scenes, in depicting what little survives the war on the Japanese side.) I won't give it away here...suffice to say that Letters makes clear that War is a demon that rips lives apart and rends men asunder, no matter what side you're on or for what reasons. Regardless of race, creed, nationality, or ideology, all who invoke its wrath will eventually come to taste tragedy.
"Is this the right message to be sending to taxpayers in America, Russia, Europe and Japan -- that it's OK to do a stunt like this?" The Russian space agency weighs the financial pros and safety cons of an orbital chip shot from the ISS. "The golf shot is hardly the first commercial venture in space. The cash-strapped Russian space agency has taken three 'space tourists' to the orbiting laboratory for a reported $20 million apiece. An Israeli company, Tnuva Food Industries, paid the Russians $450,000 to show two cosmonauts drinking milk, and Pizza Hut paid $1 million to slap a logo on the side of a Proton rocket and have cosmonauts deliver a pizza to the space station. The Russians aren't alone. Last year, the Japanese space agency arranged for the filming of an instant ramen noodle commercial on the space station."
"I was trying to escape. Obviously, it didn't work." If it's any consolation, Dubya, we all feel just as trapped. In one of those resounding visual metaphors that capture a presidency and that life occasionally kicks up for all to see (the last one being Dubya's fiddling during Katrina), our leader gets stymied by a locked door while trying to evade a reporter's questions about his China trip (which were pretty softball, given all the things he could've been asking these days.)
In somewhat related news, in the relatively sanguine Post story about the door incident, the following depressing information is included: "In five years in the presidency, Bush has proved a decidedly unadventurous traveler...As he barnstormed through Japan, South Korea and China, with a final stop in Mongolia still to come, Bush visited no museums, tried no restaurants, bought no souvenirs and made no effort to meet ordinary local people...[Laura Bush] once persuaded him to go to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, only to see him burn through the place in 30 minutes. He dispensed with the Kremlin cathedrals in Moscow in seven minutes. He flatly declined an Australian invitation to attend the Rugby World Cup while down under."
