I just watched yet another program on Ninomiya Sontoku, aka Kinjiro, that considers him as a statue. Schools throughout Japan have Kinjiro statues, as do some other institutions and many private individuals. These statues were handed down from previous generations and most people don’t quite know who Kinjiro was besides someone who read a lot of books. I know some variety shows do discuss him as an actual person, but they seem to mostly rattle off stats and figures and argue over whether he was a bureaucrat or an economist, or some asinine thing. I’ve never heard anyone tell the following story:
When Kinjiro was born, the family were really in hard straits. To add to their distress, when Kinjiro was five years old, the Sa[kawa] River overflowed its banks and washed away his father’s land, leaving them in abject poverty.
[…]
When Kinjiro was about twelve years of age, he went to work for a year with a farmer in the neighborhood. At the end of the year, before starting for home, he received, in addition to his board and lodging, a Japanese kimono and about two yen. His mother expected him early and was waiting for him, but when at night he had not returned, she became quite anxious. Shortly after dark he came rushing in, all out of breath, and full of excitement. When his mother reproved him for being late, he told her that in the morning he had received from his master a kimono and two yen, and had immediately set out for home. On the way he had met a man with a lot of little pine trees for sale. The poor man was very disheartened, because he had not succeeded in selling a single tree, and told Kinjiro that unless he could find a buyer he would be very much distressed. Kinjiro was sorry for the man, and an idea struck him whereby he could not only help the man, but could at the same time do the whole community a good service. As we already know, the Sa[kawa] River sometimes overflowed its banks. Kinjiro thought if a couple of rows of pine trees were planted along the banks of the river, and once took root, it would remedy this difficulty. So he bought all the trees and spent the remainder of the day planting them. He felt sure his work would have its reward. To-day those trees are large, and not only support the river bank, but add much to the beauty of the scenery. They stand as a living monument of little Kinjiro’s thoughtfulness.
“Just before the dawn: the life and work of Ninomiya Sontoku” by Robert Cornell Armstrong (1912)
Let’s put aside the fact that Kinjiro gave the fruits of a year’s labor to save a local farmer. What is clear is that the problem Kinjiro solved is one that was also faced by the people of Japan in the 1960s. Rivers in Japan frequently overflow and damage riverside structures. Or, at least, they used to. Nearly all the rivers in Japan have been filled in completely with concrete. Nobody ever thought to plant multiple rows of trees on the riverbanks. The Sakawa River itself has been dammed, and Kinjiro’s surviving trees were almost chopped down by thoughtless bureaucrats; the townspeople saved them.
Kinjiro was beloved by the people of his area because of his wisdom and his big heart. The people of Odawara City where he was born still remember him fondly today, referring to him as “Sontoku-sama”, and honoring the trees he planted there. A few websites therefore relate the story of the planting, but nobody seems to have made this connection with the state of Japan’s rivers today. Would that we had more like Kinjiro, and fewer building statues of him.
Posted: February 11th, 2011 | Kokoro
The Covenant
James A. Michener
Fawcett, 1987 (Amazon)
I think the question I really wanted this book to answer for me is why District 9 is such a good movie. It outperformed expectations.
Michener, who is renowned for his expert research, brings us all of the most important episodes of South African history, and many of its most telling quirks–the Norwegians who fought and died in the Boer War purely out of hatred for imperialism, the Afrikaner housewives who demanded that a classical statue in their town square be veiled in the name of decency–all in the context of an epic, generation-spanning fictional narrative, the purpose of which is not to distract from the history being made, but to give that history a human face. Michener’s is determined to show what history looks like, at the expense of any side; and, digesting the work properly, you are forced to evaluate the morality of remembrance and history itself as a human endeavor.
Michener opens with the imagined stories of the !Kung San and Zimbabweans before proceeding to the meat of the narrative, the Afrikaners. Taking the three stories side by side, it is impossible not to come to a reasonable evaluation: the !Kung San’s culture was beautiful and timeless, but being timeless it was also unchanging, and did not have any cultural narrative that could fill up a 1000 page book. Zimbabwe, too, must have had some limited history in the days of its kingdom, but it was never written down and dissolved into legend, irrelevant to its descendants. Is that bad, necessarily? Is it better to have a collective history than a lot of individual stories? Well, the next section will supply some evidence.
The Dutch are deposited in Africa as an unimportant colony, and remain unimportant in world history to everyone besides the southern Africans themselves– attracting notice only as the heroes of the Boer War and the villains of apartheid, but never with any context, and always as part of some other country’s political narrative. In an utterly foreign and savage land, being given no meaning to their mission, it was natural that they would invent some meaning for themselves, and Michener’s quiet argument in The Covenant is that they became an Old Testament people fashioning themselves after the narrative of the ancient Israelites.
This may or may not be true. But the more obvious truth is that they clung to every event in their history, with a bitter, collective insistence that they were alone in the African wilderness–other ethnic groups being incidental or antagonistic to their racial memory–and had been attacked on all sides for hundreds of years. For much of their history the Afrikaners were pretty much left alone to populate the coastline, embark on their own Oregon Trails, and rough it in the Veld with no formidable enemy but themselves. But after their colony was appropriated by the British Empire, Afrikaners kept a running tally of the English crimes against them, which, combined with post-independence responses to apartheid, were made into a historical case for the brutality of the world against the Afrikaner: a double hanging at a place called Slagter’s Nek, the imposed end of slavery by the English, decades of fighting the English for freedom, torture and death in English concentration camps, and now the murders of innocent citizens by (black) communists and killers, political harassment by European leftists and atheists, and so forth.
Too much history! Of course, this history is not easy to forget, just as Americans cannot easily forget 9/11. The Afrikaners cannot be faulted for remembering things that happened to them as a people. If we are to fault anything, it is human nature. Should someone time travel to 1700 and warn the Afrikaners that race is a cultural construct and that they should intermarry freely with the natives, they would be lynched; this was a group that already shared so many cultural bonds separating them from the Other that race was just another layer on the pile. Michener laments many times that the Afrikaners did not give the Colored (mixed-race and Indian) population equal voting and political rights, a choice that could have prevented the terrible legacy of apartheid and could have even eventually integrated the black population. But excluding the Colored was more than a matter of race. In the Colored population the myth of embattled Christians stranded in the wilderness was diluted and lost, replaced with family and local histories that held none of the power of racial memory. Putting aside the Afrikaners who were labeled Colored as a brutal punishment, the actual Colored population did not share the Afrikaners’ teleological drive.
Out of the evils of human history, some, such as imperialism or Balkans-style ethnic conflict, are readily understood as the mistakes of good people. Some, like Nazism and slavery, were easy to understand as the product of good people in the past, but are steadily moving towards ineffability as the world alienates itself from the motives behind them. And some, like apartheid, are simply bizarre to an outside observer. How could a tiny minority of good people perpetrate a system like this onto people they were at peace with, their neighbors and coworkers, whom they agreed belonged in their country? The answer can be found precisely in the Afrikaner narrative, for a people battling for their lives against a cold and uncaring world cannot easily incorporate other peoples, who do not share that sense of urgency, into their polity. The Afrikaners of the 20th century did not lack humanity or intelligence. They openly discussed their political situation with visitors of all kinds; their politicians, leaders, and judges constantly tried to impress the importance of their narrative onto South Africa’s other ethnic groups. The only thing they lacked was the ability to escape their Afrikaner identity.
What actually dissolved over the course of the 20th century was their belief in their own coherence. When they finally backed down and admitted that their system did not work, they were also being forced to admit that their own narrative, which could fill not only the 1000 pages of this book but several more books, was unable to provide a basis for fair and just government. The government that replaced them did not have a 1000-page narrative. In fact, we can see that while it is fairer to everyone, it is also directionless, and from this lack of meaning rises selfishness, corruption, and anarchy.
So, why is District 9 a good movie? Because the Afrikaners are us: a species struggling to keep the world coherent in the face of chaos. We have developed in the past 500 years the ability to refine our myths, but an educated person cannot help but notice that even these purified, enlightened narratives fail to change basic human nature. So we paddle against the current, and hope that if the aliens come they will be saviors, and not miserable wretches like us.
Posted: February 3rd, 2011 | Book Reviews
[If you saw a previous post — this came from my diary. Upon thinking about it further, I’ve decided to return it there.]
Today I taught second graders. The lesson was related to Setsubun, the old holiday where you throw beans at oni/ogres to keep them out of your house, and I instructed the kids on drawing oni using the English words “eyes, nose, mouth” (and somehow “horns” got into there too). The kids caught on quickly. One class demanded my signature, while the other had a veritable league of little artists drawing their oni in Cubist or Post-Impressionist style. Then, all of a sudden the teacher asked them to write their “kokoro no oni”, or “ogre of your heart”, underneath the picture.
It took me some mental bridging to figure out that an “ogre of your heart” means something that is preventing you from being a good kid, but the kids seemed to get it with no problem. Is this an ordinary Japanese expression? Not only did they understand what a “kokoro no oni” was, most of them quickly figured out which “oni” they thought plagued their hearts the most and wrote it down on the paper in a manner of seconds. Some examples of what they wrote:
- しゅくだいさぼるおにをたいじぞ！ Defeat the ogre of skipping homework!
- べんきょうしないおにをたいじぞ！ Defeat the ogre of not studying!
- わすれんぼうおにをたいじぞ！ Defeat the ogre of forgetfulness!
- きゅうしょくのこるおにをたいじぞ！ Defeat the ogre of leaving food on your plate at lunch!
- いじわるおにをたいじぞ！ Defeat the ogre of being rude!
- はずかしがるおにをたいじぞ！ Defeat the ogre of being shy!
- かん字きらいおにをたいじぞ！ Defeat the ogre of disliking kanji!
Wow! They could all grow up to be school counselors!
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Japanese kids can identify their own faults. School rules such as studying well and eating your food at lunch are stressed throughout the year, and character flaws like rudeness and shyness are discussed on most popular children’s shows. Still, I can’t imagine American elementary schoolers being able to complete an assignment like this so quickly. Little kids truly have a lot of thinking power that can be molded into many different things.
Posted: January 28th, 2011 | JET
Your parents, who brought you into this world and raised you, should rightfully be the most important figures in your life. On the bedrock of one’s forefathers are civilizations built and raised. Yet the Western cult of the self attempts to subvert this and create a society of orphans. Adults are constantly rewarded for putting their personal or professional goals before their children. Parents think nothing at fighting in front of their children. Above all, the insipid practices of divorce and premarital pregnancy create selfish adults and miserable kids; the hedonistic adults perhaps happier in the short term, but eventually dead, and the kids passing on dysfunction to the next generation. In short, in popular culture children are expected to have no reason to respect their parents and every reason to hate them.
In the midst of this society of orphans, I had the incredible fortune to be born to two perfect parents. To my knowledge, they have never quarreled; if they did it was not in my presence, which to a realist historian means the same thing. They never demanded recognition or respect, but earned both by pouring their hearts into raising their children with selfless love.
What is the result of this labor? The creation of children who can feel the presence of love in their homes, and have the means to distribute that love throughout society. The false, selfish “love” of a temporary obsession should crumble before this almighty goal. If “love” brings you to overlook alcoholism, brutality, and dishonor, then it is no grounds for a marriage that might expose children to these things. Similarly, if you yourself engage in these things in the presence of children, then it is you who must be shamed and removed from the pool of desirable partners.
The purpose of a marriage is not to memorialize a selfish, limited love between two people, nor is it (as Christian leaders suggest) to “produce” children. Only a couple who cannot think rationally about the society they want to live in will settle for one of these shallow goals, and only a foolish individual will promote them. Humanity as a whole deserves better than that. Marriage must engender an outward, contagious love conducive to raising healthy children.
I’m still on the fence as to the meaning of human existence, but I feel fairly confident in saying that raising children who carry both wisdom and love with them to the next generation should be among humanity’s highest goals. Let us hope, then, that we can enshrine that goal both in our laws and in our stories.
Posted: January 28th, 2011 | Kultur
Continuing where part 1 left off. Now you can learn about what I did in Tokyo.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: January 2nd, 2011 | Travel
The vacation you’re about to see requires a fair bit of explanation, so I’m releasing my photos as a blog post. Please note that there are more pictures in the Picasa album.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: January 2nd, 2011 | Travel
The dreariness of the family’s spiritual landscape passes belief. It is as monochrome and unrelated to those who pass through it as are the barren steppes, frequented by nomads who take their mere subsistence and move on. The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated.
I am speaking here not of the unhappy, broken homes that are such a prominent part of American life, but the relatively happy ones, where husband and wife like each other and care about their children, very often unselfishly devoting the best parts of their lives to them. But they have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world, of high models of action or profoundsense of connection with others. The family requires the most delicate mixture of nature and convention, of human and divine, to subsist and perform its function. Its base is merely bodily reproduction, but its purpose is the formation of civilized human beings. In teaching a language and providing names for all things, it transmits an interpretation of the order of the whole of things. It feeds on books, in which the little polity—the family—believes, which tell about right and wrong, good and bad and explain why they are so. The family requires a certain authority and wisdom about the ways of the heavens and of men. The parents must have knowledge of what has happened in the past, and prescriptions for what ought to be, in order to resist the philistinism or the wickedness of the present. Ritual and ceremony are now often said to be necessary for the family, and they are now lacking. The family, however, has to be a sacred unity believing in the permanence of what it teaches, if its ritual and ceremony are to express and transmit the wonder of the moral law, which it alone is capable of transmitting and which makes it special in a world devoted to the humanly, all too humanly, useful. When that belief disappears, as it has, the family has, at best, a transitory togetherness. People sup together, play together, travel to- gether, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.
The Closing of the American Mind, pp. 57-8
The source of this problem is described in the paragraphs that follow, for those interested.
Posted: December 19th, 2010 | Excerpts
Life isn’t fair.
It seems like a simple enough lesson, but it’s apparently forbidden in the ivory tower. I’ve seen a stunning amount of work put into academic deconstruction of the unfairness of the simplest statements, demonstrating a scholarly grasp of the intricacies of a situation, but a five-year-old child’s demand for some grown-up out there to set it right. There is an unwritten law that academics are not allowed to identify any social problem that originates in their own thinking. They might be able to correct the scholarly consensus, but in the end, the solution to the problem always lies in changing someone else’s behavior. And merely identifying an external agent, whether real or imagined, doesn’t solve anything. Life doesn’t operate by the ethics of what ought to be.
In college you are exhorted to go out there and make things fair, but life isn’t fair; some small parts of your life may have been fair, but the majority of it wasn’t. Having identified the cause of all your problems, you are told to remedy it and thereby fix the world. But you’re not going to fix the world. Your ability to fix things will vary deeply; if you’re very lucky and very courageous, you get to fix the lives of the people around you; if you’re merely average like most of the world, you fix yourself and maybe your family; if you’re unlucky, not even that. They don’t teach lessons on how to move from the unlucky to lucky tier at your school. You might pick it up from a church or a community group, but most likely you will have to learn as you move along.
College does not teach you how to operate in humanity’s complex web of power and relationships, or even its own section of that web. In fact, if you really, truly believe what you are taught in college, you will never learn to navigate this world. Instead, you will protest the human reality that you live in, refusing to respect the existence of power and desiring an end to its constituent parts. On the personal level: You will learn how to protest any unfair treatment of you yourself, or perhaps someone around you, by making a big fuss. You will see the lawsuit as the ultimate weapon in your personal life, and public shaming as the ultimate consequence. You will not understand how to shrug off the small stuff and resolve the larger issues quietly to the satisfaction of all involved. If you have integrity, you will lean towards religious asceticism, and may find some peace in separating yourself from the world entirely; if you lack it, you will simply be known as the most troublesome person in your circle of acquaintances.
On the political level: Anyone who refuses to adopt your message will be either ignorant, bigoted, or evil. You will discover that most of the world falls into one of these three categories. You will find that your personal vision of a just world and a fair life differs from that of others who naively desire a total end to injustice, and you will be doomed to fight with those comrades instead of “the enemy”. Meanwhile, your actual participation in society, through part-time jobs, freelance work, or street protests, will be irrelevant — not because rebels have never won, but because true rebellions are born out of more than theoretical ponderings. The true operation of the world will be beyond your grasp, except for a small circle of friends.
Those who reject what they were taught, or majored in economics or business instead, will be rewarded with both success and wisdom. Perhaps they will never understand the extent of injustice around the world and the tools needed to right it. But, over time, they will come to understand the smaller worlds that they themselves live in. That form of knowledge is truly power, and whether they use that power for good or evil is up to them; but it will become theirs to wield.
The founders of many American liberal arts colleges were solid Protestants who hoped to use the influence of the university system to spread their values. In the most superficial sense the collegiates of today have rejected that Christianity. But, on a much deeper level, they carry on the 19th century Protestant message of utopia on earth, and parade through the streets proclaiming their absolute truths and rallying fervent believers to their personalized causes. They can do what they want, but the facts will not change. Life isn’t fair.
Posted: December 18th, 2010 | Kultur
Karatsu Kunchi is a harvest festival that’s held every November. The entire town of Karatsu counts down to this day every year. Work stops everywhere and everyone parties. They carry huge floats around. The pictures speak for themselves really.
HUGE images ahead! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 19th, 2010 | Japan
On September 15, the American National Nuclear Security Administration in Nevada executed Bacchus, a sub-critical nuclear test, which they refer to as a safety test of the American nuclear stockpile. It was dutifully reported in a press release and on their Facebook page (!). And… nobody noticed.
At the end of September, they again reported this in their monthly newsletter. And… nobody noticed. Fully two sources reported on this in September: a man named Andrew Kishner and a man named RKM Ming Lai. Neither is associated with any news source; they are private, little-read bloggers.
The NNSA could have been forgiven for thinking that their sub-critical test was really not a big deal at all. Then, quite suddenly, in the morning of October 13, Asahi TV noticed!
アメリカが臨界前核実験 オバマ政権下で初
10/13 05:50
米政府が臨界前核実験を行っていたことが分かりました。オバマ政権になって初めてです。
米エネルギー省のホームページによると、実験は先月15日にネバダ州で行われたもので、地下での核爆発ではなく、臨界前実験によって核兵器開発のデータを得ることが目的としています。同じ実験はこれで24回目ですが、前回の2006年8月以来、オバマ政権下では初めてです。アメリカは爆発を伴う核実験を禁止する包括的核実験禁止条約を批准していませんが、「核なき世界」を目指すオバマ大統領は批准への強い意欲を示していて、臨界前実験でも国際社会から批判される可能性があります。
After hearing of Asahi’s belated scoop, the Mayor of Hiroshima issued a letter of protest. Only then was the Peace Watch Tower reset to “zero” (or, rather, 28), English-language news reports issued, NGOs notified, etc. All of this happened roughly a month late.
It seems like nobody at the Hiroshima mayor’s office, or indeed anyone else in the world with an interest in nuclear issues, was actually watching the NNSA website. The NHK falsely reported that a statement was released October 12. One group opens their article with the roundabout statement, “It was learned on October 12“, and an explanation that the NNSA failed to make an announcement beforehand like they should have. But the fact of the matter is that no announcement was made on October 12. In fact, someone at Asahi must have remembered to check the NNSA website on this date, and found the month-old announcement.
Posted: October 29th, 2010 | World Peace
