Categories
books history japan

#FenCon: A few places to get started on modern Japanese history/culture

Once again I want to apologize to everyone who attended the Tao and Again panel at FenCon. I had no idea I was going to be moderator and thus was woefully unprepared. (And it didn’t help there were only two of us on the panel, so I didn’t even have a big group of other panelists to cower behind!) As promised, here are some recommendations of places to get started on research for modern Japanese history/culture. This list is in no way definitive or exhaustive, particularly considering “modern Japan” is a giant subject in and of itself, but hopefully it’ll help bring up questions and ideas that will lead to both research and stories!

If I think of anything else, I’ll be sure to add it to the list! (And please, drop any recommendations you might have in the comments.) For the most part I tried to grab books that are fairly easy to find in libraries or bookstores.

Factual
Shinohata – Ronald P Dore
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II – John Dower
A Modern History of Japan (second edition) – Andrew Gordon
The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman – Kaneko Fumiko [Memoir]
Gendering Modern Japanese History – Barbara Molony (ed)
Office Ladies and Salaried Men – Ogasawara Yuko
A Man With No Talents – Oyama Shiro [This is a memoir]
The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Tasuko and the Meiji Restoration – Anne Walthall
Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: Motives in the Meiji Restoration – George M. Wilson

Fiction
Rashomon and Other Stories – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Black Rain – Ibuse Masuji
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa – Kawabata Yasunari
Barefoot Gen – Nakazawa Keiji
Kokoro – Souseki Natsume
I Am a Cat – Souseki Natsume

Categories
earthquake geology japan

The Sendai Earthquake

I haven’t had anything to say about the Sendai earthquake; it has quite literally left me speechless with horror, and pain, and agonizing worry. I know and care about people who live there. I’ve been to Japan twice, myself, and hope to travel there many more times in the future. There is something more personally horrible about knowing a place – if even a little – remembering its sights and sounds and smells, and knowing that something terrible has happened there.

I can’t really focus enough to think about the science behind what has happened. If you’re interested in the details, the USGS is the place to go. Or Chris Rowan has an excellent synthesis of the data at Scientific American.

Garry at Geotripper has tried to put things in a perspective of why the geosciences really are important to each and every one of us, whether we realize it or not. It’s an excellent post. You should read it. The one thing that really stuck with me is:

Many will watch an event like this unfold and try to find some meaning. In one sense, there was no meaning; this was something the Earth does.

There is a quote that I have in my e-mail signature, which I’ve seen attributed to Will Durant – though there’s a good argument that it’s probably an anonymous quote:

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

The Earth is so very, very old, and so very, very vast. We are tiny, and frail, and even the longest life any one of us can hope to have is less than the blink of an eye in the history of our planet. The Earth does not care about us. We have no special significance. We have only each other.

(photo from Getty Images)

In a way, studying geology has been the most humbling experience of my life. There is not a day that goes by that I am not reminded that our world operates at a scale that we cannot even begin to grasp, and that it did so long before we existed, and will continue on long after the last human is gone.

I’ve seen people – and here I use the term loosely – cheer, as if this is some sort of cosmic vengeance for Japanese misdeeds during World War II. I have seen others try to use this tragedy to justify the self-satisfied little voice in their head that they think is god, but is only actually themselves. First I was angry. Now, I’m just sick. I’m sick that there are people so small-minded and cruel that they take joy in the suffering of others. I’m sick, and worried, and I hurt for my fellow humans who are in so much pain, and so far away.

There is no meaning to the Sendai earthquake. There is no capricious god, no vast karmic wheel. It is simply a thing that has happened, that we as humans must struggle against, and fight to overcome, and mourn those who have died afterward. Because there is nothing more to it – it’s just the summation of physics and time – what we do is so very important. We have only this world, only this life, and only each other.

(photo from the Sacramento Bee)

Doctors Without Borders
Red Cross
Japan America Society of Colorado

Categories
history japan

65 years ago today

65 years ago today, the United States of America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, directly killing 80,000 civilians and indirectly killing up to 60,000 more of the following years. It’s a moment that’s left an indelible scar on the psyche of the world, with the image of a mushroom cloud as a symbol of the utter destruction a single bomb is capable of wreaking. The bombing of Nagasaki three days later feels almost like an afterthought, a coda of death and destruction, while the firebombing of Tokyo achieved a similar amount of casualties, but over a longer period of time and is often largely forgotten by anyone outside of Japan.

It is easy to argue that in World War II, we were among the “good guys.” Hitler was undeniably a Very Bad Guy. The Japanese committed atrocities throughout Asia, the most heinous of which – Unit 731, the rape of Nanking, its use of “comfort” women – the government has yet to truly acknowledge, let alone specifically apologize for.

But this is not about the burdens that Japan still bears, or what Germany has done to wear its sackcloth and ashes publicly. This is not about the general slaughter of civilians that characterized World War II on all sides. Rather, this is about America, and our own atrocities.

We were one of the good guys. We fought back the Nazis. We were attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. We did not strike the first blow against them in this simplified view of history. But good people can sometimes do terrible things, and the good guys in a story can often commit acts just as bloody as the bad guys. And it is important to acknowledge that these bad things did happen, and that they were bad.

There can be endless debate about the justification for dropping the bomb, whether it ultimately saved lives or didn’t, whether it’s more justifiable because the Japanese were committing atrocities in Asia. All of these points are open for endless debate; the bomb dropped in the past, and we quite literally have no way of knowing for certain what might have happened if it hadn’t been dropped. The history is what the history is. The question is how we look at that history and understand it now, what lessons we gain from it.

In Japanese, I have heard the atomic bomb called pikadon (ピカドン), which is an onomatopoeia. Pika is the flash. Don is the explosion follows. As an expression, it’s fun to say, and it sounds almost innocent. I’ve seen it, and heard it spoken in Japanese anime and manga, and for a long time I didn’t know what it meant, until I took a modern Japanese literature class. My teacher gave us pages from Barefoot Gen to read, and showed us a clip from one of the animated movies. In the manga, Gen’s father doesn’t buy into the military propaganda saturating the country, and there’s a strong anti-government and anti-war theme. The depiction of Japanese civilians as not a monolithic group that unthinkingly supported the war and military hit me and many of my classmates hard.

Not long after, I got in an argument with someone on Amazon, over a review for the book Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji. The person I argued with had accused the book of being anti-American. Black Rain is a beautiful book, and a heartbreaking one; it is a gut-wrenching story about the survivors of Hiroshima and how the bomb continued to kill them, years and decades after it had been dropped. It takes no strong political positions and focuses on the simple fact that having an atomic bomb dropped on one’s city is horrible.

That the destruction and suffering caused by the bombs was horrible is a fact. Facts do not exist to make us feel good about our country and the decisions we’ve made in the past. They are what they are. To attack a fact because it makes one feel uncomfortable changes nothing. To scramble for justification, to try to diminish that fact smells a little too like cognitive dissonance for my liking.

I think it may be time to spend fewer words on debating if dropping the bomb can be considered the right decision, because that is a debate that will never find a satisfactory conclusion. It is instead rather time to admit that whatever the intended result, whatever the justification, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed a lot of people and caused a lot of suffering. That civilians in Hiroshima suffered and died from the atomic bomb in no way diminishes the suffering of the civilians of Nanking as they were raped and murdered by Japanese soldiers, while likewise the pain and horror in Nanking in no way lessens the suffering felt in Hiroshima. These things all happened, and all of the suffering was real.

We can still count ourselves among the “good guys” in WWII and admit that the atomic bomb killed a lot of people and caused a lot of suffering, and that it would be better if it never happens again. And I think that it is, in fact, healthier for us to admit that not everything we’ve done in the past deserves a tickertape parade, that maybe we do have some things we should apologize for.

The idea that one’s country can do no wrong is a dangerous one indeed, and the very reason that I think it’s important to consider the destruction at Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in Tokyo. Maybe we’re the good guy, though that point is sometimes open to debate. But we are no super hero.