|
Welcome counter-narrative to the usual Western picture of Japan today (4.5 stars) 2015/2/22
投稿者 A. J. Sutter - (Amazon.com) This book fills an important niche in Western commentary about Japan. It provides a passionate, coherent narrative that ties together many aspects of Japanese history, political economy and even society, written by someone who's lived here a long time and who cares about the country's future. As a roughly 400-page book from a major academic press, it may seem a bit odd that it lacks a proper bibliography and set of foot- or endnotes. But even though I wished that the sourcing were better in a couple of places, this book doesn't seem intended to serve the purpose of a usual academic study. A better way to think of it would be like a transcript of a two- or three-day orientation seminar about modern Japan by a very intense expert who wants you to see through the conventional wisdom. I certainly didn't agree with all of it, and I would have emphasized some topics that the author mentions only in passing, if at all. But if you're not already convinced that Japan's problems stem from economic inefficiency, protectionism and a racist population that refuses to acknowledge history, this book will vindicate your reluctance to accept such clichés. And if you admire Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, or believe the Obama Administration is more high-minded in its foreign policy than was its immediate predecessor, this book could give a healthy shake to your confidence in your views. In what follows, I'll start by explaining what's special about this book's point of view (1), and highlight some points that most aggressively challenge the received wisdom about the country's current condition (2). Then, after mentioning some missing details that would have lent even more support to the book's argument (3), I'll conclude with a focus on some significant blind spots (4 and 5). Although I'll go on at some length about this last category, you can see from the star rating that these criticisms, though substantive, don't greatly dim my overall recommendation of this book. 1. Let's start with how this book differs from more conventional works about Japan. Most Westerners' access to information about Japan is filtered through people who are just passing through, physically and/or intellectually. There are a few classic types: General news reporters sent here for a couple of years of purgatory before going someplace they believe is really exciting, like China, some war zone, or at least Seoul. Business reporters who freely spout off about what Japan needs to do, based on ideas they learned from Econ 101 and the investment bankers they interview. Long-term bureau chiefs who've figured out what types of stories will fit the preconceptions of their editors in New York, D.C., Atlanta or London, and who write a longish memoir around the time they leave Japan to become one of those editors. Callow grad student and post-doc bloggers who spend a couple of years here before returning to a perch in the US or elsewhere from which to continue pontificating without having to suffer the consequences of policies implementing their thoroughly conventional advice. And let's not forget op-eds by superstar economists who spend a couple of tightly-packed days here wheeled around in a pumpkin coach, visiting suitably august members of the Japanese elite. (To be fair to superstars, I got the impression that Thomas Piketty was more willing than others to speak truth to pumpkins during his January 2015 whirlwind visit here -- but on the other hand he doesn't show up so often in the New York Times.) The author of the present book (RTM) is distinguished from this motley bunch in at least two ways. First, he's already been here more than 20 years and has put down emotional roots in the country. Second, he's a former investment banker who later published in New Left Review, so he's capable of evolving his views. Of course, there are a number of long-term foreign residents and maybe even a handful of short-termers, both academic and not, who have very valuable and insightful things to say abut Japan. But all too often their material is hard to find, stays close to some specialty (e.g. civil liberties, energy policy, etc.), and in some cases may even affect to disdain the word "should" when they write about Japanese policy. A virtue of this book is that RTM presents a much more encompassing and interconnected view than you can get even from excellent monographs or online articles. And it's a view that isn't afraid to say that something bad is bad -- nor, by the way, to offer a variety of idiosyncratic commentaries about pop divas, TV shows, anime songs, handsome politicians and schoolgirl fashions, among other things. At least when it comes to matters of politics rather than pulchritude, this isn't so much "bias," as an opinion backed up by an historical argument. |
過去の投稿日別表示
[ リスト | 詳細 ]
2015年04月16日
コメント（0）
|
Inner Peace
Thursday, April 16, 2015 http://www.dailyword.com/dailyword/inner-peace-thursday-april-16-2015 I choose to live with a peaceful heart. Peace does not depend on outer conditions. The peace of God waits solely on my decision to choose Love. Whatever happens in my life or the world, I focus on the truth of my innate wholeness and my oneness with God. In the midst of any apparent conflict, I center myself in Love’s abiding power and presence. I release any attachment to people or events being a certain way. I abandon any judgment or expectations. I surrender to the knowledge that all things work together for good. I choose a peaceful attitude that nourishes my heart, body, and soul. I feel replenished and vibrant because I choose peace today. I choose love. With patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.—Ephesians 4:2-3 |
|
RUNAWAY HORSES by YUKIO MISHIMA
Translated by MICHAEL GALLAGHER 421 pages. Knopf. $7.95. Yukio Mishima completed his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, one November morning in 1970. Then he dressed himself in the somewhat Grau-starkian uniform of his private army, the Shield Society, and led a group of young right-wing followers to a military headquarters in western Tokyo. There, in a violent and extravagantly eccentric display of the artist engage, he broke into the commander's office, harangued some mocking soldiers from a balcony about the disgraces of fading Japanese imperial tradition, withdrew and committed harakiri. A companion ritually lopped off the head of Japan's most celebrated postwar literary talent, a man who had often been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. It was a high price to pay for an artistic effect, but Mishima's death did at least serve to endow his last works, now being published in English translation, with an eerie sense of death anticipating art. This is especially true of Runaway Horses, the second volume of the tetralogy; for its subject is right-wing rebellion and, presented in weirdly loving detail, the beauties of seppuku (ritual suicide). Camus said that "suicide is something planned in the silence of the heart, like a work of art." In Mishima, for all of the peculiar sensationalism of his death, there is a shocking aesthetic correspondence between the man's art and his final act. The luxury of fiction allowed Mishima the license of idealization difficult to discover in his actual self-destruction. His fictional suicide is Isao lunuma, a right-wing student with an obsessional love of Samurai tradition and a hatred for the 20th century's destruction of imperial values. lunuma enjoys an almost erotic anticipation of the moment when he will solemnly disembowel himself for the Emperor. In the 1930s, he assembles a group of similarly obsessed conspirators to plot the assassinations of Japan's leading industrialists, hoping to precipitate a general uprising against the corruption of Japan's ancient national spirit. lunuma's own father betrays the conspirators to the police, but because of the nationalistic sympathies the plot has aroused, the son is eventually released. Then, with his zealotry intact, lunuma proceeds alone to his assassination target as planned, and commits the suicide he had desired—in the book's last sentence, which is touched by Mi-shima's lucid, kinetic imagery. "The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids." That is, of course, lurid imagery as well—blood and the imperial sun. Mi-shima's sensibility was at once delicate and apocalyptic. Like Spring Snow, the first volume of The Sea of Fertility, Runaway Horses shivers with fragile yet highly wrought detail. Here Mishima also experiments, to lovely effect, with the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, lunuma, it seems, may be the reincarnation of Kiyoaki Matsugae, the doomed young lover of Spring Snow. Entanglements—across novels and across generations—are deep and haunting. The interplay is both vertical and horizontal in time. With rich intelligence, the author touches, sometimes brilliantly, on his old themes of the East's collision with the West, of rationalism and passion, thought and action. Mishima claimed that his tetralogy contained everything he knew about life — and presumably about death. That may have been intended in part as a rationalization for his suicide, though some Japanese have suspected that he killed himself, on a crank's political pre text, because his creative powers were failing. Western readers will have to wait for the rest of the tetralogy to make a judgment. The first two works are sometimes stunningly good; yet in both there is an odd moral frigidity, a special chill evident in his earlier works as well. For all his gifts, Mishima seems to have written too often with the dead pan menace of the kendo expert he was — a tense restraint broken only by a violence that is curiously narcissistic. Even his flamboyant suicide may not be enough to endow his works with the human blood they lack. ∙ Lance Morrow |
|
THE TEMPLE OF DAWN
by YUKIO MISHIMA 352 pages. Knopf. $7.95. The serial publication of Yukio Mishima's last works, a tetralogy called The Sea of Fertility, has the eerie effect of making him seem the fastest and most prolific dead writer in history. A bit more than a year ago came the English translation of the first posthumous volume, Spring Snow. Last summer it was Runaway Horses. Now we have The Temple of Dawn. Mishima sealed this literary package with his ritual suicide in 1970, when he was only 45. Unlike, say, Ernest Hemingway, who shot himself at 61 in apparent despair over a deteriorating mind, Mishima killed himself in what seemed a gesture of robust if wasteful heroism, the ultimate act of self-control. Since his death was so theatrically deliberate, the temptation is strong to judge the tetralogy as an artistic and philosophical suicide note to the world. The note is now three-quarters completed for English-language readers. It is fascinating and ambitious, but the final message (and literary value) is still difficult to decipher. The first three interconnected books are extraordinarily good. Mishima uses the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation to link various characters throughout the 20th century with changing manners, politics and national psychology in Japan. In The Temple of Dawn, he also discourses widely and sometimes pedantically about Buddhist theory; that is unfamiliar country for most Western readers. But Mishima's intensely poetic moral sense communicates his own fascination with such subjects. In Spring Snow, the dreamy and aristocratic hero Kiyoaki Matsugae died a vaporously youthful death. He becomes Isao, the fanatic young political conspirator of Runaway Horses. In The Temple of Dawn, Kiyoaki/Isao is again transformed, this time into Ying Chan, a lovely Thai princess. The witness to all three incarnations is a wonderfully subtle spiritual voyeur named Honda, a rationalist Japanese judge and lawyer. Honda, like a principle of embattled moral intelligence, acts as Mishima's civilized guide through the mysteries of love, death, political tragedy and reincarnation. If Mishima had written nothing else, his account of Honda's excursion to Benares, the holy Indian crematory site on the Ganges, would be considered a small masterpiece, on the order of E.M. Forster's visit to the Malabar caves in A Passage to India. Among the funeral burnings Honda finds an appalling filth and holy joy that amaze him: "A black arm would suddenly rise or a body would curl up in the fire as though turning over in sleep." The scene "was full of nauseous abomination, the inevitable ingredient of all times deemed sacred and pure in Benares." And yet "there was a flashing animation in the flames, as though something were being born." Mishima takes Japan from the late '30s through the war and the postwar period into the perplexed affluence of the '50s. Eventually, Honda becomes joylessly rich. He degenerates from spiritual voyeur into Peeping Tom—a transformation reflecting Mishima's own contempt for the vulgarization and materialism of postwar Japan. As the novel ends, Honda, who has begun to sound like a Japanese Humbert Humbert in his pursuit of his Thai princess—now a student in Japan—secretly watches her in a lesbian embrace. Then Honda's mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji burns to the ground like a pyre at Benares, the flyaway ashes sporadically sizzling into his new swimming pool. The combination of filigreed Oriental pornography and slightly cheap Götterdämmerung has sometimes been a contaminating tendency in Mishima's work. But the rest of the book plausibly suggests a writer whose gifts amount at least to minor genius.
—Lance Morrow |
|
Prosperity
Wednesday, April 15, 2015 I am swimming in a sea of prosperity. I am prosperous in countless ways! Whenever I doubt my well-being, I think about my blessings, and realize I am swimming in an ocean of good. I have my health and well-being; the ability to breathe, think, and move about. I see prosperity in the comfort of my home, my place of employment, and the beauty of nature. I am blessed with free will—I choose how to spend my time and where to place my attention. All my relationships are prosperous, and I receive abundant acceptance and love from friends, family, coworkers, and pets. I am thankful for my greatest fortune: the constant presence of God in my life. I am swimming in a sea of prosperity! And my God will fully satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.—Philippians 4:19 |
