Jérôme Gautheret : Le déclin de la France qui fume

Revue d'Eric Godeau, Le Tabac en France de 1940 à nos jours : histoire d'un marché (Sorbonne), au Monde (02.07.2008) :

C'est par un simple décret, le 9 mars 1991, que fut enterrée l'une des conquêtes les plus symboliques de Mai 68 : depuis cette date, les collégiens et lycéens ne peuvent plus fumer dans les établissements scolaires. La décision fut prise dans un large consensus. En vingt ans, le regard sur le tabac avait radicalement changé. Naguère objet de consommation quotidienne, symbole positif, la cigarette avait été identifiée comme un problème de santé publique, un fléau à combattre. La France qui fume entamait son déclin.

Le Tabac en France de 1940 à nos jours, d'Eric Godeau, est la passionnante histoire de cette révolution discrète. Reprenant à sa manière l'injonction à l'étude des "choses banales" d'un Daniel Roche, l'historien s'est plongé dans les archives de la Seita et du ministère des finances pour reconstituer l'histoire récente de ce marché atypique.

Héritier de la ferme des tabacs instituée par Colbert, le Service d'exploitation industrielle des tabacs (SEIT) est créé en 1926. Il devient le Seita en 1935, quand l'Etat lui confie le marché des allumettes, puis "la" Seita en 1980, lorsque le "service" devient une "société". L'affaire est d'importance, elle génère de juteuses rentrées d'argent pour l'Etat (8,3 % des recettes du budget en 1948). En 1954, Pierre Grimanelli, directeur général du Seita, parle d'une "mine d'or à la disposition de l'Etat".

Brian Masters : The real reason the Tokyo stabbings shock us

"Nihilistic vacuity", "moral absence" -- I wonder, how this element can be crystalized into destruction... In fact, I can't understand the offender's mind..

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They are less than idiots, it seems to me.

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Yomiuri Musings reads : "If you become weary of the world, you should depart it alone." Wow, Japanese number one newspaper promotes suicide.

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Interview with Amamiya Karin on Japanese contingent workers, part 1 and part 2. Via Kikaka.

John Junkerman : The Global Article 9 Conference, Toward the Abolition of War

His reflection and reportage on The Global Article 9 Conference, at Japan Focus (25.05.2008) :

Conference participants drafted a declaration, placing Article 9 in the context of a global disarmament agenda as well as a statement to the G8 countries that will be meeting in Japan next July. Plans are already being discussed for follow-up conferences, perhaps to be held in Costa Rica and elsewhere. 

The success of the conference and the international attention focused on Article 9 generated strong enthusiasm and optimism. But for Japanese activists, it also placed in sharp focus the large gap between the potential of Article 9 and the reality shrouding Japan—and the work that remains to be done. After an international participant called for a campaign to award Article 9 a Nobel Peace Prize, conference co-chair Ikeda Kayako responded in her closing remarks, “A Nobel Peace Prize? That’s out of the question. When I think of the actual situation of Article 9 in Japan, when I think of the US-Japan Security Treaty, when I think of  Okinawa, all I feel is pain in my heart.” 

Susann Cokal : Poor, Obscure, Plain and Little

Review of Ruth Brandon, Governess : The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres (Walker & Company), at The NY Times (25.05.2008) :

Relegated to the nursery, where she spent 12 or more hours a day educating, feeding and otherwise looking after her charges, a British governess might expect to earn between £8 — barely enough to keep herself in books and clothing — and £100 a year. She taught multiple languages (including French, naturellement), simple arithmetic, music, drawing and history, but perhaps none of them well. Lessons came from what she had learned from her own governess or at a school for girls, thereby perpetuating an impoverishment of female education that roused the ire of several of Brandon’s subjects.

Brandon calls her choice of representative women “rather arbitrary,” as well as “small and random.” The reader might also add “uneven,” since the book devotes much attention to the famous feminist writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Jameson, as well as to Anna Leonowens (best known from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, “The King and I,” inspired by her memoirs of teaching in Siam). More obscure governesses, whose lives are harder to unpuzzle — and might thus be more intriguing — get less time.

It’s surprising that Brandon didn’t devote a chapter to Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, given her frequent references to the governesses in novels like “Agnes Grey” and “Jane Eyre.” Those famous novels could have benefited from an analytical eye. Brandon is also a fiction writer, and she leans heavily on the novels of the period to provide cultural background; she might have spent more time exploring the ways in which a novelist’s imagination transformed the governess’s actual experience.

Peter Robb : Gangsters Without Borders

Review of Misha Glenny, McMafia : A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld (Knopf), at The NY Times (25.05.2008) :

Glenny’s criminal geography centers on the post-Soviet countries, whose influence he sees spreading outward to “countries as far away from one another as India, Colombia and Japan.” He signposts but doesn’t travel a “new Silk Route, a multilane criminal highway” linking the old Soviet periphery with central and eastern Asia. None of this is quite as new as he implies. The distant countries have long and busy criminal histories of their own, and their own international trading links. Heroin was traveling across Asia into Europe in a big way from the time of the Vietnam War, and cocaine was moving north through the Americas and across the Atlantic not long after. Cosa Nostra in Italy and the United States, the Colombian cartels and the Asian crime syndicates were all operating internationally long before the world went global. So was the arms trade. The patterns and the influences were as variable as in the above-ground economy.

Glenny is good on some connections of the gangsters without borders, like the Russia-Israel link. His account of how Israel was colonized by Russian organized crime is memorable, and his fleeting image of the unutterable squalor of Tel Aviv’s brothels, staffed by captive girls from the former Soviet Union and frequented by obese American teenage tourists, is unforgettable. He is grippingly ambivalent about Dubai, the Middle East’s newly created Switzerland, and how it is energized by Indian organized crime and the subcontinent’s Hindu-Muslim violence. After its sections on Eastern Europe and the Soviet fringe of Asia, this is the book’s best part. In Dubai, the former coastal village with a dying pearl fishing industry, we see everyone — “Arabs, Iranians, Baluchis, East Africans, Pakistanis and west coast Indians” — converge.

Interview with Oe Kenzaburo

Onishi Norimitsu's report at The NY Times (17.05.2008).

The title of the novel he's now writing is Death by Water, in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. Eliot was an anti-semitist... Does it not matter to him ?

Eric Nuevo : Au fil des mots et maux du monde contemporain

Revue de François Taillandier, Ce monde-là. Dictionnaire personnel de l'époque (Flammarion), à nonfiction.fr (13.05.2008) :

Au fil de sa chronique hebdomadaire dans le journal L'Humanité, François Taillandier s'est donné pour mission depuis cinq ans, ainsi qu'il l'énonce dans sa préface, "d'augmenter le son" ; mais le son de quoi, précisément ? Celui de notre époque en ce début de XXIe siècle. Augmenter le son : élever le volume de la machine linguistique pour mieux entendre ce que nous raconte notre époque - car elle parle, et mieux, elle nous  parle sans cesse, usant pour cela de tous les stratagèmes imaginables. Et puisque ces moyens divers se multiplient proportionnellement à la vitesse d'évolution des techniques de la communication – télévision, radio, Internet – il s’agit alors de décortiquer les mots, de les comprendre, de les mettre en résonnance avec leur temps, voire d'en inventer de nouveaux qui sauront mieux définir notre époque. La fin (d'une époque) justifie toujours les moyens (linguistiques).

Le sous-titre du livre, Dictionnaire personnel de l'époque, pose le premier jalon du projet de Taillandier : écrire non pas un dictionnaire objectif, universel, mais bien son dictionnaire, un manuel du discours contemporain – et de son absurdité – où  il nous livrerait avec une mordante ironie sa propre interprétation des mots et du langage. Ouvrir ce livre c'est donc, aussi, entrer un peu dans l'esprit de son auteur, en même temps que dans celui de l’époque où nous baignons.

Ingénieux magicien du langage, amoureux des mots et des résonances (Taillandier a récemment consacré un ouvrage à un autre grand jongleur du langage, l’écrivain argentin Borges), l’auteur nous propose un voyage à travers les sens et l’essence des choses. Son analyse au vitriol de la société passe par différentes interprétations du langage courant, que l’on pourrait aisément diviser en trois catégories bien définies : la manière dont notre époque s’adresse à nous au travers de moyens toujours plus insolites ; l’évolution de la langue française au regard des changements politiques, sociaux, économiques de notre société ; et le constat (déprimant) de la disparition de quelques mots, du surgissement de certains autres, ainsi que les glissements sémantiques inévitables que la politique a su employer avec talent.

Jake Adelstein : This Mob Is Big in Japan

Hope he'll be all right.

A Ann Wright

Mon amie, je vous aime.

Michaël Prazan : Le mai japonais ou la violence sans fête ni mémoire

Transcrit du Monde (02.05.2008) :

Si l'on célèbre aujourd'hui dans les journaux, à la télévision, à la radio, partout en France, la "grande fête de mai", rien de tel au Japon, pourtant le pays où la révolte étudiante fut sans doute la plus ample, la plus longue et la plus offensive parmi celles de toutes les démocraties qui connurent l'explosion de l'année 1968.

La Zengakuren, fédération qui portait le mouvement étudiant japonais (qui démarra dès 1965), fascinait les étudiants du monde entier, et particulièrement français. Les situationnistes lui consacrèrent des textes enflammés, Genet vint à Tokyo, Pierre Goldman se mit au karaté. Les étudiants japonais, qui se rebellaient contre la guerre du Vietnam, à laquelle l'Archipel participait indirectement, et contre une société conformiste et autoritariste, étaient un exemple de détermination, d'organisation. Ils étaient à la pointe de la révolte du monde occidental et son mètre étalon.

Continue reading "Michaël Prazan : Le mai japonais ou la violence sans fête ni mémoire"

Paul Auster : The Accidental Rebel

On Iraq, looking back on a happening during his Columbia University days, at The NY Times (23.04.2008) :

What did we accomplish? Not much of anything. It’s true that the gymnasium project was scrapped, but the real issue was Vietnam, and the war dragged on for seven more horrible years. You can’t change government policy by attacking a private institution. When French students erupted in May of that year of years, they were directly confronting the national government — because their universities were public, under the control of the Ministry of Education, and what they did initiated changes in French life. We at Columbia were powerless, and our little revolution was no more than a symbolic gesture. But symbolic gestures are not empty gestures, and given the nature of those times, we did what we could.

I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present — and therefore will not end this memory-piece with the word “Iraq.” I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.

Dan Bloom : Go Orange in 2008

On Jens Galschiot's project from Taipei Times (17.04.2008) :

A Danish artist has launched a global protest campaign against human rights abuses in China using the color orange.

It’s a brilliant idea, simple and completely non-violent and peaceful. He wants people who attend the Olympics in Beijing this summer to wear orange-colored shirts, hats, neckties, shoes and dresses.

Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot initiated the global protest campaign. He has told reporters in Europe: “By using something with the color orange during the Olympics — both inside and outside of China — people from many countries will be sending a signal that something is wrong in China.

A good idea, but I didn't know this Danish sculptor.

Also see Jens Galschiot's website (en) and TheColorOrange.net (en).

Roger Pulvers : Are Japanese people ready for 'change they can believe in'?

From The Japan Times (06.04.2008) :

Are Japanese people so afraid of change? What are they protecting? Not their hallowed traditions, which they have often junked without a second thought. Not the machine of their political system, which is barely able to creak along due to a surfeit of semi-competent politician-mechanics and a dearth of creative designers and inventive thinkers.

It is not that Japanese people are afraid of the processes of change, it is that they have been so suppressed by the forces of reaction running this country's institutions that they have forgotten how to instigate those processes.

If an Obamalike figure did, suddenly, make an appearance on the Japanese stage, the "management" would make sure that, by the time his moment in the limelight came, he would be so old and tired that he would just repeat the lines handed to him, take a bow and, weary, retire to a back room.

This, however, does not change the fact that Japan needs an Obama as much as the United States does. If not more so.

Interview with Mikami Kan

David Hickey's nice reportage at The Japan Times (28.03.2008) :

What was the aim for your new album?

I've been playing abroad for the last five or six years. My challenge for this album was to in some way bridge the gap between Japan and Europe, even if I'm singing in a different language. I want to have the same impact on the listener whether they're foreign or Japanese. I don't know if I'll fail or succeed. I'm not singing about God; European music has been drawn from the music of the Church. Even The Sex Pistols played proper chords. They had pretty harmonies, didn't they?

You left your hometown — a fishing village in Aomori Prefecture — for Tokyo in 1968, then made your live debut at the notorious Station 70 bar in Tokyo's Shibuya district in 1971. Tell us about that.

It was Japan's first live venue. The guy who set it up built it with money from his parents. He was the son of someone high up at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. This was the guy who planned the Peace Kanbakudan (homemade explosives) attacks (in the '60s and '70s) and he hid out in the club for sometime after that. He was my friend. During the Vietnam War, which we were all against, he was selling ammunition and planes to the Vietnamese.

What sort of audience did you play to?

Members of the extreme far right and hard left would drop by Station 70 — (author Yukio) Mishima's hangers-on and some of the young members of his private army, the Tatenokai, and members of (anarchist terrorist group) the Japanese Red Army. But they didn't come to propagandize. These groups would hang out together in the music room. I went in there myself, but they didn't talk much. Japan's top student leaders would gather there night after night, but the atmosphere was actually pretty somber. People drank; they took sleeping pills — which was the "in" drug at the time. . . . They were an extreme bunch of people. It didn't really matter if they were "left" or "right."

I think these student leaders had the same impact on society in Japan as the hippie movement in America. At that time, political activism was very popular. It spread likes measles. Everyone was excited to be part of the movement. They were screaming, "What does it mean to be Japanese? Are we the same as America now?" We were longing to know.

See his live and interview at YouTube.

Mark Schilling : The final days of revolutionary struggle in Japan

Interviews with Wakamatsu Kôji on his latest movie, Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun : Asama Sanso e no Michi (United Red Army — The Path to Asama Mountain Lodge), at The Japan Times (20.03.2008) :

The dramatic end of the siege, with millions watching the police break-in on live television, also marked a turning point for student radicalism in Japan. "(Masaharu) Gotoda (chief of the National Policy Agency) was a smart man," reflected Wakamatsu. "He showed Japanese people the (events at) Asama for 10 days without rest, while characterizing the (United Red Army members) inside as terrorists. After the Asama Sanso incident, student movements in Japan quickly lost steam."

Now 71, Wakamatsu is at an age when most directors are mellowing out, winding down or just plain giving up. He has no plans to retire, however. "I don't have much longer," says the filmmaker, who has a fought a long, and so-far successful battle with lung cancer. "I don't know how much time I have left, so I want to shoot as many films as possible now. I'd like to shoot a normal movie next time (laughs). But I don't think any film I'm part of will end up normal."

Wakamatsu won't be returning to pink films, the genre in which he created the most celebrated of his films. "Pink films should be guerrilla movies," he explained. "They should be a hidden thing. I quit pink movies because they started to become known and everyone started to praise them. They were no longer guerrilla movies. Being a guerrilla means fighting the government with a small number of people. I'm not a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro, or anything like that, but it's no longer fun or interesting when everyone is praising that sort of thing and bringing it out into the open."

He also doesn't see any successors among the younger generation to his brand of antiestablishment cinema. "I survived as a director for 40-some years because I managed to slip in my own politics and anger while borrowing the label 'pink movie,' " he said. "But now everybody seems to have forgotten how to be angry. Their stomachs are too full (laughs). A country that's striving hard to develop tends to produce good movies. A developed country doesn't. Japan and America have nothing left to strive for, so they don't make good movies any more."

Robert Maggiori : Cités du mépris

Revue de Robert Castel, La Discrimination négative, Seuil, «la République des idées», 140 pp., 11,50 euros, à Libération (06.12.2007) :

Ghettos. Pour montrer que «la banlieue comme marge s’inscrit pleinement dans la question sociale contemporaine, en même temps qu’elle la dramatise en lui donnant une connotation ethnoraciale qui la discrimine négativement», il restitue les données historiques, sociologiques ou urbanistiques qui expliquent le passage de «la cité radieuse», projetée dès la fin du XIX^e siècle, aux «grands ensembles», à la «cité-dortoir», aux «zones à urbaniser en priorité» (ZUP) et aux «barres». Les cités ne sont pas encore des ghettos, mais le deviennent sous la poussée conjointe de «vecteurs de paupérisation et d’ethnicisation», dont les effets sont, d’un côté, l’émergence de «lieux de relégation» accueillant les catégories sociales les plus défavorisées et, de l’autre, l’apparition d’une «mixité sociale» réduite à un «mixage de populations» rapprochées par une même origine ethnique et «accumulant les handicaps en matière de ressources économiques, de rapport au travail et de capacités à assurer elles-mêmes leur indépendance sociale».

La cité illustre ce que Castel a appelé ailleurs la «fin de la société salariale», un modèle de société qui, même s’il ne garantissait en rien la fin des inégalités, assurait du moins à l’ensemble de la population une «protection de base», un travail à peu près stable et des ressources permettant de ne pas vivre à la journée - un modèle qui décline même au «centre» de la société et qui, dans ses «marges», n’existe plus.

Aussi la violence des jeunes de banlieues peut-elle s’alimenter - si l’on fait abstraction des nombreux facteurs qui nourrissent la haine des forces de police et d’autres symboles de l’autorité de l’Etat, y compris scolaires - au sentiment d’«exil intérieur»«les conduit à vivre en négatif, sous la forme de promesses non tenues, leur rapport aux opportunités et aux valeurs qu’est censée incarner la société française», et ce d’autant plus que ces opportunités se raréfient lorsque le développement économique stagne, et sont inégalement distribuées selon des critères discriminatoires prenant en compte le nom, le lieu d’habitation, l’appartenance ethnique, la confession religieuse et autres. Il y aurait bien une solution : «Travailler plus pour gagner plus.» Slogan qu’on entend bien dans les banlieues, où le taux de chômage dépasse l’entendement, où domine le précariat et où un emploi est donné difficilement au «citoyen français issu de l’immigration».

Interview with Uchihashi Katsuto

From "Japanese Deregulation: Big Corporations are Destroying People’s Lives" at Japan Focus (09.09.2007) :

In the case of Japan, the terms “employment choice” and a “diversity of work patterns” have been used in academia since Sakaiya Taichi described an “age of employment choice” and, more recently, when Yashiro Naohiro, a member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, captured the desire of the business community for an age of the “diversification of work patterns.”

Even though a “diversity of work” can be achieved only when major corporations fully fulfill their employment responsibilities to provide regular employees with certain rights and guarantees, if employers force workers to labor without these rights, then the “age of employment choice” and the “diversification of work” patterns become unforgivable deceptions. To put it more aptly, such a system becomes nothing more than the “diversification of forced work patterns.”

I call these dominant voices—like those of Mitarai, Sakaiya, and Yashiro—authoritative opinion (kenron).  It exerts control over society and overshadows the opinions of regular people (minron), which is often at odds with authoritative opinion. Those with authority generally define all the terms and conditions of debate concerning social and political issues. As a result, people are easily tricked about labor issues. People often misunderstand the “age of employment choice” to mean freedom to choose their careers and a diversity of values. Another example of how dominant voices determine and define the discussion is the “labor big bang.” Just as the Bill to Encourage Self-Reliance of Handicapped People is actually a Bill for the Destruction of Handicapped People, the Bill for the Protection of Contract Laborers is nothing more than a Bill for the Destruction of Contract Laborers. The language they use is simply fraudulent. Many intellectuals in Japan have sided with authoritative opinion, and they contribute to the aggressive domination of debates about labor issues.

Philippe Pons : La révolte molle des jeunes paumés

Transcrit du Monde (09.08.2007).

"Nous ne sommes plus à l'ère du prolétariat, mais du précariat", lance Karin Amamiya, reprenant le mot forgé en Europe pour désigner un état de précarité permanent. Longs cheveux lisses coiffés d'un béret blanc, robe sage bordée de dentelle et mi-bas laiteux, elle semble sortir tout droit des rues branchées du quartier de Shibuya. Agée de 32 ans, ancienne chanteuse dans un groupe punk d'extrême droite, auteur d'un récent livre au titre coup de poing - Nous avons le droit de vivre ! La précarisation des jeunes -, Karin Amamiya se veut le porte-voix des paumés et des déclassés.

Continue reading "Philippe Pons : La révolte molle des jeunes paumés"

Philippe Pons : Le Japon, l'île des enfants perdus

Transcrit du Monde (09.08.2007).

Souvent d'un confort feutré avec leurs spacieuses bibliothèques de mangas et de DVD, leurs box au fauteuil moelleux séparés par de minces cloisons à mi-hauteur et leurs distributeurs de boissons, sandwichs ou bols de nouilles instantanées, les cafés Internet qui fonctionnent 24 heures sur 24 sont les nouveaux repaires des jeunes Japonais.

Continue reading "Philippe Pons : Le Japon, l'île des enfants perdus"

Christine L. Marran, Poison Woman

Michael Antman's review on Christine L. Marran, Poison Woman : Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (Minnesota, June 2007), at PopMatters (07.08.2007) :

For Japanophiles, one of the pleasures of that most peculiar country is observing the way that inexplicable fads, obsessions, and enthusiasms periodically seize the populace. One such obsession, outlined by Christine L. Marran in her academic study Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture, was with a small group of real-life female murderers whose exploits were conveyed in newspaper serials, popular novels, memoirs, kabuki performances, and more, beginning in the second half of the 19th century and coinciding with the rise of modern Japan. 

The most infamous of these women, Takahashi Oden, became notorious precisely because her every action upset the natural order. A “hellion” as a young girl, she beat up on boys and, when she grew up, became a highly aggressive and sexualized woman who “was said to have poisoned her leprosy-ridden husband to be free of having to care for him” and also fatally stabbed an acquaintance. She eventually was beheaded for her crimes.

"Poison woman" may be translated from "doku-fu 毒婦".

Interview with Sadako Ogata

The Japan Times features "Refugees and Japan" and has an interview of Jeff Kingston with Sadako Ogata, the president of JICA. She says :

Every year I would come and lobby Justice Ministry officials about their policy toward refugees, but I don't think there was that much progress. Maybe I should have worked harder on Japan, but I was so busy with millions of people globally, whereas in Japan they were only trickling in. Maybe I should have been more firm. I don't think it was just checkbook diplomacy — there were also lots of Japanese volunteers who came to help with the refugees, and efforts by NGOs, maybe not on a large scale, but still significant.

In terms of asylum, Japan has not been the best humanitarian country. Japan is not a refugee power in global terms — refugees go where they know they will be received and can find support. From Japanese officials' perspective, the fewer that came the better. The government thinks of this as taigan no kaji (fire on the opposite riverbank), in the sense that it is not an immediate crisis situation facing Japan.