Florian Coulmas : Japanese intellectual crosscurrents

Review of Takeyama Michio, The Scars of War : Tokyo During World War II, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear, Rowman & Littlefield, at The Japan Times (02.12.2007) :

Rather, it is the tension between high regard and disdain that gives this essay its acumen. Takeyama is genuinely puzzled and tries to come to grips with the fact that a country that in the past had produced the most sublime statements of European humanism and enlightenment was sinking into barbarity.

In his analysis, which anticipates ideas German philosophers Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno put forth after the war in "The Dialectics of Enlightenment," Germany epitomized the problems of modern man. Alluding to a poem by Goethe, Takeyama writes that "like the sorcerer's apprentice, modern man seems unable now to control the spirit he himself called up and set to work; instead, controlled by it, he is being destroyed."

Similarly, nationalism, in his diagnosis, once played a positive role in Europe, but turned into "state absolutism" in Germany — and Japan, one might add. For developments in Germany were of interest to Takeyama in their own right and because of its role as a model and political ally of Japan.

Donald Richie : Keeping the horror of Hiroshima alive

On MASAKO'S STORY: Surviving the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, by Kikuko Otake, edited by Dr. Jesse Glass. Tokyo/Toronto: Ahadada Books, 2007, 94 pp. with photos and maps, $15 (paper), at The Japan Times (05.08.2007) :

She was 5 at the time. As an adult, she has written what her mother told her (hence the title "Masako's Story"). The account was published in Japanese in 2003 as "Amerika e Hiroshima kara" ("To America From Hiroshima") and it is this that is here adapted and translated — accompanied by an appendix with some of the original Japanese text. Its original reception was such that she realized that through a translation "many more people in the world would be able to understand the tragedy of Hiroshima." The problem remained, however, of how to focus attention, and hence understanding, on a subject that had been as emotionally exposed as this one.

One way was to print the text a line at a time, like poetry. This is, in fact, what poets traditionally do when they attempt to slow the impatient and unfeeling reader. For example, this detail:

They were hairless, and burned so completely,

That their eyebrows had been roasted off,

Making it impossible to tell the bodies of the men from the women.

Read as prose, we might have been tempted to hurry over the scene and failed to appreciate the horror. Read as poetry with the requisite pauses and the distance that form dictates, there is no escaping the horror.

La barbarie à visage nippon

Par Paul François Paoli au Figaro (28.06.2007). Revue sur Jean-Louis Margolin, L'Armée de l'empereur, violences et crimes du Japon en guerre, 1937-1945 (Armand Colin, 479 pp., 25 €) :

« Une logique jusque dans l'horreur », écrit l'auteur. Au-delà de décomptes macabres difficiles à établir - les Chinois affirmant que 35 millions des leurs furent victimes de la terreur nippone, ce que contestent bien sûr les Japonais -, Margolin tente d'appréhender la singularité de cette barbarie. Il récuse d'emblée les explications raciales sur une cruauté innée des Japonais, fussent-ils en guerre. Outre le fait que le Japon a connu, au cours de son histoire, des périodes de paix, il rappelle que l'armée japonaise s'était comportée correctement avec les prisonniers russes après la guerre contre la Russie tsariste de 1905. Pour Margolin, ce déchaînement de sadisme dans les territoires conquis est lié à une conjonction de facteurs. Parmi ceux-ci, l'auteur souligne l'influence déculpabilisante du bouddhisme zen ou du shintoïsme, la religion nationale japonaise, qui ont tendance à relativiser l'importance de la vie individuelle. Il rappelle que, face à la montée en puissance de l'impérialisme nippon au début du XX^e siècle, les groupements religieux, à l'exception des chrétiens, qui furent longtemps persécutés, se turent, voire firent chorus.

"L'influence déculpabilisante du bouddhisme zen ou du shintoïsme, la religion nationale japonaise, qui ont tendance à relativiser l'importance de la vie individuelle" -- Très intéressant. Mais cette tendance a-t-elle affaire à l'atrocité ? Immédiatement ?

Philippe Pons : Kamikazes malgré eux

Au Monde (14.02.2007).

Continue reading "Philippe Pons : Kamikazes malgré eux"

Watai Takeharu : Little Birds

"Little Birds : A Japanese Filmmaker’s Devastating Window on the Iraq War" by Gregory Elich at Japan Focus (31.01.2007) :

At a time when the Iraq war continues to be a defining issue on the American scene, it is ironic that the most powerful and uncompromising documentary on the subject remains almost entirely unknown and unseen in this country. It took Japanese filmmaker Watai Takeharu a year and a half to film more than 123 hours of footage in Iraq, which he managed to edit down to two unforgettable hours. The result is the stunning Little Birds, which plunges the viewer into the middle of the war, in all its sorrow and horror, and never lets up.

Website and Mr. Watai's weblog (Japanese). Now he's in Austin, Texas.