Washington Post: Japan’s Starry Gems of the Diamond

Because of the Big Three, 550 American baseball games a year are broadcast on television here. About 300 of them are carried without commercial interruption, allowing Japanese viewers to gaze between innings at their beloved stars as they sit quietly in the dugout or stand around on the field. These players, unlike their American counterparts, are rarely caught on camera spitting, picking their noses or scratching themselves in manly places.

AP says today, a new/old photo has surfaced that shows Scripps-Howard war correspondent Ernie Pyle dead at the side of the road in Japan in 1945. There is much to-do in the big newspapers today about this memorial photo of a dead war writer. But no image of the photo yet. It is being held somewhere by someone until… what? enough money, enough positioning. Whatever.

To me the iconic photo is the one of Pyle alive, as the photo below shows… and the photo of the elegant, battered tool of his trade as shown in the above photo comes in second. But, I digress.

The road Ernie and the small contingent of solders had taken that day back in the spring in 1945, had been swept of mines. Many G.I trucks had ridden over it safely. Just six days previous, President Roosevelt had suddenly died while still in office. His corn-fed Vice President, Harry S. Truman had ramped up everything in himself to try to take a wheel a million times larger than he. Germany would surrender and ‘the war’ would be declared over another 20 days hence. The end of ‘the war’ in Japan would take another three and a half months to close.

But Ernie Pyle had only heard that maybe Germany’s surrender was imminent. And he continued to write notes like these, which are from his journal, to my eye, blood poetry, bone poetry… viz:
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Close on the heels of signing the Kyoto Protocol, the newly-formed Labour Government in Australia is sending out a clear message about its priorities with regard to environment conservation worldwide. Australia and some 30 other countries lodged a diplomatic protest to send ‘very powerful signal’ of international displeasure over Japan’s whaling program, despite Tokyo’s suspension of its plans to kill humpbacks, reports IHT.

Late Friday, Australia led a group of nations in lodging a diplomatic protest with the Japanese ambassador to Australia. Commercial hunts of humpbacks have been banned worldwide since 1966, and commercial whaling overall since 1986.

“Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said it was the largest single diplomatic protest yet against Japan’s whaling program. He praised Japan for suspending plans to add up to 50 humpback whales to its annual hunt of 935 minke whales and 50 fin whales, but said Japan must do more.”

Among the countries who joined Australia in voicing opposition to Japan’s whaling program were France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, the UK and Uruguay. The European Commission also participated in the protest, reports Melbourne Herald Sun.

Last week, Mr Smith and Environment Minister Peter Garrett announced that an Australian Customs vessel would monitor the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean.

“The Japanese government is desperately trying to reduce stockpiles from last season, encouraging public schools and the food industry to increase whale meat consumption, reported The Australian,” according to another news report. Backed by Japanese government’s initiative to reduce 3,798 tonnes of whale meat stockpile, more Japanese schools have now started serving whale meat for children’s school lunches.

“In Japan, whale meat jerky has also been sold as dog food - although the company denies that this has continued. Another company, Asian Lunch, which runs street vendors in Tokyo’s central district, last month introduced whale mince curry for white collared workers. It has been serving 600 dishes of whale curry a day in 14 places in Tokyo.”

Meanwhile “the U.S., which currently chairs the International Whaling Commission, recently held several rounds of talks with Japan to seek a one to two year suspension of the humpback hunt,” reports the Associated Press.

Commercial hunts of humpbacks — which were nearly harpooned to extinction in the 20th century — were banned in the Southern Pacific in 1963, and that ban was extended worldwide in 1966. The American Cetacean Society estimates the humpback population has recovered to about 30,000-40,000 — about a third of the number before modern whaling. The species is listed as “vulnerable” by the World Conservation Union.

(Photo above: “A lunch vendor serves a whale meat curry lunch box to customers at a vending van in Tokyo. Whale curry made its debut as a takeaway business in Tokyo, attracting curious customers who seldom have the meat amid an international row over hunting the giant mammals.” — courtesy: AFP)

Whaling is the harvesting of free-roaming whales from the oceans and dates back to at least 6,000 BC. Whaling and other threats have led to at least 5 of the 13 great whales being listed as endangered. Commercial whaling is subject to a moratorium by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). More here…

We lived in a different America then. News that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor came from bulletins that broke into Sunday afternoon radio programs and was spread by word of mouth over the telephone, on the streets of cities and house to house in small towns.

World War II came to us in slow motion and seemed unreal until we read details in the next day’s newspaper and heard a broadcast of President Roosevelt telling Congress that that day would live in infamy as he declared a state of war with Japan.

Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about Iraq, which nevertheless is sliding out of the national consciousness now day by day?

World War II was everybody’s war. It would be fought by our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers and those of the people next door and down the block. I was 17 then, but in little more than a year, I knew I would be among them.

We were all in it together, and every night at 8:55, we turned on our radios for the only news most of us were able to get.

If we had been told then we would be called “The Greatest Generation,” we would have wondered what was unusual about doing what we had to do. It would have saddened us beyond tears if we knew that our children and grandchildren would ever have to fight and die when the nation’s survival was not so clearly at stake.

It would have broken our hearts then, and it still does.

Cross-posted from my blog.

This is another Guest Book Review by fiction writer Jessica Schneider who also writes for the highly visited site Cosmoetica, is Book Editor for Monsters and Critics and is the only contributor to her own blog.

Book review: The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

by Jessica Schneider

The Rape of Nanking is a well-written account of what happened in Nanking in 1937 when the Japanese invaded and slaughtered 300,000 Chinese. Known for being “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” this book goes into the detail not only of the Rape itself and what it entailed but also addresses the ways the Japanese tried to deny it ever happened and likewise cover it up.

Iris Chang published her book in 1997 and I only came to learn of her suicide in 2004. Many speculate her sudden suicide was due to not only her personal depression but also because of the impact that this grisly subject matter must have had on her.

For many years The Rape of Nanking was never spoken about—largely because many of the surviving Chinese were humiliated by the whole experience, as well as the efforts put upon by the Japanese government, as well as educational systems, to cover it up. I recommend this book highly, but keep in mind this is not for the ‘weak heart.’ Within the book you will find photos of Chinese people being tortured, decapitated, a woman with a sharp object protruding from her vagina, all the while noticing the smiles upon those Japanese faces committing the crimes.

The word ‘Rape’ is used effectively here, for not only were these horrid acts a rape of these people’s basic human rights, but also because women were the ones who suffered the most. The book addresses the many rapes that took place by the Japanese soldiers to that of civilian women—where more often than not the women were not only raped, but were disemboweled, had their vaginas torn apart by knives, their breasts cut off, or were tied up and sometimes forced to endure sex with as many as 40 soldiers a night.

In one of the photos it is highly disturbing to see a young woman tied up with her legs spread apart and wallowing in exhaustion. It is possible that the woman in the photo might not even be alive.

Many of these Japanese solders were so used to killing that the mere act of slaughter became boring to them, and so that is why they made up ‘games’ for how to kill people. I won’t list them all here, but I had to put the book down a moment and gather myself because it was so hard to imagine. The book also gets you wondering which is crueler—to shoot 50 people in the head quickly, or to take half that number and mutilate them for weeks on end?

Ironically, one of the heroes of Nanking is John Rabe, who was also a Nazi. Rabe served as the Chairman for the International Committee and helped to organize the Nanking Safety Zone, as well as having kept lengthy diaries to serve as evidence for future years. Chang calls Rabe the “Oskar Schindler of China.” She also speaks about the handful of other Westerners, like Rabe, who stayed behind to help the Chinese people, and how their acts of heroism have gone largely ignored in history, just as the Rape of Nanking itself.

It was also interesting to learn the ways in which the Japanese tried to cover it up.

For years afterwards many of the Chinese resorted to smoking opium and heroin for no other reason than just to escape the misery of their lives. Likewise, crime levels began to rise and so many of the Japanese deniers began claiming that Nanking had been in need for Japanese occupation due to the high crimes—for some government to give them order. She also addresses the ways in which the Japanese history books have been edited and rewritten, where the Rape of Nanking is presented not as a systematic slaughter to kill the Chinese people, but as the mere result of war.

I found many similarities between those who deny the Rape of Nanking with those who deny the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, as well as ways in which government works to hide the evidence. Deniers quibble with the numbers murdered (saying it is much less), claiming the murders were not systematic but as a result of war, and also claiming the victims had ‘rebelled’ as a means to justify the invasion and murder. Chang details these denial tactics at great length. Read the rest of this entry »

Shinichi Tetsutani loved to ride his beloved tricycle outside his house in Higashi-Hakushima-Cho, a neighborhood in the Japanese port city of Hiroshima.

Shin-chan, as his family called the three-year-old, was doing just that on the morning of August 6, 1945, when there was a brilliant flash in the sky.

Shin was about a quarter mile from the hypocenter of the detonation of the first nuclear weapon to be used in anger, the consequence of a frightening new technology that its creators were all too aware would change warfare — and civilization — forever by wreaking unimaginable death and destruction.

Shin died that night, one of about 140,000 people to perish in the atomic bomb explosion and from associated effects, principally radiation poisoning. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, taking about 74,000 lives. Kyoto, the original target of the first bomb, was spared because the government officials and generals who were desperate to end the war were sensitive of its cultural significance.

A third atomic bomb was being readied, but by August 15 the conciliators in the Japanese government had won out over hard-line militarists who had had the tacit backing of Emperor Hirohito, who was not the pitifully manipulated figurehead the Japanese claim, and was the villain of this story. In any event, Japan capitulated and World War II finally was over after some 234,874 Americans had lost their lives in the Pacific theater alone.

There is no military-political action in modern history laden with as much baggage as President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb.

Those who have argued in favor of his decision offer these arguments:

* The bombs ended the war months sooner and saved an estimated half million American lives that could have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese mainland

* Millions of people under Japanese occupation in The Philippines, New Guinea, Borneo and elsewhere who faced starvation, including hundreds of thousands of POWs from the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, were freed.

* The hard-line militarists had adamantly refused to surrender although it was obvious that the war was lost.

Those who have argued against his decision offer these arguments:

* The bombings were immoral, a crime against humanity and constituted genocide.

* In a contemporary context, they were an act of terrorism.

* They were militarily unnecessary because Japan was essentially defeated and ready to surrender.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

UPDATED AGAIN & MOVED UP:

AP via Earthlink: Nuke Waste Drums Tipped in Japan Quake

KASHIWAZAKI, Japan - A nuclear power plant near the epicenter of a powerful earthquake suffered a slew of problems, including spilled waste drums, leaked radioactive water, fires and burst pipes, the reactor’s operator said Tuesday - more than 24 hours after the tremors struck northern Japan.

The malfunctions at the Kashiwazaki power plant and the delays in acknowledging them are likely to feed concerns about the safety of Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors, which supply 30 percent of the quake-prone country’s electricity and have suffered a long string of accidents and cover-ups.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said a total of 50 cases of malfunctioning and trouble had been found at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant since Monday’s magnitude 6.6 quake, which killed at least nine people and left 13,000 homeless.

The company said they were still inspecting the plant, which shut down automatically after the quake, and further problems could emerge.

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