Part I
14 March 2007
My first encounter with Takashi Miike was watching a movie called “Gozu.” The grainy style of the film and the strangeness of the plot made me think it was a movie from the 60s or 70s (I was tired and didn’t notice the cell phones that cropped up in the first hour). The whole thing seemed to be filled with the kind of symbolism that filmmakers of that era felt compelled to put into their films: a car gets a flat tire from running over a bone in the road and a man with half his face painted white offers help; an old woman spurts milk from her breasts and whips her mentally disturbed brother in an attempt to summon a spirit that cries like a baby. In a central scene, a half-naked man with the head of a cow appears in the night and licks the face of a man in search of his missing friend.
It was fun and often humorous, but I wrote it off because I assumed that underneath it all, there was probably some easily deciphered statement being made. Maybe it was a political allegory (one character, the American proprietress of a liquor store, is featured in front of a prominent American flag and has to read her Japanese lines off cue cards) or an attempt at creating an ‘alternative’ view of reality like Salvador Dali tried to in “Un Chien Andalou,” a world that’s visually striking and memorable, but ultimately far too cool for the rest of us poor spectators to be invited into.
I have fun watching such things because they seem crazy and predictable, but it's fun at the expense of the filmmaker. Ultimately, I enjoy it only because it’s the product of a very predictable mind that thinks its own ideas are so original that they can only be expressed through an elaborate code of symbolism and myth that turns out, in the end, to be redundant.
But there’s another reason someone might make a movie as weird as “Gozu,” a reason much more honest and much more obscure. The filmmaker might be a person truly confounded and mystified by life. As I re-watched scenes of “Gozu,” and eventually the whole movie, I started to think maybe that’s what really was going on here. Or, even more radical, maybe the guy who made this movie was just fucking around in the most devilish way possible. And so this is how I first got hooked on the movies of Takashi Miike.
Part II
21 March 2007
So I was thinking the other day, is this Takashi Miike a lightweight?
How to define a lightweight? I think about someone like Woody Allen. I love Woody Allen, but when I read interviews in which he says he’s not going to make any films dealing with the Iraq war, I think he’s wussing out in some ways, especially when he’s so bold about talking about the war when he’s not behind the camera.
In his movie “Gozu”, Takashi Miike shows a middle aged woman filling bottles with her own milk to sell to children, and later a sexy young girl gives birth to a full-grown man. This definitely breaks some taboos about what it is we’re physically comfortable watching onscreen. But Adam Sandler breaks taboos about what we’re physically comfortable seeing, and that doesn't make his work especially interesting.
What I wanted to know is whether or not Takashi Miike has ever had the guts to make a political statement.
The closest answer I can find is in the movie “The Bird People in China” (“Chugoku no Chojin”), which follows a Japanese businessman on a trip into the mountains of Yunnan Province of China to evaluate a potentially rich vein of jade. This is the least violent of T.M.’s films. In fact, one of the major themes is the longing to escape violence, embodied by a psychotic Japanese Yakuza (gangster) who has been shunted into a low profile assignment in China that chafes at him.
A series of accidents leaves our party of businessman, Yakuza and Chinese guide stranded in a rugged and beautiful region of the world, and Takashi Miike does an incredible job at depicting the quiet way in which an encounter with a “primitive” culture can be simultaneously thrilling and unsettling for people who have never known an alternative to high-tech civilization.
What’s especially interesting is the idea, brought up early on in the movie, that Yunnan Province is actually the anthropologic source of Japanese culture. As the movie goes on we see how the main characters are tantalized by the idea that this remote, bucolic river valley is where they belong, and that their truest identity is to be found among the gentle, welcoming people who live there.
When the Yakuza finally blows his top at the end of the movie, he’s not like the blindly sadistic mobsters in T.M.’s “Ichi the Killer,” nor like the trumped up maniacs in “MPD Psycho” who have been genetically engineered to kill just for the sake of it. The Yakuza is determined that if the discovery of viable jade is broadcast, it will bring a wave of development, pollution and crime that will destroy this most unspoiled region of the world. And we actually stand by him because T.M. has let the natural scenery speak for itself in this slow-paced, luxuriant film.
And yet the indigenous people are the first to clamor for civilization. Once the vein of jade proves to be viable, they cheer, “Now we will get electricity!”
I’m not saying that the only way to become a worthwhile filmmaker is to go out and make clear, Al Gore-like statements on current issues ripped from today’s headlines. But “The Bird People of China” sheds light on ideas that seem to inhabit all Takashi Miike’s movies. In “Gozu,” the main character gets lost in the boondocks of Japan where logic seems to dissolve and a form of primitive, ritual magic seems to hold reality in its sway. In “Audition,” a comfortable television executive has a close and brutal encounter with a woman who inhabits a much harsher world of petty crime and sexual abuse. In both of these movies the friction between two worlds is handled like a drug trip, which is fine. It’s interesting to watch.
But in “Bird People of China,” T.M. visits a much more realistic intersection of worlds, and the results are impressive.
Part III
28 March 2007
One theme that keeps coming up in Takashi Miike’s movies is family. Even in his Yakuza movies, there’s a sense that there’s a familial bond between the gangsters. In “MPD Psycho,” the main character is a detective whose mind is home to a family of personalities who are sometimes at odds but ultimately have an affinity with one another. Two of Miike’s strongest films deal explicitly with family.
“The Happiness of the Katakuris” is about a family that buys a house in a remote part of Japan, right at the foot of an active volcano. At first it looks as though they won’t get any guests at all, but the real problem turns out not to be a lack of guests, but the fact that the guests keep dying. The funniest of these death scenes is one where a famous sumo wrestler comes in with his underage girlfriend. You don’t need to be too imaginative to guess how it ends up.
TM has always had a talent for throwing comedy into places you wouldn’t expect it. The comedy is what elevates his movies over their various genres. “Katakuris” is different because it’s intrinsically a comedy. At the heart it’s about the pretensions of the characters. The father wants to reunite his family while getting rich quick. The grandfather wants to ennoble himself by taking the blame for all the dead customers. The daughter falls in love with a con artist who is obviously Asian but is passing himself off as a British serviceman and member of the royal family.
It all gets pushed over the top when, about a third of the way in, it becomes a musical comedy. When the Katakuris find their first dead customer, they break into an 80s style video. The mother and father do a karaoke number complete with a shimmering disco ball. The con artist Richard Sagawa and his victim do an amazing number about the glories of falling in love.
It’s not a deep movie, but it works because there is a sense that Takashi Miike means what he’s saying. The myth of a happy family that can muddle through is as ridiculous as the phony story of Prince Charles having an illegitimate Japanese cousin who’s flying over Iraq, but for some reason we all buy into the former myth while seeing right through the latter. It’s only by falling for ridiculous delusions that we’re able to survive, so let’s go ahead and be happy.
“Visitor Q” is a much scarier movie that touches on the same topic. We’re brought into the troubled life of a tv reporter who’s career has been ruined after he broadcast a man-on-the street interview in which he gets sodomized by a group of teenage boys. Now his world is a nightmare. His wife is a heroin addict who gets beaten by her son, who in turn is beaten up by bullies. His teenage daughter is a prostitute, and in the opening scene he pays her for sex. His ex-lover, a news reporter, can barely stand being around him, but he continues to harass her with his new idea: a reality show based on the ruin of his own life.
This is not easy stuff to watch, but it’s not exactly gratuitous. As in Camus’ “The Plague,” the goal here seems to be to show what happens when the things we dread invade our “normal life.” As in “Gozu,” one of the chief images of “Visitor Q” is an older woman—the mother, in this case—who finds that her breasts can miraculously produce huge quantities of milk. By the end of the movie, she’s transformed into a goddess-like figure.
I suspect that both of these movies are about the Japanese recession of the 1990s. There is a game afoot, and both of these families are clearly the losers—losers in the global economy, losers in the Japanese social hierarchy, losers in the search to satisfy one another. But they have been trained to try and make the best of things, to act optimistic, and this leads them to a strange sort of Hell where humiliation and death become the only sacraments left.
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination
by Edogawa Rampo. Tanslated by James B. Harris, 1956. Charles E. Tuttle Company.
7 March 2007; Up to page 88 of 222.
I found out about Edogawa Rampo by watching a movie based on four of his short stories. The movie is called Rampo Noir, and is so disturbing and perverse at its heart that it’s almost beyond the limit of what I can take. Still, I had to be curious about the man who created these stories, a man described as the Japanese Edgar Allen Poe. (The name he wrote under isn’t actually his real name, but rather a transliteration to Japanese of “Edgar Allen Poe.” Neat trivia, huh?)
What I’ve found so far is that Rampo’s stories are not nearly so dark as the films that have been made from them. For instance, in adapting The Caterpillar, the filmmakers took the story of a woman who tortures her husband, who was severely wounded on the battlefield, and makes it much more brutal. Where the wife in Rampo’s story blinds her husband in a fit of rage and frustration, the film shows and act of deliberate, premeditated sadism.
Really, this is a lot like Poe, who was a man who principally succeeded in putting ideas out there into circulation, ideas that captivate the imagination without necessarily pleasing it. Whereas Rampo’s detective fiction is nothing to rave about (nor is Poe’s, I think) his ability to wander into the grotesque is somehow admirable, because it’s honest to the nightmarish way the human imagination can work. Rampo strikes me as a man who wasn’t interested neither the sort of artistic tropes nor gratuitous violence that are so prominent in the film adaptations of his work, but I imagine that he would be quite happy to find that a new generation of storytellers has taken his ideas and decided to “ratchet them up.”
14 March 2007; p. 88 to end.
I was never really impressed by the stories in this collection. Maybe they’re not representative of Mr. Rampo’s talent. Maybe they're poor translations. But all in all, I think he might have been a little too enamored of his idol Edgar Allen Poe. The more Poe wrote, the more he seemed infatuated by his own cleverness. Over and over we are told how clever his detective Daupin is, and Poe seems almost to gloat over the fact that people would fall for his balloon hoax.
In the same way, Rampo seems far more impressed with the ingeniousness of his characters than we as an audience ever are. Watching one of his murderers gloat over the perfection of his or her master crime, we’re as likely to be impressed as we would be to watch someone win a hand of poker after stacking the deck. Rampo's supposedly fiendish criminals have all been dropped into a world of morons who seem to be just waiting for someone to come along and fool them.
Still, it’s interesting to watch Rampo’s fascination with mirrors and optical devices, and the last story in the book, “The Traveler with the Rag Painting” evokes a somewhat dreamlike quality as it tells the story of a man who goes through the wrong side of a pair of binoculars into the picture of a woman he’s fallen in love with.
Maybe the reason why mirrors and optical devices work for Rampo is that, as with Poe, he has a talent for writing a story about people who are dangerously obsessed. I wonder if this is the direction his other work goes in, or does it just remain smug?
7 March 2007; Up to page 88 of 222.
I found out about Edogawa Rampo by watching a movie based on four of his short stories. The movie is called Rampo Noir, and is so disturbing and perverse at its heart that it’s almost beyond the limit of what I can take. Still, I had to be curious about the man who created these stories, a man described as the Japanese Edgar Allen Poe. (The name he wrote under isn’t actually his real name, but rather a transliteration to Japanese of “Edgar Allen Poe.” Neat trivia, huh?)
What I’ve found so far is that Rampo’s stories are not nearly so dark as the films that have been made from them. For instance, in adapting The Caterpillar, the filmmakers took the story of a woman who tortures her husband, who was severely wounded on the battlefield, and makes it much more brutal. Where the wife in Rampo’s story blinds her husband in a fit of rage and frustration, the film shows and act of deliberate, premeditated sadism.
Really, this is a lot like Poe, who was a man who principally succeeded in putting ideas out there into circulation, ideas that captivate the imagination without necessarily pleasing it. Whereas Rampo’s detective fiction is nothing to rave about (nor is Poe’s, I think) his ability to wander into the grotesque is somehow admirable, because it’s honest to the nightmarish way the human imagination can work. Rampo strikes me as a man who wasn’t interested neither the sort of artistic tropes nor gratuitous violence that are so prominent in the film adaptations of his work, but I imagine that he would be quite happy to find that a new generation of storytellers has taken his ideas and decided to “ratchet them up.”
14 March 2007; p. 88 to end.
I was never really impressed by the stories in this collection. Maybe they’re not representative of Mr. Rampo’s talent. Maybe they're poor translations. But all in all, I think he might have been a little too enamored of his idol Edgar Allen Poe. The more Poe wrote, the more he seemed infatuated by his own cleverness. Over and over we are told how clever his detective Daupin is, and Poe seems almost to gloat over the fact that people would fall for his balloon hoax.
In the same way, Rampo seems far more impressed with the ingeniousness of his characters than we as an audience ever are. Watching one of his murderers gloat over the perfection of his or her master crime, we’re as likely to be impressed as we would be to watch someone win a hand of poker after stacking the deck. Rampo's supposedly fiendish criminals have all been dropped into a world of morons who seem to be just waiting for someone to come along and fool them.
Still, it’s interesting to watch Rampo’s fascination with mirrors and optical devices, and the last story in the book, “The Traveler with the Rag Painting” evokes a somewhat dreamlike quality as it tells the story of a man who goes through the wrong side of a pair of binoculars into the picture of a woman he’s fallen in love with.
Maybe the reason why mirrors and optical devices work for Rampo is that, as with Poe, he has a talent for writing a story about people who are dangerously obsessed. I wonder if this is the direction his other work goes in, or does it just remain smug?
Sympathy for the Underdog
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Starring Koji Tsuruta and Noboru Ando. 1971. Released in DVD by Home Vision Entertainment.
Reviewed on 28 February 2007
This Japanese gangster movie has a lot of the style of one of the old Rat Pack flicks, boosted up by lots of footage of Vegas-like neon lights, a hep jazz soundtrack, shots of the gang walking in a tight-knit cluster down the street looking cool in the face of death. There’s lots of fake blood in this movie, and it all looks like the producers used red finger-paint to create the effect. The hokey quality of it doesn’t really detract from the film much—in fact, it makes it easier to stomach the violence and enjoy the movie as a sketch of revenge and a cast of over-the-top underworld characters. Tsuruta carries a lot of the movie as Gunji, the determined yakuza boss so solitary and mysterious he even puts his sunglasses on right after having sex. After being edges out of the Japanese mainland by a big mob organization that’s run like a business, Gunji takes his ragtag gang of six loyal followers to Okinawa, where he has to battle the local criminal element, including an American named Carter (who sounds like he learned English by listening to automated phone recordings) and a one-armed giant (who has a suspicious bulge beneath the “armless” side of his jacket . . . hmmmm).
The whole thing would fall apart if the actors didn’t seem to be 100% in earnest from start to finish. As it is, it’s a fast paced, enjoyable piece of fun, and you get to see some great glimpses of what Okinawa was like in the 70s.
Reviewed on 28 February 2007
This Japanese gangster movie has a lot of the style of one of the old Rat Pack flicks, boosted up by lots of footage of Vegas-like neon lights, a hep jazz soundtrack, shots of the gang walking in a tight-knit cluster down the street looking cool in the face of death. There’s lots of fake blood in this movie, and it all looks like the producers used red finger-paint to create the effect. The hokey quality of it doesn’t really detract from the film much—in fact, it makes it easier to stomach the violence and enjoy the movie as a sketch of revenge and a cast of over-the-top underworld characters. Tsuruta carries a lot of the movie as Gunji, the determined yakuza boss so solitary and mysterious he even puts his sunglasses on right after having sex. After being edges out of the Japanese mainland by a big mob organization that’s run like a business, Gunji takes his ragtag gang of six loyal followers to Okinawa, where he has to battle the local criminal element, including an American named Carter (who sounds like he learned English by listening to automated phone recordings) and a one-armed giant (who has a suspicious bulge beneath the “armless” side of his jacket . . . hmmmm).
The whole thing would fall apart if the actors didn’t seem to be 100% in earnest from start to finish. As it is, it’s a fast paced, enjoyable piece of fun, and you get to see some great glimpses of what Okinawa was like in the 70s.
I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
By Emily Dickinson.
Illustrated by Rex Schneider. Introduction by Richard B. Sewall. 1978, Stemmer House, Maryland.
20 February 2007
I’m going to be a father soon, so children’s books have been on my mind of late. This one’s illustrated almost entirely in color pencil and possibly pastel, and the goal is to make Emily Dickinson’s poetry more accessible to children. I think overall it works very well. In fact, I’m not embarrassed to admit that having everything drawn out for me helps a great deal; I don’t have the sort of brain that’s good at solving riddles, and many of Dickinson’s poems are just that. Maybe it’s cheating, but when I have an illustrator there to whisper unsubtly in my ear “It’s about a snake!” or “She’s describing a snowstorm,” it’s much easier for my mind to settle down and enjoy the poem line-by-line.
Schneider takes advantage of the fact that Dickinson never gave titles to her poems. Sometimes the last line of a poem will be withheld so you have to flip the page to see the resolution. (“It’s about a snake!”) Sometimes two short poems will share the same page. The overall effect is that the whole book is one big poem, a series of glances at the imaginative world of a bright and reflective woman you can’t help want to know better.
The introduction by Richard Sewall gives a good rundown on the both the rewards and punishments of reading poetry. It’s written in just the right tone for kids age 10-12, candid and not at all patronizing. And the glossary at the end gives great tailored descriptions of words kids might stumble over.
Schneider’s drawings of people come off a little stiff and the various elfin figures he uses to represent winds, frost and seasons have a little too much Disney in them for my taste, but the overall effect of seeing Emily Dickinson’s thoughts on nature rendered on the page is so refreshing and fun as to rinse the mind of all trifling concerns about petty details. This is a book to be thoroughly enjoyed.
Illustrated by Rex Schneider. Introduction by Richard B. Sewall. 1978, Stemmer House, Maryland.
20 February 2007
I’m going to be a father soon, so children’s books have been on my mind of late. This one’s illustrated almost entirely in color pencil and possibly pastel, and the goal is to make Emily Dickinson’s poetry more accessible to children. I think overall it works very well. In fact, I’m not embarrassed to admit that having everything drawn out for me helps a great deal; I don’t have the sort of brain that’s good at solving riddles, and many of Dickinson’s poems are just that. Maybe it’s cheating, but when I have an illustrator there to whisper unsubtly in my ear “It’s about a snake!” or “She’s describing a snowstorm,” it’s much easier for my mind to settle down and enjoy the poem line-by-line.
Schneider takes advantage of the fact that Dickinson never gave titles to her poems. Sometimes the last line of a poem will be withheld so you have to flip the page to see the resolution. (“It’s about a snake!”) Sometimes two short poems will share the same page. The overall effect is that the whole book is one big poem, a series of glances at the imaginative world of a bright and reflective woman you can’t help want to know better.
The introduction by Richard Sewall gives a good rundown on the both the rewards and punishments of reading poetry. It’s written in just the right tone for kids age 10-12, candid and not at all patronizing. And the glossary at the end gives great tailored descriptions of words kids might stumble over.
Schneider’s drawings of people come off a little stiff and the various elfin figures he uses to represent winds, frost and seasons have a little too much Disney in them for my taste, but the overall effect of seeing Emily Dickinson’s thoughts on nature rendered on the page is so refreshing and fun as to rinse the mind of all trifling concerns about petty details. This is a book to be thoroughly enjoyed.
Die Pest (The Plague)
by Albert Camus, 1947, translated to German by Guido G. Meister, published by Rowohlt, Hamburg.
20 February 2007; Up to page 27 of 182.
I haven’t come very far in this book. The copy I have is an old paperback with a spine reinforced by the publishers with heavy tape. I found the copy at C&M used books while coming back from a volunteer activity at a local soup kitchen. I’ve read two other books by Camus in German, so it’s becoming a tradition for me. Oddly, it’s easier for me to read Camus than it is to read almost any other author in German. It’s even easier to read it than it is for me to read a lot of prose in English. I think the reason is because Camus wasn’t trying to play any games with language. As a reader, I never feel like he’s trying to buy me off with any tricks or affectations, nor do I feel he’s struggling with any need to bolster up his own enthusiasm for what he’s writing. Everything’s cool and sharp like surgical equipment just before a surgery.
I’m not being wholly accurate. Der Fall, a later book, is more vague and lackluster. But Der Fremde (The Stranger) is told in a voice so remote and matter-of-fact that I read the whole book with a luxuriant case of the existential creeps. Der Fremde is the first-person account of a man who goes through life with almost total emotional and moral detachment. Camus makes no attempt to delve into the past and explore the cause of this constant calm. Rather, he simply lets the character pass through all the situations that we assume would trigger passions in anyone: love, injustice, murder and damnation. He takes part in all of them, takes note of all of them, and accepts them. Only at the end does the protagonist have a fit of rage when a minister attempts to bless him before his own execution.
Where Der Fremde deals with an individual, Die Pest brings us into a community, seaside town in Algiers sometime in the 1940s. The plot itself deals with signs of an emerging bubonic plague epidemic—first an infestation of rats, then a series of grotesque deaths, all described in a resigned and neutral tone that serves to amplify the horror of the matter. But though the tone is similar to Der Fremde, I think Camus has a different strategy here. We meet a number of characters, and each seems to have some sort of burden. The solitary Cottard attempts suicide. Dr. Rieux is worried about his wife, whose tuburculosis has forced her to go away to a sanitarium. Michel, the superintendent of Rieux’s building, is dismayed at how the rat infestation reflects on his self-image. The general impression is that everyone suffers in isolation. No one is capable of starting a relationship where compassion and healing could take place.
I know that many people have interpreted this novel as an allegory of fascism, so I suspect that as the story develops, we’ll see that brutality can break through the walls where compassion cannot.
28 February 2007; pp. 27-102
First off, a couple notes about the copy of the book I’m reading—it was printed in 1960 and right about page 94 there’s a cigarette ad. Not a glossy advertisement, just a page of the same paper as the text is written on with the slogan An guten Dingen finden alle Völker in gleicher Weise Geschmack. And there’s just a drawing of a cigarette. It’s hilarious and weird.
Also, in 1960 as today, many German novels will come with a page near the beginning with a condensed account of the author’s life as well as a summary of the novel’s plot. Whereas most American published books are highly marketed packages, with every blurb and graphic designed to increase the potential consumer’s willingness to open the old pocketbook, these descriptions of content (Inhalt) have more in common with the nutritional labels the FDA requires on foodstuffs. The Inhalt section of Die Pest notes that this book represents Albert Camus breaking away from the hard-line existential pessimism of his one-time mentor Jean Paul Sartre.
Reading the book, I understand this description. As the plague continues in the isolated city of Oran, a group of conscientious (and philosophical) citizens decides they must act independently to form a sanitation committee to “fight the plague.” In a prolonged subplot, the journalist Rambert, who seeks only to escape the city and be reunited with his lover, is won over to service in the sanitation group.
If you’re not reading the plague as a metaphor of fascism, and the sanitation group as a symbol of the resistance organizations in occupied and Vichy France, this whole section of debates about public health makes little sense, especially in a book where so little time is spent describing the actual physical and medical results of the plague, and so much is spent following the main characters around to various cafés and listening in on their conversations about the nonexistence of God.
I do have to say that though I’m happy Camus started finding some purpose in life, it didn’t stop him from making Die Pest a novel that’s sometimes too slack and lackadaisical. This is somewhat forgivable if you think of how long Europe basically shrugged off the emergence political radicalism in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy as just another way of doing things, and the way that the citizenry of fascist regimes were so “good” about swallowing their doubts and trying to just go on about their business. The best parts of Die Pest so far are the descriptions of mass psychology, the way Camus captures the canned heat of a community that can’t come to terms with its own impending doom.
But Camus hasn’t succeeded so far in creating an engaging cast of central characters. For the most part, the main characters Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert and Grand seem slight variations on the same personality; they’re all un-heroic, fundamentally disillusioned people who nonetheless choose to make sacrifices for a cause that’s humane yet hopeless. Their philosophical discussions seem much more like the inner dialogue of a single mind, rather than the dialogues of diverse people who have to challenge themselves to find common ground.
The only part of the book that’s a little embarrassing is the depiction of the clerk Grand’s attempts to be a writer of fiction. I guess we’re supposed to be amused when we see how the poor guy spends weeks anguishing over the choice of words for the first sentence of his novel, but it really seems like the sort of humor you’d expect to see on an episode of Family Ties or The Facts of Life than something that belongs in a philosophical novel.
I do expect the plot to pick up a little, and hope the characters gain a little bit of independence as the history of the plague unfolds.
7 March 2007; p. 102 to end.
At first it seemed odd to me that Camus spent so little time focusing on the actual effects the plague had on those suffering from it, almost as though admitting that the plague was just an excuse for him to depict the stresses put on a society by extraordinary forces such as war and repression. I should have known not to underestimate this writer. Rather than play up the horror of the situation, Camus’ plague-ridden city of Oran is under a quarantine law by which those diagnosed with the plague are immediately removed from their family members and loved ones. The sick are kept in provisional hospitals, often set up in schools, and the family members are kept under observation in a sports arena near the outskirts of town. Through most of the book, we observe the quiet, dreamy atmosphere of a town that lives in this state of weird divorce both from the outside world and from the disease that’s killing more and more people every day. Right at the heart of the narrative, we get an extremely concentrated look at the effects the plague has on a single boy. The detail is excruciating, from the young boy’s crabbed hands to his cries of sheer rage at the pain. By focusing on this one instance of crushing misery, Camus makes the book simple, believable and deadly serious, and made me feel that the main characters, almost all of whom are present at the boy’s bedside, really are driven to grappling with the thoughts about suffering, justice and the worth of life in dialogues that, in a lesser book, would seem abstract and pretentious.
One of the most interesting of these discussions is between the book’s central character, Dr. Rieux, and the Jesuit priest Paneloux. Witnessing the suffering and death of an innocent child, Paneloux is faced with fundamental challenges to his faith. I especially liked this character because he’s believable and complex, and represents a maturing perception of religion on Camus’ part. Whereas Der Fremde reads as a complex but ultimately childish and spiteful putdown of religion as a whole, in Die Pest Camus seems to recognize that sincere faith is too important to be simply brushed aside by even the most disillusioned existentialist. For one thing, the sacrifices that some religionists made in fighting fascism during the 1930s and 40s were often great and admirable; and on the other hand, religion has dealt for so long with the same issues that concern existentialists that, even if the two schools of thought are bound to come to different conclusions, it would be dishonest to deny that they share a concern with the same questions and they must speak of them in the same vocabulary.
Is the plague a metaphor for fascism? Kind of. But Camus is aware of the fickleness of the mind, aware that even among serious thinkers, fashions come and go and there will be a day when people fool themselves into thinking that the rise of militant totalitarianism was merely a thing of the past. Rather, Camus uses the plague as a metaphor for the phenomenon of suffering itself. He draws clear parallels between the conditions in Oran and those in Europe under fascism, but he also intentionally divorces the plague from politics by making it a force beyond human control. “Yes,” he seems to be saying, “The Nazis may have unleashed great suffering into the world, but it would be too good to them to credit them even with responsibility for the suffering they brought to the modern world: in truth, suffering and atrocity is always present, it is more true than any abstract idea of nation or creed.”
Camus entertains the idea that of all we experience in this world, suffering is the only thing that is true. But he also gives fair play to the possibility that suffering is rather only the gateway to truth, that truth can only be attained by those who head straight on into Hell and aren’t afraid. While Die Pest is not as enjoyable to read or even as well written as Der Fremde, the fact that Camus can find room in one story for two worldviews so powerful and contradictory makes this the better of the two books.
20 February 2007; Up to page 27 of 182.
I haven’t come very far in this book. The copy I have is an old paperback with a spine reinforced by the publishers with heavy tape. I found the copy at C&M used books while coming back from a volunteer activity at a local soup kitchen. I’ve read two other books by Camus in German, so it’s becoming a tradition for me. Oddly, it’s easier for me to read Camus than it is to read almost any other author in German. It’s even easier to read it than it is for me to read a lot of prose in English. I think the reason is because Camus wasn’t trying to play any games with language. As a reader, I never feel like he’s trying to buy me off with any tricks or affectations, nor do I feel he’s struggling with any need to bolster up his own enthusiasm for what he’s writing. Everything’s cool and sharp like surgical equipment just before a surgery.
I’m not being wholly accurate. Der Fall, a later book, is more vague and lackluster. But Der Fremde (The Stranger) is told in a voice so remote and matter-of-fact that I read the whole book with a luxuriant case of the existential creeps. Der Fremde is the first-person account of a man who goes through life with almost total emotional and moral detachment. Camus makes no attempt to delve into the past and explore the cause of this constant calm. Rather, he simply lets the character pass through all the situations that we assume would trigger passions in anyone: love, injustice, murder and damnation. He takes part in all of them, takes note of all of them, and accepts them. Only at the end does the protagonist have a fit of rage when a minister attempts to bless him before his own execution.
Where Der Fremde deals with an individual, Die Pest brings us into a community, seaside town in Algiers sometime in the 1940s. The plot itself deals with signs of an emerging bubonic plague epidemic—first an infestation of rats, then a series of grotesque deaths, all described in a resigned and neutral tone that serves to amplify the horror of the matter. But though the tone is similar to Der Fremde, I think Camus has a different strategy here. We meet a number of characters, and each seems to have some sort of burden. The solitary Cottard attempts suicide. Dr. Rieux is worried about his wife, whose tuburculosis has forced her to go away to a sanitarium. Michel, the superintendent of Rieux’s building, is dismayed at how the rat infestation reflects on his self-image. The general impression is that everyone suffers in isolation. No one is capable of starting a relationship where compassion and healing could take place.
I know that many people have interpreted this novel as an allegory of fascism, so I suspect that as the story develops, we’ll see that brutality can break through the walls where compassion cannot.
28 February 2007; pp. 27-102
First off, a couple notes about the copy of the book I’m reading—it was printed in 1960 and right about page 94 there’s a cigarette ad. Not a glossy advertisement, just a page of the same paper as the text is written on with the slogan An guten Dingen finden alle Völker in gleicher Weise Geschmack. And there’s just a drawing of a cigarette. It’s hilarious and weird.
Also, in 1960 as today, many German novels will come with a page near the beginning with a condensed account of the author’s life as well as a summary of the novel’s plot. Whereas most American published books are highly marketed packages, with every blurb and graphic designed to increase the potential consumer’s willingness to open the old pocketbook, these descriptions of content (Inhalt) have more in common with the nutritional labels the FDA requires on foodstuffs. The Inhalt section of Die Pest notes that this book represents Albert Camus breaking away from the hard-line existential pessimism of his one-time mentor Jean Paul Sartre.
Reading the book, I understand this description. As the plague continues in the isolated city of Oran, a group of conscientious (and philosophical) citizens decides they must act independently to form a sanitation committee to “fight the plague.” In a prolonged subplot, the journalist Rambert, who seeks only to escape the city and be reunited with his lover, is won over to service in the sanitation group.
If you’re not reading the plague as a metaphor of fascism, and the sanitation group as a symbol of the resistance organizations in occupied and Vichy France, this whole section of debates about public health makes little sense, especially in a book where so little time is spent describing the actual physical and medical results of the plague, and so much is spent following the main characters around to various cafés and listening in on their conversations about the nonexistence of God.
I do have to say that though I’m happy Camus started finding some purpose in life, it didn’t stop him from making Die Pest a novel that’s sometimes too slack and lackadaisical. This is somewhat forgivable if you think of how long Europe basically shrugged off the emergence political radicalism in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy as just another way of doing things, and the way that the citizenry of fascist regimes were so “good” about swallowing their doubts and trying to just go on about their business. The best parts of Die Pest so far are the descriptions of mass psychology, the way Camus captures the canned heat of a community that can’t come to terms with its own impending doom.
But Camus hasn’t succeeded so far in creating an engaging cast of central characters. For the most part, the main characters Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert and Grand seem slight variations on the same personality; they’re all un-heroic, fundamentally disillusioned people who nonetheless choose to make sacrifices for a cause that’s humane yet hopeless. Their philosophical discussions seem much more like the inner dialogue of a single mind, rather than the dialogues of diverse people who have to challenge themselves to find common ground.
The only part of the book that’s a little embarrassing is the depiction of the clerk Grand’s attempts to be a writer of fiction. I guess we’re supposed to be amused when we see how the poor guy spends weeks anguishing over the choice of words for the first sentence of his novel, but it really seems like the sort of humor you’d expect to see on an episode of Family Ties or The Facts of Life than something that belongs in a philosophical novel.
I do expect the plot to pick up a little, and hope the characters gain a little bit of independence as the history of the plague unfolds.
7 March 2007; p. 102 to end.
At first it seemed odd to me that Camus spent so little time focusing on the actual effects the plague had on those suffering from it, almost as though admitting that the plague was just an excuse for him to depict the stresses put on a society by extraordinary forces such as war and repression. I should have known not to underestimate this writer. Rather than play up the horror of the situation, Camus’ plague-ridden city of Oran is under a quarantine law by which those diagnosed with the plague are immediately removed from their family members and loved ones. The sick are kept in provisional hospitals, often set up in schools, and the family members are kept under observation in a sports arena near the outskirts of town. Through most of the book, we observe the quiet, dreamy atmosphere of a town that lives in this state of weird divorce both from the outside world and from the disease that’s killing more and more people every day. Right at the heart of the narrative, we get an extremely concentrated look at the effects the plague has on a single boy. The detail is excruciating, from the young boy’s crabbed hands to his cries of sheer rage at the pain. By focusing on this one instance of crushing misery, Camus makes the book simple, believable and deadly serious, and made me feel that the main characters, almost all of whom are present at the boy’s bedside, really are driven to grappling with the thoughts about suffering, justice and the worth of life in dialogues that, in a lesser book, would seem abstract and pretentious.
One of the most interesting of these discussions is between the book’s central character, Dr. Rieux, and the Jesuit priest Paneloux. Witnessing the suffering and death of an innocent child, Paneloux is faced with fundamental challenges to his faith. I especially liked this character because he’s believable and complex, and represents a maturing perception of religion on Camus’ part. Whereas Der Fremde reads as a complex but ultimately childish and spiteful putdown of religion as a whole, in Die Pest Camus seems to recognize that sincere faith is too important to be simply brushed aside by even the most disillusioned existentialist. For one thing, the sacrifices that some religionists made in fighting fascism during the 1930s and 40s were often great and admirable; and on the other hand, religion has dealt for so long with the same issues that concern existentialists that, even if the two schools of thought are bound to come to different conclusions, it would be dishonest to deny that they share a concern with the same questions and they must speak of them in the same vocabulary.
Is the plague a metaphor for fascism? Kind of. But Camus is aware of the fickleness of the mind, aware that even among serious thinkers, fashions come and go and there will be a day when people fool themselves into thinking that the rise of militant totalitarianism was merely a thing of the past. Rather, Camus uses the plague as a metaphor for the phenomenon of suffering itself. He draws clear parallels between the conditions in Oran and those in Europe under fascism, but he also intentionally divorces the plague from politics by making it a force beyond human control. “Yes,” he seems to be saying, “The Nazis may have unleashed great suffering into the world, but it would be too good to them to credit them even with responsibility for the suffering they brought to the modern world: in truth, suffering and atrocity is always present, it is more true than any abstract idea of nation or creed.”
Camus entertains the idea that of all we experience in this world, suffering is the only thing that is true. But he also gives fair play to the possibility that suffering is rather only the gateway to truth, that truth can only be attained by those who head straight on into Hell and aren’t afraid. While Die Pest is not as enjoyable to read or even as well written as Der Fremde, the fact that Camus can find room in one story for two worldviews so powerful and contradictory makes this the better of the two books.
Addition: My latest Christmas Cartoon
Here's the latest in a series of Christmas cartoons I've been sending out to friends.
Japan, A Short History
by Mikiso Hane
2000, Oneworld, Oxford
30 January 2007 . Pages 1-70 of 212.
I get really carried away sometimes wanting to take in a lot of information, dipping into way too many books at one time. This is especially true when I’m working on a book or play. I want to create a broad base of knowledge for myself because I like books by authors who seem to be geniuses, such as Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal or Norman Rush. Never mind that I’m hindered with being a slow reader with an only moderately retentive memory. Never mind that as I’ve grown up, I realize these writers often trip themselves up on their own erudition; still, there’s something in me that feels a novel should be a vast collage of facts and ideas from many different disciplines. So I’ll go to the library and grab a lot of books off the shelf. When I was less mature, I’d have grabbed some ancient, voluminous history of Japan, which would probably have been jammed from preface to appendix with raw data. But wanting to keep my sanity, I know that it’s a wiser first step to go with a book like Mikiso Hane’s, which is at least manageable that you can get through it and feel you still have time left over for having a life.
Of course, a book like this requires a lot of concentration and a lot of imagination. You can’t drop a stitch. For the novice, every concept and historical figure is new, so you have to keep close track of them all as they're introduced. What’s a Shοen, who were the Takugawa, and what roles did the two play in relation to the Bakufu? Blink and you’ll miss the definitions, and so you have to either be constantly flipping back or you have to make the compromise of skimming forward and just getting an intuitive overview of the shape of the thing. Maybe that’s the most productive way to approach a book like this: even if you’re not trying to memorize the entire labyrinth of Japanese history, you get a sense of the ball game of history, the way that chaotic free-for-alls resolve into stable hegemonies, and the way these hegemonies decay. Some interesting things to me so far have been: the fact that even though the Japanese have long viewed the Emperor as a godlike figure, he’s usually had very little real power; the early conversion of hundreds of thousands of Japanese to Christianity; the plight of the peasantry, which suffered famines so harsh that mass cannibalism may have occurred; the Confucian-influenced caste-system, which included an “untouchable” caste called the burakumin; and the various sects and divisions of Buddhism, including Mahayana, which focuses on the compassionate Bodhisattvas, the Nichiren Sect, which extolled the power of meditative chanting, and the Jodo school, which believed that merely by saying the name of a gracious Bodhisattva, Amida, with true devotion, one can gain salvation. I do wish that there were more attention given to art and culture. We get a quote from Hokusai and learn that Hiroshige was a master of depicting the various different effects of light, but it seems that in order to put art into its own perspective you have to somehow approach the artist’s own inner conflicts and social relationships with the same attention you pay to the intrigues that take place between the samurai and the imperial court.
(The brief description of Hiroshige made me take a good look at a set of postcards of his prints, compiled out by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and published by Pomegranate in San Francisco. It’s definitely worth looking at. I especially enjoy the way he’ll often put objects in the extreme foreground, as though the viewer’s face is just inches away from them. For instance, one scene is a rice paddy as viewed through the gaps in a stand of irises; in another scene, a descending raptor fills the top of the picture and the remainder of the scene is a distant, snowy landscape.)
18 February 2007, pp. 70-136
As history progresses toward the present, Mikiso Hane seems more in his element. This is especially true of the social history of Japan, i.e., the conditions of abject poverty endured by many. The section about factory workers during the late Meiji Era is a study in brutality, and it ought to ring a bell for people today who get a little anxious with the way “globalization” seems primarily to be about the dismantling of social safety nets. The section on factory workers takes us on a guided tour through some of the vicious cycles and catch-22s that characterize the condition of workers in that time. The system described seems not just unfair and dishonest, but also intentionally sadistic. High rates of injury in factories were blamed on workers’ “carelessness.” Workers with cholera were sometimes burned alive. Contrast this with the obscenely wealthy zaibatsu (basically the dominant corporate interests in Japan at the time) and you begin to see the scope of the economic tensions at play.
The subject of labor history brings up the subject of another book I read recently, Thomas Pynchon’s "Against the Day", which focuses largely on the frictions between a Colorado mining family and the family of plutocrats who set out to cause their downfall. If you’re not a fan of Pynchon you can skip this paragraph. What struck me about Day is that Pynchon, who tends to revel in ambiguity and intellectual game playing has come down so solidly on the side of the workers and anarchists of the period. Pynchon’s historical fiction is a lot more fun than a lot of the “straight” stuff that’s out there because he presents conspiracy theories, tabloid hoaxes and pure invention on the same footing as “legitimate” fact, and he does so for a good purpose: to take away the drab shroud of dignity that we usually bring to the past in literature. But in Against the Day, Pynchon seems much more careful about preserving some dignity when it comes to the workers’ movement at the turn-of-the-century. He does this, I think, because he sees this part of history as the bedrock reality, and the story of presidencies, the rise and fall of economic and cultural institutions, and even the progress of science more as fictions and myths that may be freely tampered with. Furthermore, the sweeping “global” aspect of the book that seems to have annoyed so many readers seems to turn things inside out and show us that history might be easier understood if we see the most exploited and oppressed peoples as composing a cohesive, underlying fabric whose wholeness is compromised and distorted by the patterns of nationality and hierarchy that are stitched on from above. That’s a clunky description on my part; suffice it to say that because of Pynchon’s book, I’m looking for different things in Mikiso Hane’s book than I would have otherwise.
The no-nonsense style of the book (no illustrations, no maps, very little biographical background and only a handful of illustrative quotes from the people involved) is necessary to keep the book slim and manageable, but it does make it hard to keep track of the many players who seemed to act as midwives to the transition of Japan from a feudalistic to a more modern government. I wonder if this might not be more appropriate to our era: after all, with internet access as long as you have at your disposal names such as Okubo Toshimichi and Yamagata Aritomo, all you need to do is type in the name and you’ll have a wealth of graphic information right on your screen. Will printed histories evolve towards simply being repositories of keywords that can be looked up online for further details?
One other thing to say is that once the Meiji Era starts, the coverage of artistic and intellectual developments becomes much more comprehensive and interesting. The description of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s disturbing Jigokumon (The Hell Screen) is enough to make me want to seek the story out on my next trip to the library.
14 March 2007: p. 136 to end.
Hane has written some other history books, some of which deal with postwar Japanese history. His short history shows how differently he regards the story before and after the war. Before the war, whether we’re talking about prehistory, the days of the shogun, or the battles of WWII, all questions are essentially answered. After the war, however, mysteries still exist. Why did Japan become such an economic powerhouse? What is the relationship between Japanese corporations and yakuza?
This isn’t intellectual dishonesty; it’s a matter of perspective. From the point of a historian of recent events, bygone centuries have to stand as a pedestal upon which our own period must stand that we might view it. What’s amazing is that Hane has managed to look back so far, and tell the story in such detail. He’s not exactly consistent: each period has its own focus, based on what he thinks is the most significant arena of development. But overall, we get an amazing glimpse of how a student of history can trace lines of cause and event from the oldest available archaeological data to the present day without exhausting his or her mortal capacity.
I like the way that Hane affords himself a single sentence of punditry and commentary when he notes that the militarists and nationalists who led the charge into WWII and who sent soldiers to war sat safe in Tokyo while their soldiers die, as leaders during war almost always do.
And it’s interesting to see the way that many of those people and forces who led the nation into war managed to slip back into power once the war was over—although alliegences had changed (in line with the new Cold War) and progress had been made on issues such as suffrage for women.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a study of the environmental side of Japan’s history, which is a shame because Japan faces so many challenges that force it to walk an ecological tightrope that other industrialized nations have not been forced to.
2000, Oneworld, Oxford
30 January 2007 . Pages 1-70 of 212.
I get really carried away sometimes wanting to take in a lot of information, dipping into way too many books at one time. This is especially true when I’m working on a book or play. I want to create a broad base of knowledge for myself because I like books by authors who seem to be geniuses, such as Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal or Norman Rush. Never mind that I’m hindered with being a slow reader with an only moderately retentive memory. Never mind that as I’ve grown up, I realize these writers often trip themselves up on their own erudition; still, there’s something in me that feels a novel should be a vast collage of facts and ideas from many different disciplines. So I’ll go to the library and grab a lot of books off the shelf. When I was less mature, I’d have grabbed some ancient, voluminous history of Japan, which would probably have been jammed from preface to appendix with raw data. But wanting to keep my sanity, I know that it’s a wiser first step to go with a book like Mikiso Hane’s, which is at least manageable that you can get through it and feel you still have time left over for having a life.
Of course, a book like this requires a lot of concentration and a lot of imagination. You can’t drop a stitch. For the novice, every concept and historical figure is new, so you have to keep close track of them all as they're introduced. What’s a Shοen, who were the Takugawa, and what roles did the two play in relation to the Bakufu? Blink and you’ll miss the definitions, and so you have to either be constantly flipping back or you have to make the compromise of skimming forward and just getting an intuitive overview of the shape of the thing. Maybe that’s the most productive way to approach a book like this: even if you’re not trying to memorize the entire labyrinth of Japanese history, you get a sense of the ball game of history, the way that chaotic free-for-alls resolve into stable hegemonies, and the way these hegemonies decay. Some interesting things to me so far have been: the fact that even though the Japanese have long viewed the Emperor as a godlike figure, he’s usually had very little real power; the early conversion of hundreds of thousands of Japanese to Christianity; the plight of the peasantry, which suffered famines so harsh that mass cannibalism may have occurred; the Confucian-influenced caste-system, which included an “untouchable” caste called the burakumin; and the various sects and divisions of Buddhism, including Mahayana, which focuses on the compassionate Bodhisattvas, the Nichiren Sect, which extolled the power of meditative chanting, and the Jodo school, which believed that merely by saying the name of a gracious Bodhisattva, Amida, with true devotion, one can gain salvation. I do wish that there were more attention given to art and culture. We get a quote from Hokusai and learn that Hiroshige was a master of depicting the various different effects of light, but it seems that in order to put art into its own perspective you have to somehow approach the artist’s own inner conflicts and social relationships with the same attention you pay to the intrigues that take place between the samurai and the imperial court.
(The brief description of Hiroshige made me take a good look at a set of postcards of his prints, compiled out by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and published by Pomegranate in San Francisco. It’s definitely worth looking at. I especially enjoy the way he’ll often put objects in the extreme foreground, as though the viewer’s face is just inches away from them. For instance, one scene is a rice paddy as viewed through the gaps in a stand of irises; in another scene, a descending raptor fills the top of the picture and the remainder of the scene is a distant, snowy landscape.)
18 February 2007, pp. 70-136
As history progresses toward the present, Mikiso Hane seems more in his element. This is especially true of the social history of Japan, i.e., the conditions of abject poverty endured by many. The section about factory workers during the late Meiji Era is a study in brutality, and it ought to ring a bell for people today who get a little anxious with the way “globalization” seems primarily to be about the dismantling of social safety nets. The section on factory workers takes us on a guided tour through some of the vicious cycles and catch-22s that characterize the condition of workers in that time. The system described seems not just unfair and dishonest, but also intentionally sadistic. High rates of injury in factories were blamed on workers’ “carelessness.” Workers with cholera were sometimes burned alive. Contrast this with the obscenely wealthy zaibatsu (basically the dominant corporate interests in Japan at the time) and you begin to see the scope of the economic tensions at play.
The subject of labor history brings up the subject of another book I read recently, Thomas Pynchon’s "Against the Day", which focuses largely on the frictions between a Colorado mining family and the family of plutocrats who set out to cause their downfall. If you’re not a fan of Pynchon you can skip this paragraph. What struck me about Day is that Pynchon, who tends to revel in ambiguity and intellectual game playing has come down so solidly on the side of the workers and anarchists of the period. Pynchon’s historical fiction is a lot more fun than a lot of the “straight” stuff that’s out there because he presents conspiracy theories, tabloid hoaxes and pure invention on the same footing as “legitimate” fact, and he does so for a good purpose: to take away the drab shroud of dignity that we usually bring to the past in literature. But in Against the Day, Pynchon seems much more careful about preserving some dignity when it comes to the workers’ movement at the turn-of-the-century. He does this, I think, because he sees this part of history as the bedrock reality, and the story of presidencies, the rise and fall of economic and cultural institutions, and even the progress of science more as fictions and myths that may be freely tampered with. Furthermore, the sweeping “global” aspect of the book that seems to have annoyed so many readers seems to turn things inside out and show us that history might be easier understood if we see the most exploited and oppressed peoples as composing a cohesive, underlying fabric whose wholeness is compromised and distorted by the patterns of nationality and hierarchy that are stitched on from above. That’s a clunky description on my part; suffice it to say that because of Pynchon’s book, I’m looking for different things in Mikiso Hane’s book than I would have otherwise.
The no-nonsense style of the book (no illustrations, no maps, very little biographical background and only a handful of illustrative quotes from the people involved) is necessary to keep the book slim and manageable, but it does make it hard to keep track of the many players who seemed to act as midwives to the transition of Japan from a feudalistic to a more modern government. I wonder if this might not be more appropriate to our era: after all, with internet access as long as you have at your disposal names such as Okubo Toshimichi and Yamagata Aritomo, all you need to do is type in the name and you’ll have a wealth of graphic information right on your screen. Will printed histories evolve towards simply being repositories of keywords that can be looked up online for further details?
One other thing to say is that once the Meiji Era starts, the coverage of artistic and intellectual developments becomes much more comprehensive and interesting. The description of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s disturbing Jigokumon (The Hell Screen) is enough to make me want to seek the story out on my next trip to the library.
14 March 2007: p. 136 to end.
Hane has written some other history books, some of which deal with postwar Japanese history. His short history shows how differently he regards the story before and after the war. Before the war, whether we’re talking about prehistory, the days of the shogun, or the battles of WWII, all questions are essentially answered. After the war, however, mysteries still exist. Why did Japan become such an economic powerhouse? What is the relationship between Japanese corporations and yakuza?
This isn’t intellectual dishonesty; it’s a matter of perspective. From the point of a historian of recent events, bygone centuries have to stand as a pedestal upon which our own period must stand that we might view it. What’s amazing is that Hane has managed to look back so far, and tell the story in such detail. He’s not exactly consistent: each period has its own focus, based on what he thinks is the most significant arena of development. But overall, we get an amazing glimpse of how a student of history can trace lines of cause and event from the oldest available archaeological data to the present day without exhausting his or her mortal capacity.
I like the way that Hane affords himself a single sentence of punditry and commentary when he notes that the militarists and nationalists who led the charge into WWII and who sent soldiers to war sat safe in Tokyo while their soldiers die, as leaders during war almost always do.
And it’s interesting to see the way that many of those people and forces who led the nation into war managed to slip back into power once the war was over—although alliegences had changed (in line with the new Cold War) and progress had been made on issues such as suffrage for women.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a study of the environmental side of Japan’s history, which is a shame because Japan faces so many challenges that force it to walk an ecological tightrope that other industrialized nations have not been forced to.
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