Section 41 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 May 14 Wednesday.
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Morning, alarm clock, 0600 ... TV on ... Al-Qaeda blasts in Saudi America, dead Americans ... SARS ... kettle on ... tea, museli ... making sandwiches ... rain in the afternoon, or so says the weather forecast, but a little rain, just a little, is falling as I walk to the railway station ... heading, unwittingly, for today's encounter with the Japanese Communist Party ....

I'm trying to buy a newspaper at the kiosk at the railway station, which should take five seconds, but there's some idiot woman there who is trying to decide which brand of throat lozenge to buy, and she's holding up the various packets and asking the sales clerk's advice and making comments on them as if this was a leisurely decision she was making in a high-priced shoe shop, and I really want to strangle her ....

I'm very much a polished part of the machine by now, and I really have very little tolerance for anyone who constitutes a source of friction. Like the witless idiot the other day who, standing in the train, stuck the ferrule of an umbrella down the side of my shoe. I looked around ... then down ... and realized that the perpetrator was a little kid, a very small female in a school uniform, completely oblivious to what it was doing ....

Anyway, today ... finally ... the newspaper ... the usual news, more dead Iraqis, fifty five "suspected cases" of cholera "reported in Basra in recent days" according to an article on page five of today's International Herald Tribune, an article headlined "As sanitation in Basra worsens, UN health agency warns of cholera epidemic".

Yokohama station ... Tokaido Honsen ... Ohfuna ... huge crowds on the platform at Ohfuna ... "so many people" says a guy behind me, in English, and I don't turn to look but to me he sounds Chinese ... while SARS is not yet on the loose in Japan, and while I figure my own SARS anxiety levels are low, I have nevertheless become more conscious of the people around me, registering their coughs, their accents, where they are from ....

On the walkway leading from Ohfuna station to the nearby Shounan monorail (the "ou" here, like the "Oh" in "Ohfuna," is intended to represent a long "o" sound) there are loudspeakers in action, some group protesting something, and, walking by, I hear "Amerika" and "senso," which means "war" (and here I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know for sure if the final "o" of "senso" is supposed to be long ... I think it is, but I couldn't swear to it ... assuming that "war" ends with a long "o" then I should transliterate it as "sensou".)

This combination - "America" plus "war" - piques my interest enough for me to accept a pamphlet, which turns out to be from the Japanese Communist Party. I easily recognize the kanji (the Chinese characters) for "Japanese Communist Party" since they've figured on a number of the anti-war posters I've seen here and there in recent months (some in my own neighborhood, which evidently contains a node of Communist activism - maybe the Marine Corps should come and kick in some of our doors and shoot some of us.)

In Japan, incidentally, the Communist Party does not seem to be some tiny little splinter of nothingness out on the fringes of the political wasteland. Rather, I get the impression that it is an accepted part of the political scene, although to be honest my interest in Japanese politics is so negligible that I don't really have the vaguest idea of how many votes the Communist Party gets.

Today's pamphlet, unfortunately, demonstrates once again that signboard literacy is not enough. Struggling with the pretty straightforward Japanese in which the pamphlet is written, I manage to figure out enough to gather that the Party is denouncing the cosy military relationship between the Japanese government and the Americans.

Sometimes there are entire statements that are within my range, such as "Sensou wa iya da!" - "We can't stomach war!" or "Down with war!"

Other times I only get part of it. Written in the Japanese katakana alphabet is the word "stoppu" which must be a direct transliteration into Japanese of the English word "stop". A lot of people in Japan think it stylish to pepper their written Japanese with English words, and it's interesting to note that the Japanese Communist Party is not immune to the attractions of this kind of trendiness.

After "stoppu," however, comes a four-character kanji combination - one, two, three, four Chinese characters in a row, and I can't figure out what this combination is supposed to mean.

"Watashitachi no koe o agete ikimashou" seems clear enough - "Let's raise our voices in protest". But protest about what, exactly? Something that involves the Americans and Iraq and the war on Iraq and the United Nations and the Japanese government getting cuddly with the Bush regime, as near as I can make it.

It seems from the pamphlet that there's going to be a protest meeting tonight at some hall near Hibiya station (in Tokyo) and that on the 18th (Sunday) there's going to be a "peacewalk" starting from some hall near Kannai station (in Yokohama) and finishing at the old red brick ("aka renga") buildings (a tourist attraction in Yokohama). (The word "peacewalk" is another katakana transliteration from English.)

The pamphlet does two things.

First, as indicated above, it reminds me that it really is time to start remedying my semi-illiterate state. For me, at this stage, becoming truly literate is primarily going to be a matter of (a) increasing my kanji-recognition powers and (b) building my vocabulary (when I went to buy a comb the other day, I realized that I didn't know the Japanese for "comb").

Second, the pamphlet drives home a point about America's war on Iraq: it has really heated up the political scene in Japan.

Ever since the Second World War, Japan has been content to let the Americans do the job of defending the Japanese nation. The deal works something like this: Japan supplies the Americans with military bases and America supplies Japan with the Marine Corps.

This was fine while the Americans were just a bunch of tourists who kept themselves harmlessly amused sitting around eating 6,000 calories a day. True, their hobbies did include building nukes and fooling around with anthrax in the biowar basement, but these seemed like pardonable eccentricities.

However, that was the old America. What we have now is the new America ... and, to an extent, there's now a debate in Japan about how to handle the new America.

On the left, the Japanese Communist Party seems to be taking a firm anti-war stand, and seems (assuming that I have more or less gotten a handle on the general trend of the pamphlet that I've been trying to decrypt today) to be following the traditional "no war" line which has dominated Japanese politics ever since World War Two.

On the right, however, there seem to be a certain number of people who think that it would be better for Japan to do its own defending rather than to go on being defended by the criminally delinquent Bush regime, since there's no telling where Warlord George is going to end up taking us.

And, if Japan seriously takes on the job of defending Japan, this (or so say some) is going to mean building nukes.

A while back I read an opinion piece which contributed to this debate, and which gave a definite "yes" to the building of nukes.

I don't know if the author of the opinion piece is right-leaning, but I don't get the impression that he's left-leaning. Also, I don't know whether the author of the opinion piece thinks of the Bush regime as a bunch of criminally delinquent gangsters ....

What is clear from the opinion piece, however, is that the author thinks that Japan should have nukes. And why? Because the job of preserving regional security cannot be left to the Americans.

I read this opinion piece a while ago in the English language edition of The Asahi Shimbun and made some notes on it. If my notes can be trusted, the opinion piece was published in the Asahi on 2003 April Wednesday 16. (Alternatively, if my notes cannot be trusted, the piece must have appeared on Thursday 17.)

What I'm talking about is a "Point of View" opinion piece by Susumu Saito headlined "Keep neo-conservativism out of Northeast Asia". The author is the director of something called the Trilateral Institute, "a private economic think tank based in Tokyo".

(The Asahi skips the "the" which I have placed before "Trilateral," but in my opinion the "the" is necessary, and as a professional English teacher I'm accustomed to trusting my own judgment on these matters.) (Hugh's rule: an institutional name ending with a generic word such as "Center" or "Institute" is going to need to begin with "the".)

This opinion piece is scary stuff, because Saito is proposing a four-way nuclear balance of terror (though he doesn't use the word "terror" and doesn't suggest that this balance would be terrifying.) He figures that if China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea all have nukes then the regional balance of power will be stable, and the economy will flourish.

And what is provoking this bold excursion into the territory of the demented? Well, as the headline suggests, the provocation is the American neoconservative threat.

In a nutshell, Saito sees a local nuclear balance as preferable to having the Americans show up in the neighborhood to make war. He concludes like this:-

What Japan and both Koreas share in common is that they cannot afford to let the region be another experimental field for the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration.

I don't agree with Saito on the nukes. If everyone starts building nukes, then sooner or later someone will start using them. And, if we look at the unhappy example of India and Pakistan, it seems fair to say that the mutual possession of nuclear weapons is neither a guarantee against war nor a recipe for lessening regional tensions.

However, I do most strongly agree that about the last thing this region needs is for America to come rushing in to save us from the threat in the North Korean backyard. Even if you do have a wasp's nest in the backyard, it's not desirable to have some maniac come rushing in to hose down everything in sight with a flamethrower.

Afghanistan is a mess, Iraq is worse, and, if George is permitted to start a third war, and if he chooses to have it on the Korean Peninsular, then the third war is going to be a real bloodbath.

It's really noticeable that "Al-Qaeda blamed as huge blasts kill scores in Riyadh" makes the front page of today's Japan Times ... cholera in Basra doesn't, though the new Fizzer computer virus makes an appearance ... similarly, on the front page of the International Herald Tribune it's "Qaeda blamed as blasts hit Saudi capital" whereas (as mentioned above) the article about a suspected cholera outbreak in Basra appears on page five.

Pretty quickly, the chaos in Iraq is slipping away from the headlines.

But my own opinion is that quite a few people in Japan are going to be following the continuing events in Iraq with a degree of interest which flows from the following fact: because of the North Korean situation, this part of the world may be the next to experience the Bush brand of household renovation, which boils down to taking a bulldozer and driving it through the house.

It's plain that George Bush has been able to sell the outcome of the war on Iraq to the American people. It seems that from an American perspective the Iraq war equals "victory" and "security".

But, from where I'm sitting, the Iraq war equals a smashed-up country, a bunch of dead civilians, a landscape contaminated by depleted uranium, looted museums, incinerated archives, lawless anarchy in Baghdad and cholera in Basra - all this to overthrow a Saddam Hussein who, historically, was very much America's animal, a pit bull protected and nourished by American power.

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Section 41 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 May 15 Thursday.
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Got up early this morning, deleted my spam and then checked the news. Right now, the world news includes updates on cholera and malnutrition in Iraq - there is cholera in Basra and 300,000 children face starvation in Iraq itself.

However, this news has slipped below the headline level, and so has started to achieve invisibility.

My first port of call was Google news - news.google.com/news

This computer-assembled compilation gives a good indication of what news editors around the world have chosen to prioritize, and today the priorities include previous American security requests in Saudi Arabia, Algerian desert hostage ordeal of European tourists and the new "Matrix" movie.

Nothing about what interests me right now, which is the suspected cholera outbreak in Basra, the port in the south of Iraq.

So I punch "basra cholera" into the Google News search box and get a bunch of articles, including one from www.swissinfo.org dated May 14 - either yesterday or today, given that when it is early on May 15 in Japan it is still the 14th in much of the rest of the world.

The article starts:-

"Tests have confirmed an outbreak of cholera in Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, and looted laboratories must be rebuilt fast to track and contain the disease, the World Health Organisation has said." (Article by Jeremy Page.)

Nosing around for Iraq news I also find an article from asia.reuters.com, also dated May 14, headlined "U.N.: Iraqi Children Face Death from Malnutrition".

This article (by Robert Evans) starts like this:-

GENEVA (Reuters) - More than 300,000 Iraqi children face death from acute malnutrition, twice as many as before U.S. and British forces invaded the country in March, the United Nations UNICEF agency warned on Wednesday.

The news exists, but there's nothing to prompt the average browser to hunt for it. If I hadn't chanced upon an article about cholera in Basra in yesterday's IHT then I wouldn't have bunched "basra cholera" into the Google News search engine this morning, and if I hadn't started actively hunting for news on Iraq this morning then I would not have hit upon the malnutrition article.

So George Bush, aided by Al-Qaeda and The Matrix Reloaded, can be said to be winning the propaganda war on Iraq, with the bad news from Iraq swiftly slipping into the "no news" category.

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