.... the story more or less starts writing itself, pretty well effortlessly. But the problem is that I already have enough projects on hand to fill something like ten to twenty years, these being the rewriting of the Oceans of Light trilogy, the writing of the Oolong Morblock series, the construction of something functional from the shambling mess of the Ida Brahma trilogy ... and so on.

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Section 8 Entry 0004. Date: 2002 December 30 Monday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

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.....{ Gangs of New York ...... { Predictions for 2003 ...... { diary ...... { contents ...... { topics .....

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Most companies in Japan closed up for the New Year's break on Friday the 27th of December and will not reopen again until Monday the 6th of January. Christmas was no big deal, just a blip on the calendar, but now the year's major festival is on hand, and the whole of Japan is slowly grinding to a halt as New Year's Day draws closer and closer.

Yesterday was a day for doing big shopping, to make sure that supplies are on hand. On New Year's Day itself, pretty much everything will be shut down. Western teachers who are new to Japan are sometimes ambushed by this unexpected event, and wander the deserted streets of the Land of Eternal Shopping in dismayed amazement, wondering what everyone died of.

Yesterday's big shopping included a cake of mochi, a special kind of rice cake. Instead of being in separate grains, the rice has been reduced to a kind of solidified glue. This is cooked up to make a kind of chewy soup. The eating of mochi is a standard part of the ritualistic New Year, and as I will be enjoying traditional Japanese hospitality in Gunma Prefecture on New Year's day itself, there is no doubt that I will get to partake in this ritual.

The cake of mochi looks like a rudimentary snowman, an oval head balanced on an oval body, with a very fancy bow adorning the place where the body joins the head. Atop the head is a mandarin orange. Why? Because. That's the tradition. Right now, the cake of mochi is parked in the foyer of this house, sitting on a paper tray which sports a picture of a ship which, unless I am mistaken, is crewed by the Seven Lucky Gods.


[o-sechi ryori ... technically, "ryori" has long "o" to make "o-sechi ryouri" or, if your browser can display macrons, "o-sechi ryōri ... the dictionary defines this as "dishes for the New Year"]

Apart from mochi, a large number of other special foods are eaten at New Year in Japan, this group of foods going by the name of osechi ryori. Extremely weird things which are impossible to identify. The only one I can remember from previous New Years is a kind of dyed chestnut which is reasonably palatable.

Unfortunately my tastes in food are extremely conservative, and I find it difficult to adapt to new food items. After five years in Japan, I am at home eating sushi, sashimi, tempura, ramen (that is, noodles), and gyoza (fried dumplings). I can happily eat a bowl of steamed rice and eat it with chopsticks, too.

But this is the everyday stuff, stuff that I have had plenty of time to get acclimatized to. If something is rarely served, like osechi ryori, then I find it really hard to handle. Fortunately, the eating of these ritual dishes is not compulsory.

With the company I work for closed until Monday the 6th of January, I've been trying to get some serious writing done, but it's been difficult. With the pressures of the year abruptly released, I feel as if the strings of purpose have suddenly been cut, and find myself singularly unmotivated. Still, I've managed to push ahead with work on my Chalakanesia novel West of Heaven.

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.....{ New Year in Japan ...... { Predictions for 2003 ...... { diary ...... { contents ...... { topics .....

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Yesterday, before doing the big shopping, I saw the movie Gangs of New York. This is a really long film. The version playing in Japan runs for almost three solid hours. It held my interest for the duration, although I have to say that I'm not sure that the movie succeeds as a movie.

The movie, which is extremely violent, focuses on a young Roman Catholic man who is ethnically Irish and who goes by the name of Amsterdam. Seeking to revenge his father's death, he sets out to kill a gang leader named Bill the Butcher, an anti-immigrant type who despises the Irish as a whole and who sees Roman Catholics as ultimately being loyal to Rome rather than to America.

The problem with the movie is that the conflict between Amsterdam and Bill takes place in the context of a large-scale political problem. The Irish immigrants are becoming increasingly discontented with their position at the bottom of the heap in New York, particularly because large numbers of them are being conscripted to go and fight in President Lincoln's war.

Toward the end of the movie, there is a major riot, and the consequences of this riot overwhelm the small-scale conflict between Amsterdam and Bill. This leads to a rather unsatisfying ending, in that the small-scale Amsterdam/Bill conflict which has dominated the movie ends up seeming more or less irrelevant, overwhelmed by the force of large-scale political movements.

Handling politics in art is really difficult. Movies, novels, stories and so forth necessarily have to focus on individual fates. But individuals are generally not pivotal. So the actions and choices of individuals are irrelevant to the political dynamic, unless the individuals are key players like Abraham Lincoln.

Politically, I thought the movie was an interesting combination of honesty and ... well, maybe it's wrong to call it dishonesty. Let's use the word "delicacy" instead.

The brutally honest part was the treatment of the intense historical antagonism between Roman Catholics, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, those American Christians who viewed Roman Catholics as "papists," a historical term of abuse which gets used in the movie.

This antagonism seems to have been more or less laid to rest, at least in the United States, by 1960, the year in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected as president ... unless I'm much mistaken, JFK was the first Catholic president of the United States.

Consequently, the clash with the Catholics is a piece of psychologically remote history, a dead issue, at least for Hollywood and Hollywood's main audience ... though it is interesting to speculate on how this movie is being received in Northern Ireland.

The delicacy? Well, that comes into play in the handling of a different conflict. The movie documents the manner in which the mob, when it gets out of hand, lynches a number of what are referred to (in the parlance of the 1800s) as "colored" people.

It seems that historically there was a considerable degree of antagonism between the Irish immigrants and the African American segment of New York, and in fact the movie touches on this antagonism at a number of points. However, the hero Amsterdam is portrayed as being (as far as we can see) free from this prejudice, and in fact one of Amsterdam's supporters is a young African American man.

This is the point at which I feel a certain degree of delicacy has been exercised. We're being shown a portrait of the past, but it's been selectively airbrushed. The facts of prejudice are acknowledged, but our hero -- the surrogate "we" who acts in the world in which we are viewing -- has to embody our own contemporary sensitivities in order to be tolerable. The Amsterdam of the movie is not the statistically average New Yorker of Irish descent in the 1800s but, rather, a Twenty First Century hero doing his bit to fight for those downtrodden Irish.

In this extremely long movie there is one interesting omission, and the omission is that Amsterdam nowhere articulates how he feels about the American mainstream.

Bill the Butcher is very articulate about how he feels about this unpalatable ethnic and religious minority, and gets to say exactly what he thinks on more than one occasion. But how about Amsterdam? What does he feel with respect to the American mainstream?

In many ways, the movie-makers seem to have gone to a lot of effort to achieve historical authenticity. In particular, the script is not written in standard modern American English but in the English of Lincoln's day, or in a brand of English which (to my untutored ear) does a pretty good job of masquerading as the English of the past.

Yet, in terms of viewpoint, we're seeing this world through the eyes of a Twenty First Century hero who seems to more or less accept himself, unthinkingly, as a kind of norm. The assumption of the movie-makers seems to be that Bill the Butcher is an aberration who has to explain himself, whereas there's no need for Amsterdam to do any explaining, or to articulate his stance toward the mainstream.

In other words, our viewpoint on the day and age of President Lincoln is, implicitly, that of the mainstream, that of the majority, that of the norm. Amsterdam, the surrogate "we" who acts in the world in which we are viewing, is more a tourist from the Twenty First Century than a member of an embattled minority.

In saying this, I have a small measure of insight into the situation of minorities. I have never been a member of an embattled minority, and in fact my position in life has always been rather privileged, in that I have never ever confronted any obstacle to personal progress that was predicated on anything other than my own abilities, training and experience. However, I have had the experience of belonging to a minority group, albeit in a very minor form.

Although I was born in England, I grew up in New Zealand, and while I was growing up I was identifiably a member of the British-born minority, which naturally raised in my mind the question "Am I a New Zealander or am I British?"

I decided that I was British, and cleaved to that position until I went to live and work in London, England, when I was in my early twenties. At that point I discovered that England was an alien country to me, that the English mindset was foreign, and that I was, after all, culturally a New Zealander.

That's easily summed up in a mere two paragraphs, but the process described spanned twenty years.

And now I'm living in Japan and I'm in the process of assessing the nation which has physically absorbed me. Like all countries, Japan is a mixed bag, some parts good and others less than desirable. But whether I judge some part of Japan as being good (to take a trivial example, sashimi) or less than desirable (to give another trivial example, osechi ryori), I'm always conscious of Japan as a set of norms which are not my norms, but with which I must negotiate terms of engagement.

And it's this sense of grappling with the foreign, of taking a position with respect to the foreign, which is entirely missing from the perspective of the hero Amsterdam in Gangs of New York.

The part which resonated with me, emotionally, is the part at the end where there is a scene of New York burning in the background (in the aftermath of the riots), and the voiceover talks about how the old familiar world has been swept away entirely.

Well ... leaving the subject of the movie and turning to face the looming reality of the year 2003, it's time to once again face the fact that the old, familiar world which we used to enjoy back in the year 2000 or thereabouts has most definitely been swept away, and we are entered into a new world of, it seems, increasing disorder and confrontational brutality.

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.....{2002 December 30 Monday. New Year in Japan ..... { Gangs of New York ..... { diary ...... { contents ...... { topics .....

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My own predictions for the year 2003 are as follows:-

(i) George Bush will invade Iraq.

I rate the probability of this happening as ninety-five percent, and I agree with those who think that military action will start on or shortly after January 29. George will undoubtedly win, though things will not go as easily as they did in Kuwait, and the interesting question then will be to see who ends up in possession of the oil.

(Having said that, I'm not cynical enough to believe that George Bush is going to make war to get his hands on Iraq's oil. His true reasons are beyond my comprehension. After thinking about it for months, I'm left feeling puzzled as to why this president has to take the truly extraordinary step of taking an entirely unnecessary war. It seems reasonable to believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, but the history of recent years seems to be that American military power is sufficient to deter Saddam Hussein from using those weapons. Given that this is so, why war?)

(ii) The Japanese economy will not collapse in 2003.

I have to say I wavered over this one. I honestly expected the Japanese economy to collapse in 2002, and in 2001, and in the year 2000 before that. But it didn't. As far as I can make out, the Japanese banks are tottering on the edge of bankruptcy, a bunch of life insurance companies are in the same position, most Japanese companies are struggling to stay afloat, and the Japanese government has piled up mind-boggling amounts of debt. On top of that, more and more Japanese manufacturing jobs are being exported to China, and nobody in the political leadership seems to have the slightest clue as to what to do about the whole mess.

Even so. Somehow this soggy paper boat stays afloat. Maybe because the Seven Lucky Gods are on board. Who knows? That, actually, seems as good an explanation as any.

(iii) America will not launch a preemptive attack on North Korea.

Having thought about the continuing problem of North Korea, I have no idea what should be done about this, and I get the impression that nobody else in the world really has the answer either.

It has occurred to me that maybe George Bush will precipitate war on the Korean peninsular by bombing North Korean nuclear processing facilities, but I'm assigning a fairly low probability to this, something on the order of five per cent.

(iv) And this brings me to point four ... which is? I draw a blank at this point. Will new security flaws be discovered in Microsoft software? Will Mount Fuji erupt? Will Tokyo be hit by a major earthquake? Will claims of the successful cloning of a human being be proved to be true? None of these questions really grip my imagination.

So that, I guess, sums up my 2002: a year in which my imagination was captured by the spectacle of war and economic disaster.

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.....{ Gangs of New York ...... { Predictions for 2003 ...... { diary ...... { contents ...... { topics .....

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Section 8 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 January 01 Wednesday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

Today I saw a Japanese ventriloquist on TV. His act had an interesting twist. A couple of twists, in fact. Sometimes he would speak but no sound would come out, as if he was a machine that was broken. When he spoke, his mouth movements were exaggerated, and sometimes the sounds that issued from him were not in synch with the mouth movements. The mouth would start moving but no sound would come out of it, and then the sound would kick in, a second or so late. And then the mouth would stop moving but the monolog would continue for another second or so.

The overall effect was to blur the human nature of the ventriloquist, making him more like one of his puppets, with the effect that the puppets themselves started to seem a little more lifelike than they otherwise would have.

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Section 8 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 January 03 Friday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

The kerosene heater beeped at me, telling me it needed to be filled. To many foreigners in Japan, the kerosene heater is a dismaying artefact of anachronistic danger. However, once you are used to the system, the technology seems reasonable enough.

Apparently in the last great Tokyo earthquake, back in the early years of the Twentieth Century, a great many fires were started by kerosene heaters. The modern ones, however, will switch themselves off if you bump against them -- they're designed to be self-quenching in the event of an earthquake.

We're certainly in need of the heater today. It's been snowing on and off all day.

Today we visited the local Shinto shrine to pray to the gods and to get an omikuji - that is to say, a fortune - for the coming year. Mine was for very good luck. Well, we'll see. Ready or not, 2003, here we come.

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Section 8 Entry 0007. Date: 2003 January 04 Saturday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

I've now been informed that most Japanese landladies and landlords ban kerosene heaters from apartments, the reason being that these devices are in fact potentially dangerous. On reflection, it's easy to imagine how someone could get themselves in trouble by using one of these devices, particularly if under the influence of alcohol.

One important point about kerosene heaters, easy to forget if you are intoxicated, is that the air in the room needs to be changed now and then. The reason is that these gadgets may produce carbon monoxide, a gas which steals oxygen, and which consequently is potentially lethal.

These days, I live in a house which is heated by kerosene. However, the kerosene heater is never allowed to do its stuff without supervision. And, when it's time to go to sleep, the kerosene heater goes off. It has a timer so it can be set to switch itself on half an hour before it's time to get up.

I'm about to eat zouni (the "u" here indicates a lengthened "o" sound) which is a soup made by boiling up vegetables and mochi. "Mochi," as elsewhere explained, is a kind of edible paste made from rice. It is extremely glutinous, sticky stuff, and there is a scene in the famous Japanese novel "I am a Cat" in which the viewpoint character suffers hideously after getting its jaws glued together by a lump of mochi which it has incautiously tried to eat.

Yesterday's TV brought the hard-to-believe news that, over the New Year period, seven people choked to death in various parts of Japan while trying to eat mochi.

.... I have now successfully eaten my zouni.

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Infodump: Natsume Soseki, 1867-1916, was the author of a number of novels ....

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