On Random: Picture of the Day
World News
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World News
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Japan and the Ancient Art of Shrugging
22 August 2010 06:03:27
Source:
The New York Times
Norihiro Kato comments on Japan's position amongst the world's leading economies
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GROSS domestic product figures for the second quarter show that China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy. I have been traveling while on leave from the university in Tokyo where I teach, and was in Paris when the news broke last week. My first reaction, frankly, was one of relief. In English, perhaps, one might say it was “a load off my shoulders.”
In Japanese, people use the phrase “right shoulder up” to describe a graph that keeps going up, with each year’s figures rosier than the last. Of course, if that climbing line is someone’s right shoulder, it means the left is languishing somewhere out of sight. We’re seeing only half the person.
Reading the papers that morning at breakfast, I saw a graph indicating the point in the 1990s when Japan’s G.D.P. had peaked, after which the line started jagging down and up, over the long run comparatively leveling out. The relief I felt had something to do with the person I saw there, no longer so awkwardly bent. Finally we know where Japan stands — on level ground.
It’s not difficult to find similar graphs. One shows Japan’s natural population growth. Every year from 1910 to 1977, the population increased by more than 1 percent. Then the growth began to slow. In 2005, for the first time, the population shrank. Right shoulder down.
Another graph on rice production from 1878 to 1980 shows the point in the 1960s when Japan’s rice production began to decline. Decades before China overtook Japan, the country had started downsizing, preparing for a smooth landing.
Three years ago, I saw a television program about a new breed of youngster: the nonconsumer. Japanese in their late teens and early 20s, it said, did not have cars. They didn’t drink alcohol. They didn’t spend Christmas Eve with their boyfriends or girlfriends at fancy hotels downtown the way earlier generations did. I have taught many students who fit this mold. They work hard at part-time jobs, spend hours at McDonald’s sipping cheap coffee, eat fast food lunches at Yoshinoya. They save their money for the future.
These are the Japanese who came of age after the bubble, never having known Japan as a flourishing economy. They are accustomed to being frugal. Today’s youths, living in a society older than any in the world, are the first since the late 19th century to feel so uneasy about the future.
I saw young Japanese in Paris, of course, vacationing or studying, but statistics show that they don’t travel the way we used to. Perhaps it’s a reaction against their globalizing elders who are still zealously pushing English-language education and overseas employment. Young people have grown less interested in studying foreign languages. They seem not to feel the urge to grow outward. Look, they say, Japan is a small country. And we’re O.K. with small.
It is, perhaps, a sort of maturity.
The rest of the world’s population is still exploding, and we are coming to see the limits of our resources. The age of “right shoulder up” is over. Japan doesn’t need to be No. 2 in the world, or No. 5 or 15. It’s time to look to more important things, to think more about the environment and about people less lucky than ourselves. To learn about organic farming. Or not. Maybe you’re busy enough just living your life. That, the new maturity says, is still cooler than right shoulder up.
Of course, some people don’t see things this way. The old guard — those politicians who led the charge in the heady 1970s and ’80s and fought back (however pointlessly) against the economic stagnation of the ’90s — still want to compete. Those men, best represented in my view by Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, speak as if they are under siege. They hate being beaten by China. For them, it seems, maturity only means striving to be No. 1. They won’t change. They are too settled in an earlier stage of development, in a dream of limitless growth. But society matures around them.
The new maturity may be the province of the young Japanese, but in a sense, it is a return to something much older than Mr. Ishihara and his cohort. Starting in the 19th century, with the reign of the Meiji Emperor, Japan expanded, territorially and economically. But before that, the country went through a 250-year period of comparative isolation and very limited economic growth. The experience of rapid growth was a new phenomenon. Japan remembers what it is like to be old, to be quiet, to turn inward.
Freshly overtaken by China, Japan now seems to stand at the vanguard of a new downsizing movement, leading the way for countries bound sooner or later to follow in its wake. In a world whose limits are increasingly apparent, Japan and its youths, old beyond their years, may well reveal what it is like to outgrow growth.
Norihiro Kato is a professor of Japanese literature at Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.
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The Politics Of Floods
20 August 2010 04:57:39
Source:
The New Yorker
Steve Coll debates the reason we respond differently to environmental disasters caused by floods than we do to disasters from other causes
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Daniyal Mueenuddin had a terrific piece in this morning’s Times about how the flooding in southern Punjab and northern Sind is likely to play out in the lives of the marginalized farmers who predominately live there. It made me think about the politics of floods. They’re different from the politics of earthquakes or hurricanes or cyclones, or so I would hypothesize if I could start life over as a doctoral candidate in political science. I trolled around on the Web this morning looking for academic papers on the subject. I found a few interesting abstracts, including a provocative one about how political responses to natural disasters may promote the militarization of nature, but nothing that addressed what I had in mind.
When you travel in an earthquake zone there is a sense of violence all around, a visible shattering. Survivors are calling out and ambulances are rushing around and people are digging in rocks—there is a lot of activity. With the activity comes possibility and hope—survivor miracles, even. The silence and slow pace of a flood is different. Somehow, being inundated seems more hopeless. People slip underwater out of sight. They climb into a tree and sit for days, contemplating the loss of all their property. The politics of a flood must be distinct in some analogous way.
A few days after an earthquake, you feel immediately the presence of the state—or its absence. People have reasonable expectations that their government or military or social or religious charities will scramble into action and make themselves felt after an earthquake. Where are the bulldozers? Where are the portable hospitals? Open those roads! If a government doesn’t perform, people can get agitated pretty quickly. Governments rise and fall over earthquakes. In a flood zone people and flooded villages are generally hard to reach, except slowly or by boat. You can lift people out by helicopter, and that might produce a few survivor miracles, but the provision of aid, especially to address the loss of property, is not easy to organize.
The newspaper coverage of the Pakistani floods reflects this sense of distance and opaqueness; because of the access problems (and maybe because it is vacation season), there have been many fewer eyewitness reports from the front lines than at a comparable point in an earthquake crisis of similar magnitude and geopolitical importance.
When I travelled in Kashmir after the 2005 earthquake, one of the main impressions available was that the Islamist charities had outperformed President Musharraf’s military government in responding to the crisis. The Army had itself been devastated by the quake, and was slow to take care of civilians after tending to its own. Some Pakistanis trace the gradual decline and fall of Musharraf to the army’s performance then. The United States did well, for its part, in 2005. The only time Pakistani public opinion has registered approval of the U.S. above twenty-five per cent was in early 2006, after the U.S. military used helicopters and other airlift to visibly dispense supplies that Musharraf had struggled to deliver. The relief campaign had only a temporary halo effect, however: When the helicopters returned to Afghanistan, American approval ratings fell back into the single digits.
Something similar is certainly happening now in Pakistan, after the floods. President Asif Zardari, whose abysmal approval ratings would give President Obama some comfort, turned in a characteristically tone-deaf performance during the first week of crisis, choosing not to interrupt his visits to Paris and London to return home. His performance would damage his political future except that he doesn’t seem to have one. There has been some reporting that Islamist charities have again substituted themselves for the Pakistani state in providing relief in Southern Punjab. If true on a substantial scale, that would be an unhappy aspect of the crisis, since the most dangerous aspect of the Taliban insurgency within Pakistan itself these days is its spread into the mainland province of Punjab. The Obama Administration, alert to the lessons of 2005, is trying to outperform expectations and get itself right with Pakistani public opinion by providing visible relief to flood victims.
All that makes for a good Washington narrative. What was welcome about Mueenuddin’s essay was the way it described what the flood means in Punjab and Sind. Power, life, and death in rural Pakistan turn on land, particularly the neo-feudal and corrupt practices that govern its ownership and control. The Pakistanis who are being washed away in the worst ways now—the ones least likely to own cattle or shops or have a hectare of their own—lived on the margins of a terrible rural political economy in the best of times. Mueenuddin fears they will become radicalized by their latest suffering. I wonder if the politics of floods might leave them, instead, stifled and muted, and as they have so long been, slipping under.
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Our Mosque Madness
18 August 2010 12:26:09
Source:
The New York Times
Maureen Dowd adds her voice to the continuing controversy over the location of a prayer-room for Muslims close to Ground Zero.
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Maybe, for Barack Obama, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.
When the president skittered back from his grandiose declaration at an iftar celebration at the White House Friday that Muslims enjoy freedom of religion in America and have the right to build a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan, he offered a Clintonesque parsing.
“I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” he said the morning after he commented on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”
Let me be perfectly clear, Mr. Perfectly Unclear President: You cannot take such a stand on a matter of first principle and then take it back the next morning when, lo and behold, Harry Reid goes craven and the Republicans attack. What is so frightening about Fox News?
Some critics have said the ultimate victory for Osama and the 9/11 hijackers would be to allow a mosque to be built near ground zero.
Actually, the ultimate victory for Osama and the 9/11 hijackers is the moral timidity that would ban a mosque from that neighborhood.
Our enemies struck at our heart, but did they also warp our identity?
The war against the terrorists is not a war against Islam. In fact, you can’t have an effective war against the terrorists if it is a war on Islam.
George W. Bush understood this. And it is odd to see Barack Obama less clear about this matter than his predecessor. It’s time for W. to weigh in.
This — along with immigration reform and AIDS in Africa — was one of his points of light. As the man who twice went to war in the Muslim world, he has something of an obligation to add his anti-Islamophobia to this mosque madness. W. needs to get his bullhorn back out.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are both hyper-articulate former law professors. But Clinton never presented himself as a moral guide to the country. So when he weaseled around, or triangulated on some issues, it was part of his ultra-fallible persona — and consistent with his identity as a New Democrat looking for a Third Way.
But Obama presents himself as a paragon of high principle. So when he flops around on things like “don’t ask, don’t tell” or shrinks back from one of his deepest beliefs about the freedom of religion anywhere and everywhere in America, it’s not pretty. Even worse, this is the man who staked his historical reputation on a new and friendlier engagement with the Muslim world. The man who extended his hand to Tehran has withdrawn his hand from Park Place.
Paranoid about looking weak, Obama allowed himself to be weakened by perfectly predictable Republican hysteria. Which brings us to Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich fancies himself an intellectual, a historian, a deep thinker — the opposite number, you might say, of Sarah Palin.
Yet here is Gingrich attempting to out-Palin Palin on Fox News: “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.” There is no more demagogic analogy than that.
Have any of the screaming critics noticed that there already are two mosques in the same neighborhood — one four blocks away and one 12 blocks away.
Should they be dismantled? And what about the louche liquor stores and strip clubs in the periphery of the sacred ground?
By now you have to be willfully blind not to know that the imam in charge of the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is the moderate Muslim we have allegedly been yearning for.
So look where we are. The progressive Democrat in the White House, the first president of the United States with Muslim roots, has been morally trumped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, two moderate Republicans who have spoken bravely and lucidly about not demonizing and defaming an entire religion in the name of fighting its radicals.
Criticizing his fellow Republicans, Governor Christie said that while he understood the pain and sorrow of family members who lost loved ones on 9/11, “we cannot paint all of Islam with that brush.”
He charged the president with trying to turn the issue into a political football. But that is not quite right. It already was a political football and the president fumbled it.
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Japan shows us the limits of growth
17 August 2010 07:10:12
Source:
The Independent
Peter Popham looks at the history of the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s and asks what happened to it
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Economists overlook one reason Japan stopped growing: with the Cold War coming to an end, they saw that, for the first time since the 1850s, there was nothing to fear any more
It's finally happened: China's economy has overtaken Japan's. Less than 20 years after Deng Xiaoping told his people that "to get rich is glorious", and three decades after the Chinese Communist Party began its first timid opening to the outside world, the Central Kingdom has surpassed its rival across the Sea of Japan. China is now officially the world's number two and, unless something inconceivable happens, it will hold that place until it becomes number one, maybe as soon as 2030.
So today marks the beginning of a new era, but it's hardly a surprise. Just as China's economy has been galloping ahead for three decades now, Japan's has been crawling ever since I left the place for good in 1988. I don't mean to imply any connection there: as somebody once remarked, the only people who failed to make money in Tokyo during the 1980s were the mentally retarded and the foreigners, and I was one of the latter.
But I remember when the world looked so different, seen from Tokyo. Global domination was at hand. There was Sony with its Walkman and its Betamax VCRs, Honda launching its revolutionary City car with the help of Madness. Robots were promising to take over bed-making and washing-up, workers would disappear from factories because even a Japanese worker could not compete with a robot. Toyota and its rivals were producing cars that never broke down, and the rest of the world's car makers were sprawling in the dust. Brother launched its first laptop word processor with a memory of perhaps 300 words – and across the Pacific the Americans were quaking in their boots at the Yellow Peril. Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, by Ezra F Vogel, was a best-seller.
The most fashionable Western architects streamed through Narita airport to design restaurants and shops to adorn the most expensive land in the world. People worked out that a one-room flat in Shinjuku was worth more than the state of Virginia, or some such preposterous calculation. But with hindsight, those architects were a symptom of the problem: Japan's real estate was madly overvalued, and when the bubble burst the economy went down the tubes. Years of stagnation followed.
And no bad thing, one might say.
Doomsday-watchers like to scare us by saying: imagine what the world would be like – how shattered the environment would be – if the Chinese and the Indians were all as rich as us. Well, we don't need our imaginations. Just look at Japan.
As any first-time visitor to Tokyo quickly appreciates, the most striking way Japan differs from the West is that it is so much more crowded. This is nothing uniquely Japanese: nearly all of Asia is like this, from Korea to the Khyber Pass. Rice is a far more intensive crop than wheat. You can fill far more stomachs with it, and you always could.
In the mid-19th century, Japan worked out that the only way to avoid going the way of India and China and disappearing down the imperialists' maw was to industrialise in a hurry. Modernisation was thus motivated by fear: the only hope of remaining independent was to beat us at our own game. Thanks to national cohesion, a tradition of subservience to power and a generation of far-seeing reformers, within half a century of first seeing America's steam-powered "kurofune" ("black ships") puffing over the horizon, Japan was on the brink of defeating Russia in war, using modern, home-produced weapons.
And Japan's next great burst of energy was also powered by fear. I once said to Tokyo's most successful developer: "You live in a traditional wooden house, you eat on the floor, you sleep on tatami mats: why, if this is the way you prefer to live, do you cover your city in concrete?" He pointed out that nearly all Japan's cities were destroyed by aerial bombing in the Second World War: built of wood, they burned like bonfires. "We must make sure that never happens again," he said.
Forty years of furious post-war growth brought Japan close to economic parity with its wartime enemy – but they wreaked havoc of a new sort on the Japanese environment; havoc of a sort we are becoming horribly familiar with in cities across Asia today. Japan's megalopolises go on for ever. The population density means that the countryside has always been crowded, and with industrialisation those villages and paddy fields morphed overnight into city blocks with factories and apartment buildings and fast-food outlets. You could travel by Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka and wait in vain for a proper patch of countryside.
There are several reasons why Japan stopped growing after the crash. An ageing population, a shrinking birth rate and a national disinclination to admit millions of immigrants are among the obvious ones. But one reason economists tend to overlook is the following: with the Cold War coming to an end, Japan saw that, for the first time since the 1850s, there really was nothing to fear any more.
The Japanese have never been very impressed by consumption for its own sake. They were grateful to be able to haul themselves out of their wartime misery after 1945, but the pursuit of happiness, American style, has never made much sense to them. Their homes remain as cramped and humble as ever: look at the super-realistic films of the new star of Japanese cinema, Hirokazu Koreeda, and the homes of his older characters are not significantly different from those in Yasujiro Ozu's films, made 50 years earlier. The Japanese know that the more their cities grow, the longer will be their train rides to work, the worse the smog will get, the greater the problems with water quality, acid rain, rubbish disposal: the law of diminishing returns which confronts all of Asia's crowded, fast-modernising societies has been staring them in the face for decades. And because Japan continues to be a remarkably egalitarian society, everyone shares the misery.
Let us suppose, then, that Japan's 20 years of stagnation is not in fact the dismal failure the business writers describe, but a semi-deliberate national choice – a recognition of the limits of growth. And let us hope that, just as industrialising Japan was an inspiration to the rest of Asia 100 years ago, deindustrialising Japan might be the same today. Because it's one of the few hopes we have.
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My country needs help, not disapproval
15 August 2010 05:37:52
Source:
The Independent
Anglophile writer Ayesha Siddiqa says Britain could pay a heavy price for showing little understanding of Pakistan's history and current plight
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Why is the world not responding to Pakistan's current turmoil caused by the floods? Millions have been rendered homeless and hit by food scarcity. There is also now the fear of epidemics in flood-affected areas. Yet, the world does not seem too eager to come to Pakistan's rescue. Is it, as Pakistan's ambassador to the UN, Hussain Haroon said, because of the disenchantment caused by David Cameron when he criticised Pakistan as a source of terrorism? Or could the international community, particularly the European Union, not care less about a state which seems incapable of looking after itself?
Many people are unhappy with the way in which Pakistan has chosen to fight the war on terror or manage its own internal affairs. The present government's inefficiency and, as some consider it, insensitivity in solving people's problems does not inspire many around the world. However, the inefficiency is just one part of the story. For the natural calamity is far more than it could have prepared for.
These are the worst floods in 80 years in the territory now known as Pakistan. The most affected areas are in the north, where the state's military was already trying to fight the Taliban. The available military resources are insufficient to help those perishing in floodwater or dying of hunger and disease. After the 2005 earthquake in the Northern Areas and Kashmir, the local community turned out in force to help the victims. This time, the help is limited because of the economic conditions overall.
Food inflation and availability have already hit the country severely. The fear is that the religious right will use this opportunity to make inroads into common people. What matters for a hungry family is not ideology but who provides their food and clothing. But the militants' attempts to win hearts and minds could, alarmingly, bring about the failure or defeat of liberal Pakistan. This is already under siege: the suicide bombing of a popular Sufi shrine in Lahore or the destruction of another shrine in Peshawar are tantamount to attacks on a Pakistan that can think in multipolar terms and is liberal in its perception of others.
David Cameron might have been partly right in what he said the other week, but his choice of venue for delivering his message and the manner in which he did were ill-judged. He could, instead, have put pressure on Islamabad during one of the private meetings, and insisted upon the military breaking its links with militant outfits such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and others. But the Prime Minister seems to have put a greater burden on the ordinary people than on the country's defence establishment, and this may further hamper the supply of aid to the flood-affected Pakistan. The religious right will rally public opinion against Britain and try to paint everything coming from the UK as undesirable – including relief supplies.
Hakimullah Mehsud's Taliban and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have already asked the government to refuse assistance from the US and have offered the government $17m. Although the Taliban may not be able to deliver that kind of money, they intend to use the natural calamity to muster greater support for themselves among the people.
Militant groups are also filling the gap left by the state in numerous areas such as the tribal belt and northern areas affected by floods. And their message becomes more effective as they salvage the lives of the millions made homeless. The short supply of food, medical aid, housing and other facilities have made people desperate. Meanwhile, the state apparatus is inefficient, lacks resources and in many places does not even have the infrastructure to come to the aid of ordinary people.
Pakistan's liberal civil society and the world at large cannot afford to lose a battle that is not solely about saving a state but also about rescuing the soul of liberal Pakistan, as envisioned by the country's founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a man of western tastes and lifestyle. Jinnah was as much an anglophile as many other Pakistanis who want a liberal Pakistan to survive. And this is not just about lifestyle but about a value system.
Like many other Pakistanis, I would like to convince my fellow citizens of the need to fight militant forces which are creating problems for us and for other countries, including the UK. There are millions of ordinary Pakistanis among the 180 million population who do not subscribe to what happened in 9/11 or 7/7. But the liberal voice is being drowned out by those who argue that the US and Britain are ideologically opposed to Pakistan and whose aim is to embarrass us.
Britain's new security policy, especially its border control measures, have added to the estrangement, without necessarily enhancing the security of Pakistanis or Britons. The treatment given to most Pakistanis at the High Commission in Islamabad or at border control in the UK is certainly worse than that meted out to a US diplomatic mission or at an American port of entry. There are many Pakistanis now who are in two minds about visiting the UK.
I am from the generation that grew up reading Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. The idea of rethinking plans to visit Britain is like cutting me off of my own intellectual legacy. Just imagine the perception of the country among those who are not even anglophiles.
Border controls might be as necessary as the Cameron statement, but eventually it is not going to achieve much in terms of turning Pakistan around or saving its liberal soul. Rather, it is necessary to communicate to the ordinary Pakistani that the world cares for their country and wants it saved not only from floods but from militancy.
The US efforts at pledging greater resources and deploying more helicopters for relief activities in Pakistan are truly commendable. If 10 Downing Street thinks that there is a serious problem of militancy in Pakistan, which there is, it needs to think of other ways to salvage the situation. Perhaps providing a helping hand and nudging Pakistan's government to respond to its people's needs is a better idea.
Ayesha Siddiqa is the author of 'Military Inc: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy'
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