(snip)

The release of radioactivity from Fukushima — both as atmospheric fallout and direct discharges to the ocean — represents the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history.

(snip)

Oct. 15: Hot spots in Tokyo

Independent groups found 20 radioactive hot spots inside Tokyo, 150 miles from the disaster zone, that were contaminated with cesium as heavily as parts of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, in Ukraine, site of a similar radiation disaster in 1986. Kiyoshi Toda, a radiation expert and medical doctor at Nagasaki University told the New York Times, Radioactive substances are entering people’s bodies from the air, from the food. It’s everywhere.

(snip)

Dec. 19: Up to 14,000 U.S. deaths linked to fallout

The peer reviewed International Journal of Health Services reported that as many as 14,000 excess deaths in the United States appear linked to radioactive fallout from Fukushima. The rise in reported deaths after March 17 was largest among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks. The study by Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly reports, was the first on Fukushima health hazards to be published in a scientific journal.

Labels: Environment, Japan, Nuclear Energy

An excerpt from a thoughtful article by Kojin Karatani:

In the ruins of postwar Japan, people reflected upon the path the country had taken in modern times. Standing against the Western powers, modern Japan strived to achieve the status of a great military power. The shattering of this dream in the nation's defeat led to another goal, to become a great economic power. The ultimate collapse of this ambition has been brought into sharp relief by the recent earthquake. Even without the earthquake, it was fated for destruction. In truth, it is not the Japanese economy alone that is failing. In the early 1970s, global capitalism entered a period of serious recession, and since then it has been unable to overcome the decline in the general rate of profit. Capital has sought a way out of this decline through global financial investment and by extending industrial investment into what had formerly been "third world" regions. The collapse of the former strategy has been exposed by the so-called Lehman shock. Meanwhile, the accelerated development of countries such as China, India, and Brazil, continues. Yet such accelerated growth cannot last long. It is inevitable that wages will rise and a limit on consumption be reached.

For this reason, global capitalism will no doubt become unsustainable in 20 or 30 years. The end of capitalism, however, is not the end of human life. Even without capitalist economic development or competition, people are able to live. Or rather, it is only then that people will, for the first time, truly be able to live. Of course, the capitalist economy will not simply come to an end. Resisting such an outcome, the great powers will no doubt continue to fight over natural resources and markets. Yet I believe that the Japanese should never again choose such a path. Without the recent earthquake, Japan would no doubt have continued its hollow struggle for great power status, but such a dream is now unthinkable and should be abandoned. It is not Japan's demise that the earthquake has produced, but rather the possibility of its rebirth. It may be that only amid the ruins can people gain the courage to stride down a new path.

It is well worth reading Karatani's article in its entirety, as he also has some interesting observations as to how the much less severe 1995 Kobe earthquake served the purposes of neoliberalism. If one does so, one hears the echo of left alternatives to the postwar military and economic alignment of Japan with the US, an alignment that provoked intense political conflict during the 1950s and 1960s, as addressed in my 2007 review of Shohei Imamura's daring documentary, A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess. Some of Nagisa Oshima's films engage this subject as well, especially Three Resurrected Drunkards, which is available on DVD. Unfortunately, his 1960 film, Night and Fog in Japan, a film that indicts the autocratic practices of the student left as being responsible for its failure to prevent the approval of the US-Japan Security Pact, the treaty that memorialized the subordination of Japan to the US, remains unavailable. In many of his writings and interviews from this period, as translated in Cinema, Censorship, and the State, Oshima express his hostility to the Vietnam War and the use of US military facilities in Japan to conduct it. He also integrates the history of Japanese imperialism in Korea within this context as well.

Labels: American Empire, Earthquake, Japan, Korea, Neoliberalism

UPDATE 1: Having grown up among Japanese Americans in Northern California, I find these stories to be especially heartwrending:

The devastating impact of the Japanese earthquake on the country's ageing population was exposed on Thursday as dozens of elderly people were confirmed dead in hospitals and residential homes as heating fuel and medicine ran out.

In one particularly shocking incident, Japan's self-defence force discovered 128 elderly people abandoned by medical staff at a hospital six miles from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. Most of them were comatose and 14 died shortly afterwards. Eleven others were reported dead at a retirement home in Kesennuma because of freezing temperatures, six days after 47 of their fellow residents were killed in the tsunami. The surviving residents of the retirement home in Kesennuma were described by its owner, Morimitsu Inawashida, as alone and under high stress. He said fuel for their kerosene heaters was running out.

And, it's not much better for children, either:

The very young too were suffering. Save the Children on Thursday reached Ishinomaki, Nobiru and Onagawa, north of Sendai, and reported children living in miserable conditions. There were some terrible scenes, in some places like Onagawa there was nothing left, said Ian Woolverton, who led the mission. In other places like Ishinomaki we found children in evacuation centres huddled around kerosene lamps.

The charity said they met Kazuki Seto, eight, at an evacuation centre not far from Sendai. He told them: We are really worried about the nuclear power plants. We are very afraid of nuclear radiation. That's why we don't play outside. Another, Yasu Hiro, 10, added: We know about the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we are very scared. It makes us really worry. If it explodes it is going to be terrible.

INITIAL POST: Beyond the refusal of people to make deliveries to areas adjancent to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, there is the tragic possibility of social ostracism for a new generation of people exposed to radiation:

For Japanese, the desperation has an added dimension: Already the name Fukushima is laden with something beyond the fear of damaged health.

The Japanese survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lived the rest of their lives with the stigma of having been exposed to radiation, a stain that years never erased. Known as Hibakushas, they are formally recognized by the government if they lived within proximity of the blasts, and receive a special medical allowance.

But the designation also led to them being ostracized by other Japanese, who feared wrongly that the contamination was contagious or could be hereditary. The result was that many survivors of the bombings, and even their children, lived ghettoized lives because of their exposure to radiation.

The prospect of a similar stigma now worries some of those in and around the Fukushima plant.

I am worried about the future, said a 65-year-old retired engineer from Sugagawa City, 30 miles from the plant, who was interviewed by phone and didn't want his name used.

There could be some rumors that the people from this area are contaminated by radiation, and that people should not get close to us.

Masuji Ibuse fictionalized the experience of the people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his acclaimed novel, Black Rain, and the great, folkloric Japanese director, Shohei Imamura, subsequently made a film based upon it. I recommend both highly. They are discomforting for both American and Japanese audiences, as they reveal not only the horrors of the bomb, but the everyday fascism embedded within the treatment of the surviving victims by many Japanese. Hopefully, the people of Japan have learned from the past, and will treat the victims of Fukushima disaster with respect and compassion.

Labels: Earthquake, Japan, Nuclear Attack

UPDATE 1: From a New York Times article about the remaining workers at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station:

They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.

They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.

They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.

INITIAL POST: The nuclear catastrophe in Japan is beyond my capabilities to address on this blog, there's just too much happening too fast, and I lack the expertise to add much beyond what one can find at the Guardian, the New York Times and the BBC. Of course, you have to carefully sift through what you find there. There is, however, one subject that deserves emphasis, the extraordinary efforts of the Tokyo Electric Power workers to prevent full meltdowns at six Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in northeastern Japan, meltdowns that would result in massive releases of life threatening amounts of radiation. Five workers have died, 22 others have been injured and two others are still missing.

As described yesterday in the New York Times:

The nuclear plants’ operator, Tokyo Electric Power, has declined to provide details about the workers.

But Arnold Gundersen, a consultant who worked in American plants nearly identical to the stricken Japanese ones, said it was likely that the company was calling in retirees and workers from unaffected plants for help. And perhaps for sacrifice, as well. They may also be asking for people to volunteer to receive additional exposure, he said.

People who are working close to the reactor — pumping water, or operating valves inside the secondary containment structure — would almost certainly be wearing full bodysuits and air packs, Mr. Gundersen said. But some forms of radiation can penetrate any gear.

Gamma rays and other penetrating radiation can cause cancers and other long-term illnesses or, in high amounts, near-term illness or death.

Health physicists should gauge the radiation level in the work area, and the workers would normally be told how long they can remain. There may be a health physicist who will say, You only have an hour or two to do this job, Mr. Gundersen said. Each worker would carry a dosimeter, which measures radiation exposure, and they’ll be looking at it, he added. When it hits a certain number, they should leave.

Suits and air packs are meant to keep radioactive particles off the skin and out of the lungs until the workers return to a safer area.

Workers are trained to remove the gear in a specific way to avoid leaving any particles on their skin that would result in continuing exposure.

It seems probable that we will learn of specific acts of heroism reminiscent of firefighters like Viktor Birkun at Chernobyl in 1986, even if, unlike Birkun and the firefighters, they have been supplied with protective clothing:

As the plant managers and technicians fled or frantically tried to contact Moscow, the firefighters rushed straight into the inferno. With only a cotton uniform to protect him, Mr Birkun drove his fire truck over the reactor’s metal roof, now lying on the ground, and up to 15m (50ft) from Reactor 4.

Using his bare hands he lowered the engine’s siphon into the nearest cooling pool to suck up water for his colleagues as they battled 300 fires around the complex. Within seconds he began to feel the effects of the gamma rays that were bombarding his internal organs.

He started vomiting about every 30 seconds. He grew dizzy and weak. After two hours he could not stand.

Doctors later gave him a certificate indicating that he had received 260 ber (biological equivalents of roentgen), equivalent to 1,000 years of background radiation.

But experts estimate that the radiation that he absorbed was even higher, and enough to cause acute radiation sickness (ARS).

I’m amazed he survived, Michael Repacholi, the top radiation expert at the World Health Organisation, said.

It was a hugely heroic effort, and I suspect anyone who understood how much radiation was there would never have gone in.

Twenty years on Mr Birkun knows he is lucky to be alive and living in Moscow with his wife, Nadezhda, and his daughters, Lyudmila and Valentina.

Of the 134 liquidators with a diagnosis of ARS, 28 died in 1986, including at least six firefighters. Mr Birkun, now 56, is proud of the sacrifice that his team made to reduce the cloud of smoke that spread radioactive particles across Europe and even as far as Japan.

These were the people who saved Europe, he said, fingering a black-and-white photograph of his former colleagues. If they had not done what they did, the fire would have spread to Reactors 1, 2 and 3.

One of curious aspects of the use of nuclear energy over the course of my life has been the extent to which it has transcended ideology. Initially promoted as the peaceful use of the atom, a non-military justification for research that has produced the most frighteningly destructive weapons ever known, nuclear energy has been almost universally embraced by elites. During the Cold War, capitalist countries, such as the US, the UK, Canada, France, West Germany and Japan, as well as socialist ones, like the USSR and the German Democratic Republic, embarked upon nuclear plant construction programs, often against intense grassroots opposition. Lesser developed countries of this period, such as India, Spain and South Africa also brought nuclear power plants on line, although, interestingly, Central and South American countries were laggards, with most countries building no plants, the exceptions being the more industrialized ones, such as Mexico and Brazil, who built only one. Now, even purportedly anti-imperialist countries like Iran and Venezuela have adopted plans to rely upon nuclear power for future energy supplies.

Despite difficulties with the costs of construction and operation, nuclear power has persisted, and, as a possible response to global warming, may flourish yet again, despite the catastrophe in Japan. The explanation for such persistence lies, I think, in the compatibility of nuclear power with the intertwined interests of the state and capital, regardless of the way particular states describe themselves. From the standpoint of capital, whether aggregated in capitalist or socialist societies, the construction of nuclear power plants wasadvantageous when compared with alternatives. First, they obviously required a lot of capital investment. Hence, they absorbed large concentrations of it associated with governments, corporations and, particularly, financial institutions. Gigantism had an allure for all of them, because it served the purpose of oligopolizing the accumulation of capital, the production of energy and, more covertly, the knowledge associated with scientific and economic decisions. No other energy source had the ability to facilitate this objective like nuclear power, except for those associated with hydrocarbons.

Second, the construction of such facilities was a substantial endeavor. Capital was put to use employing large numbers of workers, ranging from architects, to nuclear engineers, to attorneys, to construction workers, to steel workers, to transport workers, just to name a few. A government regulatory apparatus was required to oversee nuclear plant construction projects as well as the subsequent operation of the completed plants. Such projects participated in the acceleration of the division of labor within society, a division of labor whereby more and more specialized knowledge and expertise was created to address activities of ever increasing complexity. Workers were therefore transformed in a way so as to enhance their utility while severing common bonds of collective identity. Meanwhile, the power to influence political and economic decisions was concentrated in fewer and fewer people, not so much because only a small number of people possessed the information necessary to make them, but, instead, because only a small number of people had access to the people with supposedly sufficient information to legitimize them. Needless to say, the entire process was self-referential. Capitalism and the centralized state depended upon the proliferation of hierarchy to more firmly entrench themselves, and few things, other than the military-industrial complex and the emerging technologies of surveillance and social control, were as harmonious with this proliferation as the increased use of nuclear power.

Accordingly, for many years, nuclear projects constituted a form of economic development, a glamorous, modern form of industrialization, because they employed large numbers of people in jobs with good wages and benefits while simultaneously disempowering them and promoting even more extreme concentrations of capital and state power. It was, in effect, close to a perfect circle. Advocates for alternative energy sources therefore failed to understand that the scope and expense of these projects were actually a strong argument in their favor from the standpoint of capitalists and the proponents of the centralized state. One of the worst qualiaties that one could attribute to any energy source or policy was that the infrastructure is easy to construct and maintain, or, even more heinous, that anybody can do it, which is why conservation was usually considered an inferior alternative to investing in new supply.

Given all this, it may not be coincidental that the advent of neoliberalism, and its attendant financialization of the economies of nation states, has been accompanied by a substantial decline in nuclear power plant construction, as well as an increased emphasis upon conservation, in some parts of the world, especially the US. Having overcome the socialist and social democratic alternatives, capitalists and their allies within the state redirected the vast expenditures upon nuclear power plant construction into the development of more and more speculative financial instruments. Countries more resistant to neoliberalism, such as France and Japan, pressed forward. Some research on this subject might result in some fascinating discoveries. In any event, it appears that such construction is now seen as compatible with the globalization of investment, production, transportation and communication, given the number of countries that now publicly state that they intend to move towards nuclear energy as a power source. Or, to put it differently, we have lived through the neoliberalization of nuclear power. The fact that it is prone to catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 only increases its allure. As described by Naomi Klein, Greg Palast and others, the current economic order depends upon periodic turmoil, whether generated virtually in financial markets through the mendacious actions of investors, regulators and politicians, or in the real, tangible world by them in conjunction with the unpredictability of the environment, to thrive.

Hat tip to Jack Crow over at The Crow's Eye for educating me as to the heroism of Viktor Birkun and the other firefighters at Chernobyl.

Labels: American Empire, Earthquake, Japan, Neoliberalism, Nuclear Energy

From the Guardian:

For locals in Fukushima prefecture, still reeling from frequent aftershocks and clearing up after the first disaster, the prospect of another on the way in the form of nuclear meltdown was unwelcome in the extreme.

"It is frightening. You get used to living with the nuclear plants and then something like this happens. When I saw smoke from the plant, I thought, 'Uh oh'," said Kato Tomiyama, a convenience store employeet. "I couldn't believe it," said Seiko Sato, a teacher. "We need more information."

For several hours, observers feared the worst: loss of coolant inside one of the plant's six reactors had caused a dangerous build-up of heat. A second, more deadly explosion – one that would have released a vast radioactive plume over the nation – seemed a real prospect until it was announced that, although the outer structure of the 40-year-old reactor building had been blown off by the blast, the actual reactor inside had not been breached.

Disaster had been avoided – but by the narrowest of margins. It was confirmed last night that radioactive caesium, one of the elements released when overheating causes core damage, had been detected around the plant. The discovery indicates that meltdown, caused by a nuclear reaction running out of control, had indeed affected the reactor's fuel rods – although possibly only to a limited extent. The revelation did little to reassure local people.

Labels: Earthquake, Japan

For updates, go here and here and here. The situation in Japan is almost beyond comprehension, as indicated by this Guardian live blog entry:

9.01pm GMT: Kyodo news agency is reporting that four commuter trains are still unaccounted for in the Miyagi and Iwate prefectures, the coastal area of northeastern Japan that were hardest hit by the tsunami.

Now, there is increasing concern about radiation releases from the damaged Fukushiima Daichi nuclear power plant, with the evacuation area around the plant expanded from three miles to ten miles. According to an Associated Press news alert, radiation levels have surged outside the plant, and it has already been reported that radiation levels inside the control room are 1,000 times normal. The sun has risen in Japan and the scope of the destruction is becoming shockingly known.

On a more mundane note, the New York Times can't resist exploiting the situation as an opportunity to cast the US military presence in Japan, disliked by many people there, in a favorable light. The US military is, after all, first and foremost, a humanitarian institution.

Labels: Earthquake, Japan

Unknown to few here in the US except to Pacific Film Archive denizens like myself, Hideo Takamine personified the post-war experience of Japanese women and the ongoing evolution of gender roles in numerous film roles:

Hideko Takamine, a Japanese actress who over the course of nearly 200 films developed from an endearing child star into a powerful representative of the Japanese woman’s search for identity and autonomy in the years after World War II, died on Dec. 28 in Tokyo. She was 86.

Ms. Takamine, who often seemed to be gallantly fighting back tears with her famously gentle smile, was widely regarded by Japanese and foreign critics as one of the three great actresses of the classical Japanese cinema. Her two peers were the aristocratic Kinuyo Tanaka, who worked extensively with the director Kenji Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff) and died in 1977, and Setsuko Hara, whose portrayals of modern middle-class women were associated with the films of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

Ms. Takamine was most notably the muse of Mikio Naruse, who, although not as well known in the west as Mizoguchi and Ozu, is frequently ranked as equally important in Japanese film history. For Naruse, Ms. Takamine often played women from rural or lower-middle-class backgrounds who were forced to make their own way in the world, often saddled with weak or unfaithful men.

Among her best-known work with Naruse was Floating Clouds (1955), in which she played a secretary in love with her married boss, sticking with him from a wartime post in Indochina to contemporary Tokyo despite his coldness, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), in which she played a widow working as a bar hostess in Tokyo’s Ginza district.

As noted in the Los Angeles Times obituary:

Hideko Takamine was one of the most beloved and accomplished of Japan's film stars, said Kevin Thomas, a former Times staff writer who reviewed Japanese films from 1962 to 1985. She was beautiful, and she had tremendous range and versatility.

After beginning as sort of Japan's answer to Shirley Temple, Thomas said, she emerged as one of Japan's greatest star actresses in the postwar period, which was a tremendous period for Japanese cinema.

In the wake of the war, Thomas said, there was this renaissance of Japanese filmmaking. They could discuss the war and assess blame, the impact of the occupation, the growing emancipation of women — all this kind of stuff. There was this terrific ferment, and it was a really creative period.

And for many Japanese, Phyllis Birnbaum wrote in her 1990 New Yorker profile of Takamine, she was as much a part of postwar Japan as the strange-tasting powdered milk distributed by the American military.

Many of Takamine's heroines were typical of the women who had grown up after the war, film historian Donald Richie told Birnbaum. Like so many Japanese women then, they wanted more out of life, but couldn't get it.

The war may have been over, women found, but they weren't better off. They were still fairly unhappy. So the kind of roles Takamine played fit the zeitgeist, may have even made that zeitgeist.

While one of her most well known films mentioned in the New York Times obituary, Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds, plays a little long, even for me, Takamine's performance as a women who works at a civilian outpost of the empire in Indochina, and subsequently returns to an impoverished Japan is still remarkable. Indeed, the film, and the novel of the same title upon which it is based, provide a striking, understated presentation of imperial occupation, defeat and the social turmoil that result from them. Yukiko Koda, the protagonist played by Takamine, is a victim of the fascism that fueled the empire and persists in post-war Japan through the survival of a patriarchal social order despite the catastrophic military defeat:

Even in it’s vivid depiction of the female protagonist, Naruse’s outlook differs significantly from his illustrious peers. Ozu’s heroines were often the epitome of the ideal Japanese woman, while many of Mizoguchi’s female characters were beautiful, tragic figures oppressed by society, but whose suffering and sacrifice also in some way underlined their spiritual nobility. Naruse’s depiction, in being more realistic and less conciliatory, does not offer any respite. It too displays the keen eye for the sense of tragedy and suffering, but incisively cuts through the weaknesses and flaws of a strong-willed, yet weak-hearted woman, one only too prone to letting herself get betrayed by the men in her life and one too unsure of the direction her life should take to righteously feel grieved about being wronged. Yukiko is torn between her love to Tomioka and a desperate need to have some kind of a stable life, and to see her life slip slowly but surely into a downward spiral is as frustrating as it is heart-wrenching. For her needs, both financial and emotional, she is often at the mercy of her brother-in-law for the former and Tomioko for the latter, when there is possibly no salvation in sight from either. The overbearing sense of futility is told with a cold, almost nihilistic detachment.

Both Yukiko and Tomioka, her love interest, possess that tragic dimension so characteristic of many of Fassbinder's finest creations, a sense of the emotional inadequacies and cruelties of our present lives, while being incapable of perceiving any alternative. Hence, the inevitable nihilism that overwhelms both. Yukiko, as a victim of the Japanese patriarchy, resists it as best she can, while Tomioka perpetually falls back upon an ingrained exploitation of his privileged male status, leaving several victims along the way, seemingly oblivious. I recommend the novel, written by Fumiko Hayashi, highly for her matter of fact, folkloric invocation of day to day life and language, as experienced by a finely developed cast of characters in addition to the protagonist.

Labels: Book Reviews, Feminism, Film Notes, Japan, Obituaries

Today, we learned the sad news. Chalmers Johnson is dead at the age of 79. Over the last 15 years, he was an indefatigable opponent of US imperialism, after having been a Cold War liberal who celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union and supported the Vietnam War. In Blowback, he identified the pathological aspect of US foreign policy:

In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept blowback does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes - as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 - the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia - the area of my academic training - than on the Middle East.

In this summarization, provided by him in a subsequent book, Nemesis, Johnson points out an often forgotten fact about Blowback, the fact that he developed his analysis from his study of US involvement in Asia, and not the more highly publicized US involvement in the Middle East. It is a sobering thing to remember, as it suggests that we remain vulnerable to retaliation, whether violent or economic, from people in other regions of the world, unless there is a radical, almost impossible imagine, transformation in US policy.

In recent years, I think that there was a tendency to see Johnson as a leftist. He wasn't. The willingness of some to perceive him as such points towards something that I have observed in other contexts, a tendency to confuse anti-imperialism with leftism. For example, he never repudiated his Cold War hostility towards the USSR. Rather, he was an American exceptionalist of a particular kind. Like Pat Buchanan, he believed that the USSR posed an existential threat to the US, and, like Buchanan, saw no purpose to interventionism upon the dissipation of that threat. Much like Buchanan (and Gore Vidal as well, and, even, arguably, Kurt Vonnegut), he believed that the US was exceptional because of the example it set for other countries and peoples around the world through its domestic policies and values, even if the three of them would argue vigorously over what they should be. In short, an exceptionalism that was isolationist.

Unlike Buchanan (and possibly, even Vidal), Johnson was equally concerned about the consequences of US interventionism for the people subjected to it. His mid-1990s visit to Okinawa radicalized him as he was dismayed by the US imperial arrogance associated its military presence on the island:

I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I’ve devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a scandal in every sense. My first reaction -- I’ve not made a secret of it -- that I was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people don't come down here and report it. As I began to study the network of bases around the world and the incidents that have gone with them and the military coups that have brought about regime change and governments that we approve of, I began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was, unfortunately, typical.

These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most recent manifestation of the American military empire is the decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of course, to create another regional command in Africa. This may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we should have any form of American military presence in Africa, but we're going to have an enlarged one.

Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn't ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we're talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation.

Not surprisingly, Johnson's experience is a central feature of Blowback, and he was a tireless advocate for the departure of US troops from Okinawa until his death. As an area studies scholar with an emphasis upon East Asia, he respected the cultures of the countries that he studied, and highlighted how they had been economically successfully since the end of World War II by ignoring the emerging neoliberal policies of the World Bank and the IMF. Given that most people don't recognize that Blowback is focused primarily on Asia, it is not surprising that this aspect of the book is even less well known. He acknowledged that China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan had relied upon significant state intervention to economically modernize, and that the US was actively seeking to prevent others from following the same path. Indeed, he considered these policies to be as perilous as the ones associated with covert operations, expressing alarm at nationalistic hostility to the US in East and South Asia in response to the currency devaluations and foreign asset sales facilitated by the IMF to address the 1998 currency crisis.

In other words, Johnson was no orientalist with an Asian emphasis. If anything, he could be said to be an indigenous modernist, meaning that he considered it impossible for anyone to escape the modernization process, but that countries and peoples should be permitted, as much as possible, to go through it autonomously. Such a perspective was consistent with his belief that the massive economic and military infrastructure created by the US during the Cold War was an anomaly and should have been dismantled. Johnson may have been no leftist, but his analytical rigor and personal integrity demanded respect. In the introduction to Blowback, he describes how he disdained the protests against the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley because he discovered, after a trip to the library, that none of the books about Vietnam had been checked out by anyone to read. In classic academic elitist style, he concluded that there was no reason to pay attention to such know nothings. But, from the vantage point of thirty years later, he admitted that they had been right, and he had been wrong. From such a mea culpa, he commenced to write his own book of revelations about the imperial hubris of the US, which has only gotten more extreme with the passage of time.

Labels: American Empire, China, Japan, Korea, Neoliberalism, Obituaries

Today, the New York Times has an excellent article about the economic decline of Japan and its implications for the US. I found this passage to be particularly interesting:

After years of complacency, Japan appears to be waking up to its problems, as seen last year when disgruntled voters ended the virtual postwar monopoly on power of the Liberal Democratic Party. However, for many Japanese, it may be too late. Japan has already created an entire generation of young people who say they have given up on believing that they can ever enjoy the job stability or rising living standards that were once considered a birthright here.

Yukari Higaki, 24, said the only economic conditions she had ever known were ones in which prices and salaries seemed to be in permanent decline. She saves as much money as she can by buying her clothes at discount stores, making her own lunches and forgoing travel abroad. She said that while her generation still lived comfortably, she and her peers were always in a defensive crouch, ready for the worst.

We are the survival generation,” said Ms. Higaki, who works part time at a furniture store.

Hisakazu Matsuda, president of Japan Consumer Marketing Research Institute, who has written several books on Japanese consumers, has a different name for Japanese in their 20s; he calls them the consumption-haters. He estimates that by the time this generation hits their 60s, their habits of frugality will have cost the Japanese economy $420 billion in lost consumption.

The author of the article, Martin Flackler, compares this current frugality with the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s, which he presents rather oddly, through various interviewees, as the norm. Anyone with the most cursory familiarity with post-war Japanese history knows that this period of extravagance associated with the real estate and stock market bubbles was an aberration, although it first manifested itself in the 1960s. Furthermore, as in the US, the UK and much of Europe, it was a direct consequence of Reagan's economic policies, which resulted in a hollowing out of manufacturing in the US through an overvalued dollar that effectively subsidized Japanese exports.

Of course, once Flackler has established the bubble years of the 1980s as the norm (much as many in the US have a similar misunderstanding about the bubble years of the late 1990s and early 2000s), the current refusal of many Japanese to consume at anywhere near that level becomes one of its problems, thus requiring a solution that is nowhere in sight. And, people like Higaki are the source of it, justifying the condemnation of Matsuda and, by extension, Flackler, as Matsuda is one of the people through whom he speaks. Given the severity of the situation, one wonders why he hasn't quoted someone to the effect that Japan should pass a law authorizing the government to seize any unspent savings at the end of the year. But if one goes too far in that direction, one discovers that people like Higaki have nothing to spend as they are, in her words, just surviving. It would appear that an old capitalist contradiction has risen to the surface, the excessive accumulation of capital that destroys the ability of the middle and lower classes to consume sufficiently to perpetuate economic growth. This is the real problem that Flackler fails to perceive, and a problem that has serious implications for the US as well.

Beyond that, there is also the possibility that young people in the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a good proxy for the developed world, have rejected the consumption practices that fueled the growth of the post-war era and subsequent bubbles. As noted by Yusef, the emergence of barter as an alternative to the use of money to obtain goods and services is arguably indicative of such a phenomenon. Or, consider how people under the age of 30 are seeking to sever their relationship with the automobile, the centerpiece of post-war global manufacturing production:

Selling cars to young adults under 30 is proving to be a real challenge for automakers. Unlike their elders, Generation Yers own fewer cars and don’t drive much. They’re likely to see autos as a source of pollution, not as a sex or status symbol.

They’re more apt to ride mass transit to work and use car sharing services -- pioneered by Zipcar -- for longer trips. And car sharing choices are expanding, with car rental firms moving into the market, making it convenient for young folks to rent with hourly rates and easy insurance. Connect by Hertz, for example, is rolling out its car sharing services in the New York metropolitan area, with plans to eventually expand them to around 40 college campuses nationwide.

If so, that would suggest that we are entering an era of regulated scarcity, one in which governments increasingly dictate the distribution of essential goods and services to the populace in response to deflation. Paradoxically, a movement by people towards more sustainability could initially provoke a governmental response of intensified, more authoritarian practices to deal with the unraveling of a social order centered around perpetual growth.

Labels: American Empire, Japan, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

The imposition of austerity measures in Greece has resulted in an economic catastrophe:

(snip)

The government's draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country's budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years. The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.

The problem is that the austerity measures have in the meantime affected every aspect of the country's economy. Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise. The country's gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off. A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society.

(snip)

Prime Minister George Papandreou's austerity package has seriously shaken the Greek economy. The package included reducing civil servants' salaries by up to 20 percent and slashing retirement benefits, while raising numerous taxes. The result is that Greeks have less and less money to spend and sales figures everywhere are dropping, spelling catastrophe for a country where 70 percent of economic output is based on private consumption.

A short jaunt through Athens' shopping streets reveals the scale of the decline. Fully a quarter of the store windows on Stadiou Street bear red signs reading Enoikiazetai -- for rent. The National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce (ESEE) calculates that 17 percent of all shops in Athens have had to file for bankruptcy.

Things aren't any better in the smaller towns. Chalkidona was, until just a few years ago, a hub for trucking traffic in the area around Thessaloniki. Two main streets, lined with fast food restaurants and stores catering to truckers, intersect in the small, dismal town. Maria Lialiambidou's house sits directly on the main trucking route. Rent from a pastry shop on the ground floor of the building used to provide her with €350 per month, an amount that helped considerably in supplementing her widow's pension of €320.

These days, though, Kostas, the man who ran the pastry shop, who people used to call a penny-pincher, can no longer afford the rent. Here too, a huge Enoikiazetai banner stretches across the shopfront. No one wants to rent the store. Neither are there any takers for an empty butcher's shop a few meters further on.

A sign on the other side of the street advertises Sakis' Restaurant. The owner, Sakis, is still hanging on, with customers filling one or two of the restaurant's tables now and then. There's really no work for me here anymore, says one Albanian employee, who goes by the name Eleni in Greece. Many others have already gone back to Albania, where it's not any worse than here. We'll see when I have to go too.

As the author of the article, Corinna Jessen, concludes: The entire country is in the grip of a depression. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate has increased significantly:

According to Aris Violatzis of the NGO Klimaka, the number of suicides have doubled if not tripled over the past year. Violatzis said the rate had increased to more than two suicides per day this year, as compared to one per day in 2009. And these are just the suicides that are recorded, Violatzis said, adding that the real number was likely to be higher as the stigma attached to suicide means they are often not reported.

Klimaka, which operates the 1018 telephone helpline, said it was receiving around 25 calls a day, compared to an average of 10 per day last year. Asked whether the spike in suicides was linked to the financial crisis, Violatzis said he believed it was a contributing factor. Suicide is a multifaceted phenomenon – we cannot link it exclusively to the crisis, he said, noting however that the environment influences our actions. As for the profile of most victims, Klimaka said they are chiefly productive people with responsibilities, financial obligations, families, loans. According to Violatzis, many of the victims are men who are no longer earning enough money to provide for their families and feel they no longer have a role to play – people who are going through an identity crisis. There are also many who take their lives due to deep-seated psychological problems or depression, he added.

For an example of this gruesome phenomenon, consider:

The tragic news was published in a local newspaper of the city of Volos (original article in Greek here) on July 23d, a few days before the strike. According to the article the 67-year old, who had been working as a truck driver for four decades, had tried to sell his truck recently without luck. Early on the morning of July 22nd he hanged himself off a bridge crossing over a motorway, where he was later found by passers-by.

Perhaps, you aren't that concerned about what is happening in Greece. It is a small, faraway place that rarely intrudes into our consciousness. But, then again, maybe you should be. Because there is no certainty that the plague has been contained within Greece. Despite the efforts of our Prince Prospero, President Obama, to protect ourselves from it, the global economy remains sickly:

From the previous quarter, Japan grew 0.1 percent, the slowest expansion among the six biggest economies. The U.S. grew 0.6 percent, the U.K. 1.1 percent, Germany 2.2 percent and France 0.6 percent. While China doesn’t release quarter-on- quarter GDP figures, it expanded 10.3 percent from a year ago.

None of the world's largest economies, with the exception of China, are generating sufficient growth to reduce unemployment. Of course, China, as a developing country, should have a substantially higher growth rate, and even it may now have a growth rate lower than the 10% to 14% range that has characterized peak performance in recent years. While subject to debate, there has been a general consensus that China requires growth rates higher than the more mature economies that have been accepted as members in the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, somewhere north of 6%. Finally, observe that the previous quarter, the spring quarter, was a more favorable period for economic growth than this one and upcoming ones.

Labels: China, France, Germany, Greece, IMF, Japan, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

From the Associated Press:

Japan's new liberal prime minister shunned a visit to a shrine that has outraged Asian neighbors for honoring war criminals, breaking from past governments' tradition and instead apologizing Sunday for the suffering World War II caused.

Members of the now-opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan nearly continuously since the end of the war, made a point by carrying out their own trip to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The Shinto shrine — a spectacular building with sweeping roofs and a museum in its grounds that glorifies kamikaze pilots — has set off controversy by honoring the 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including Class A war criminals such as Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime prime minister who was executed in 1948.

Among those who visited Yasukuni was LDP leader Sadakazu Tanigaki and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. About 40 legislators went to the shrine, but none from Prime Minister Naoto Kan's Cabinet, according to Japanese media reports.

Kan leads the Democratic Party, which took power last year after winning elections on promises of greater transparency and grass-roots democracy. It is the first time since the end of World War II that the entire Japanese Cabinet has avoided visiting Yasukuni on Aug. 15, the day Japan surrendered in the war.

We caused great damage and suffering to many nations during the war, especially to the people of Asia, Kan told a crowd of about 6,000 at an annual memorial service for the war dead at Budokan hall in Tokyo.

We feel a deep regret, and we offer our sincere feelings of condolence to those who suffered and their families, he said. We renew our promise to never wage war, and we promise to do our utmost to achieve eternal world peace and to never repeat again the mistake of war.

This is more than a symbolic act. It runs contrary to a 60 year effort by the LDP and the US to remilitarize Japan. Kan's apology will prove impossible to reverse, and presents the prospect of closer cooperation between Japan, China, North Korea and South Korea. Hence, the ability of the US to manipulate tensions between them will be accordingly reduced. Not eliminated, but reduced. Kan may well be remembered for closing a lengthy chapter in the US/Japan relationship that was formally acknowledged on June 19, 1960. Future historians may also associate Kan's act with the fraying of the economic bonds between the two countries.

Labels: American Empire, China, Japan, Korea

Amazingly, Oakland, California has not one, but two anarchist book publishing firms. AK Press has been a fixture for quite some time, but the new one, PM Press, was founded in 2007. To its credit, PM Press has embarked upon an effort to publish works of fiction as well as ones related to theory, economics and social history.

Last year, PM Press published a translation of Tomoyuki Hoshino's Lonely Hearts Killer, and, apparently, more translated works of international fiction are forthcoming. In Lonely Hearts, Hoshino seizes upon the Japanese identification with the Emperor as a point of entry to confront troubling questions about the nature of hierachy and the purposes that it serves within society. The brilliance of the novel lies in Hoshino's decision to put two distinctively Japanese cults in conflict with one another, the cult of the emperor and the suicide cult of seppuku and jigai.

As the novel begins, the people of Japan are mourning the loss of their young, vibrant, charismatic young emperor. The ascension of such a young person, about 40, to the throne had excited the populace with the hope that he could ignite the reinvigoration of an increasingly routinized society. But, instead, the Young Majesty died after contracting an unknown illness, plunging much of the country into an isolative despair, with the exception of two young film students, Inoue and Iroha. But Iroha's lover, Mikoto, entered a comatose state for days on end.

Upon his reawakening, Iroha introduces him to Inoue, resulting in the death of Mikoto at the hand of Inoue and Inoue's suicide in a sleeping cafe, the Dormir. Inoue leaves behind an Internet statement to the effect that, inspired by His Young Majesty, he was going to kill himself to escape this illusory, demoralizing world, going so far as to encourage mass suicide:

I will lead the vanguard and sacrifice myself. If enough of you identify with my dream, and, we can really bring back this world to what it is truly meant to be. We can extinquish this phony world, and return to the real, natural, authentic world of the dead.

In his penetrating study of anarchism in China, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, Arif Dirlik observes that . . . anarchist ideology, in its peculiar formulation of questions of conflict and interest in society, lent itself to counterrevolution almost as easily as to revolution. In Lonely Hearts, Hoshino confronts us with the troubling insight that such an observation warrants a global instead of a site specific application by describing a reactionary public response to the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto.

Instead of recognizing that Inoue sought to induce a rejection of hierarchy and the deference to authority that it necessarily entails, the public became more and more hostile to his memory as suicides proliferated. Predictably, the government seizes upon the crisis as an opportunity to seize greater police powers for itself, posthumously condemning Inoue as a terrorist, and thereby suppressing all of his cyberspace statements and videos. A small minority answered his call, but a majority either rejected him or remained indifferent as the state assumed more control over their lives. During the period, a woman ascends the throne for the first time as His Young Majesty's successor. Caught between the constraints of her personality, her role as empress and the requirements for reaching people through the media, she proves herself incapable of alleviating public feelings of unease and aimlessness.

To the extent that there was an individualistic response to the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto, it was in a social Darwinist direction, as people could only fall back upon past cultural experience. Suicides became love suicides and love suicides became assassination suicides, analogous to propaganda by the deed, and assassination suicides became indiscriminate love suicides, ones in which a person randomly selected someone to die with them. As you might have guessed, some responded by adopting the rationale of the war on terror, kill them before they kill us. In one celebrated incident, a young man kills his best friend because he thought his friend was running towards him to kill him. A court finds him not guilty, and he subsequently becomes a politically powerful figure.

Through this narrative, which he presents reflectively through his three primary characters, Inoue, Iroha and Mokuren, Hoshino mines a rich vein of social conformity and autocracy that the Japanese left has been unable to transcend, as explored in the films of Nagisa Oshima. But some reject the false choice between suicide and submission. After the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto, Iroha goes to live in a retreat center nestled in a cedar forest, a retreat operated by her high school friend, Mokuren. As she lives there for several years, she deals with her grief over the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto, and imperfectly strives to assert an independent identity. She does so in a way that Mokuren condemns as perpetuating the circle of cynicism, self-centered rebellion and sacrifice initiated by Inoue.

By contrast, Mokuren challenges the emerging social Darwinism in an editorial entitled, I Won't Kill, and rightists direct their rage towards her and the residents of her retreat center. Her challenge, and the violent rightist response to it, becomes the center of a media circus, reducing her attempt to emotionally reach people into yet another form of entertainment. If there is a moral to Hoshino's postmodern fable of alienation and impotence, it is that before there can be a political revolution, there must first be a social one within our hearts and minds. Or, even more, a social one renders the need for a political one superfluous.

Labels: "War on Terror", Anarchism, Book Reviews, Japan, Political Violence, Postmodernism

From truthdig:

For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.

Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I’m convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I’m not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and public’s ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.

By contrast, given a few days’ reflection in the summer of 1945 before a presidential fait accompli was framed in that fashion, you didn’t have to be a moral prodigy to arrive at the sense of foreboding we all had in Mr. Patterson’s class. It was as easily available to 13-year-old ninth-graders as it was to many Manhattan Project scientists, who also had the opportunity to form their judgments before the Bomb was used.

It is a piece well worth reading in its entirety. Along with Israel, and possibly, Great Britain, the US believes that it can indiscriminately kill large numbers of people to achieve its geopolitical ends. Since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US has subjected the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Afghans, now, increasingly, the Pakistanis, to this sort of violence. By contrast, 9/11 is a mere footnote.

Consistent with this, it is important to recognize that US military policy has evolved towards inflicting severe hardship upon civilians, as was done in both Iraq invasions, for example, instead of confronting the military capacity of the opponent directly. Admittedly, all the major powers involved in World War II moved in this direction as the conflict was fought, but the US took the principle to the most horrific extreme through the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its military doctrine is centered around this principle to this day.

Labels: 9/11, American Empire, Daniel Ellsberg, Japan, Nuclear Attack, Sadomasochism

In late March, I outlined the emerging contours of conflict between the US and China in relation to the global recession and its ultimate outcome. Consistent with my expressed intention to recommend posts of importance on the subject of the recession and the transformation of the global economy, please consider this one by Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns. He explains how East Asia is seeking to decouple itself from US financial policies through the creation of an Asian Development Bank, after having been dissuaded from doing so by the US in the late 1990s. East Asia, asserts Harrison, has learned its lesson, and will no longer permit the US to dictate policies related to trade, finance and development through the International Monetary Fund to the advantage of the US any longer. Essential reading.

Labels: American Empire, China, Global Recession, IMF, Japan, Neoliberalism

From Bloomberg News:

Within two months of losing his job packing shelves at a cold-storage company in Osaka, Toshiyuki Miki says, he was homeless. “Lehman Shock” turned his life upside down, he says.

Lacking the 60,000 yen ($600) a month he needs to pay rent, Miki, 40, sleeps in cardboard boxes under the elevated Hanshin expressway in Umeda, Osaka’s central business district. It’s his home as the global recession triggered by the implosion of Wall Street banks batters Japan. About 460,000 people have lost their jobs since the Sept. 15 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., according to government data.

I never realized it would affect me in this way, said Miki, who picked up the Japanese phrase Lehman Shokku from the pages of discarded newspapers. Before, I could always find some kind of job, but now there’s nothing.

Miki’s loss of housing shows how Japan’s 2.95 million unemployed people threaten to fuel a rise in homelessness. Prime Minister Taro Aso may unveil a 15.4 trillion yen stimulus package tomorrow, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News. Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano said April 6 the package will include a new social safety net for non-regular workers.

Yosano didn’t specify what help would be given to the lower-paid temporary or part-time workers. They accounted for 34.5 percent of Japan’s 55.3 million employed in September 2008 compared with 24 percent in 1999, official data show.

Yes, Japan has actually been in the forefront of switching from permanent to temporary workers:

No one knows how many like him are moving on to Osaka’s streets, charity officials say.

In 2004, then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi extended labor laws, allowing carmakers and other manufacturers to use more lower-paid temporary workers and for longer periods. That helped employers cut production costs because they could hire and fire to meet demand.

The labor laws switched the burden for supporting Japan’s workforce from the companies to the government, said Wataru Kishi, in charge of welfare assistance at Osaka’s city government. The issue is whether the government can provide the support or the entire system will collapse.

Japan’s national government, which pays 75 percent of welfare costs, according to Kishi, has already pledged 1.1 trillion yen in economic stimulus to subsidize temporary workers’ jobs and house those out of work.

As capitalism has gone global, so has the intensity of the destitution associated with its turbulence. So far, there has been no spark to ignite resistance.

Hat tip to The Little Mandarin over at Calculated Risk.

Labels: Global Recession, Japan, Neoliberalism

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, China, Europe, Global Recession, Japan, Latin America, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

AIPAC Persuaded Pelosi to Drop a Provision Requiring a Congressional Vote Authorizing War With Iran

No Bid Contracts for US Oil Companies in Iraq

Lisbon Treaty Stalled as EU Countries Ponder Future Steps After Defeat in Ireland

Nearly 100 People Commit Suicide a Day in Japan

Same Sex Wedding Album

Sacramento One of the Most Extravagant Users of Water in the World

Are We All North Koreans Now?

Labels: Europe, Food Crisis, Japan, Occupation of Iraq, Sacramento, Same Sex Marriage, War with Iran

Perhaps, the militarization of Japan at the behest of the US will be checked. Now, both the British and the Japanese governments will face increasing pressure to distance themselves from the imperial enterprise in Iraq.

Labels: American Empire, Elections, Japan, Occupation of Iraq

Chalmers Johnson has surprisingly emerged as one of the foremost establishment critics of US global policy, assuming, of course, that one is still considered establishment once one embarks upon the endeavor of exposing the realities of it. Over the course of a long and prestigious academic career, he chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley and served as an analyst for the CIA, emphasizing issues associated with the People's Republic of China.

In 2000, it became obvious that Johnson had changed his world view quite dramatically when he published the book Blowback, and popularized an espionage phrase that subsequently became associated with 9/11 and other violent acts directed towards the US, even if, curiously enough, he identified its roots in the US exploitation of East Asia. In Blowback, Johnson presented the troubling notion that the US, through the imposition of its military and economic values upon many nations around the world, was engendering such hostility that unpredictable, violent attacks upon the US and its institutional presence were inevitable.

Much like Tariq Ali's book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, it remains an essential text for trying to understand the world in which we live and how we arrived here. Later, in 2004, he published The Sorrows of Empire, wherein he explained the imperial reach of the US military, its forms of social organization and the tensions inherent within them, and the expansion of its influence, already substantial, in the post-9/11 world as it was increasingly unaccountable to traditional American political constraints. Now, in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, he elaborates upon a theme that he frequently mentioned during public appearances and interviews, namely that the US is being transformed from being a democratic republic into an imperial dictatorship.

But a fascinating question remains. What provoked Johnson into abandoning his idealistic support for American imperialism? During the course of this Democracy Now! interview, we learn the answer, and it emerged from his historic association with Japan, where he served as a naval officer during the Korean War, and subsequently focused much of his scholarship, because, why else would he have decided to visit Okinawa in 1996? Here's what he discovered during the course of that visit:

In the southernmost prefecture of Japan, Okinawa, site of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, there’s a small island, smaller than Kawaii in the Hawaiian islands, with 1,300,000 Okinawans. There's thirty-seven American military bases there. The revolt against them has been endemic for fifty years. The governor is always saying to the local military commander, “You're living on the side of a volcano that could explode at any time.” It has exploded in the past. What this means is just an endless, nonstop series of sexually violent crimes, drunken brawls, hit-and-run accidents, environmental pollution, noise pollution, helicopters falling out of the air from Futenma Marine Corps Air Base and falling onto the campus of Okinawa International University. One thing after another. Back in 1995, we had one of the most serious incidents, when two Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a twelve-year-old girl. This led to the largest demonstrations against the United States since we signed the security treaty with Japan decades ago. It's this kind of thing.

I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I’ve devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a scandal in every sense. My first reaction -- I’ve not made a secret of it -- that I was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people don't come down here and report it. As I began to study the network of bases around the world and the incidents that have gone with them and the military coups that have brought about regime change and governments that we approve of, I began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was, unfortunately, typical.

These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most recent manifestation of the American military empire is the decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of course, to create another regional command in Africa. This may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we should have any form of American military presence in Africa, but we're going to have an enlarged one.

Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn't ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we're talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation.

Johnson additionally commented upon a number of subjects related to his new book, Nemesis, especially his pessimism about the future (or lack thereof) for American democracy, and I recommend reading the transcript of the interview in its entirety.

Labels: Alternative Media, American Empire, Democracy Now, Japan, Neoconservatives, Neoliberalism