Reflections on Hiroshima

I've wanted to write this entry for a while now, and I'm still not exactly sure how to start. There's a lot that I've been processing since the seminar on the bombing of Hiroshima began, and visiting the city took it up a notch.

The Atomic Bomb Dome - the gutted remains of a factory left from the explosion - wasn't shocking in the least bit, and my host mother said as much before I left. Rain has worn away most of the soot and human shadows left from the incineration. It's a UN Heritage Site, but I was surprised and a little disgusted to find it's treated as just another tourist destination. I couldn't count the number of people posing in front of it for pictures, both Japanese and foreigners.

After spending a few minutes at the Dome, we went into the museum to have a special audience with one of the hibakusha, an atomic bomb survivor. For someone who saw the things he saw, he was really friendly and even jovial, which caught me a little off guard. But he told his account unflinchingly, and I admire the kind of courage that must take.

Next was the museum, and that's where the information finally became too much to bear. When I saw a watch stopped at 8:15am, I just wanted to cry. From this point on, I stopped feeling so self-conscious about being an American, I think because of the magnitude of what happened. It sort of belittles discomfort like that.

My reactions to the museum and the seminar is still mainly disappointment. About the tourists taking pictures, about how quickly the seminar students moved on, about the lack of conclusion to the exhibit. The response everyone has is that this is a shocking and a horrible event in history, it should not be repeated, we should continue to debate against the use of nuclear weapons, etc.

The aftermath of the bombing may be shocking, but I do not think it's surprising. We have something of a mythos of World War II being a righteous retaliation in which the use of the atomic bomb stands out like a sore thumb, when it's not that simple. We never had a Hitler or a Tojo, but Patton's not a great response. And worse than the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, in my opinion, the use of incendiary bombs in Tokyo, a densely-packed city of wooden houses. American commanders knew and counted on this - in a single night of bombing, 100,000 people died. These bombings were a widespread policy in Japan, and to a lesser extent, Germany.

I know criticizing the Allied Powers is usually construed as justifying the actions of the other side, but I mean to do no such thing. I think the most horrible story I've heard about the war is the crimes by the Japanese army against the Okinawans at the close of the war, something the government here is trying to remove from textbooks. I really wish the Japanese people were as repentant of their government's actions as the Germans are, it would go a long way in healing historical wounds.

The reason that this isn't surprising is that it reflects the desires of the governments and the peoples of that era. You can see it in the propaganda from both sides and a way of thinking that in many ways continues today. And we say this is just part of human nature, that war is hell and people do evil things, but I think the degree of immorality and horror instead points to something that is inconsistent with human nature. It's not how we're supposed to live and we know it. It's not a perfect world in which generals consider human rights and governments pursue war prevention (tied intrinsically to poverty reduction) more aggressively than victory. This is a necessary world, the bare minimum.

Finally, a question I think is more important than the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima is the morality of of "total war," inflicting as much damage on a civilian population to end a war quickly on your terms. It's a tradition that goes back at least to Sherman in the Civil War and I'm sure goes back many more centuries. Doesn't this violate the so-called just war theory? It sure violates pacifism. Maybe this is something people can agree on and speak out against.

Mountains, Gandalf!

Hello, my poor, neglected blog and our poor, neglected readership. As hard as this is to believe, I am well over the halfway point of this semester abroad and time is passing quickly. Near the beginning I would have given a lot to spend a few days back in Evanston, but now part of me wishes that I could have studied abroad for an entire year.

Not to be outdone by Luke and Tom, I went with my program into to mountains to visit Shirakawa and Takayama, perhaps the only parts of Japan not accessible by a super-punctual express train. The region is famous for delicious beef, carpentry, and faceless baby good-luck charms. (Yeah, that was my reaction as well.)

But more beautiful than any of the historic houses or feudal palaces we visited was kouyou, the trees changing colors. Seasons and nature in Japan is more vivid and serene than anything I've seen in America or Europe, and the autumn scenery are no exception.


Tuesday afternoon is the beginning of my nearly week-long fall break, and I'm planning on using it to relax and read, since I've been doing quite a bit of traveling recently. Maybe I'll re-watch Casablanca - I love watching it all the more here because the Japanese subtitles fail miserably. And I hope to write something in the next few days about the trip to Hiroshima last week.

I miss you all, and although part of me is resisting the idea of leaving, I still look forward to winter, and have already started listening to my Charlie Brown Christmas CD.

This Weekend I'm Staying Home

Oh, hello blog-world. I sort of forgot all about you. Or more, I didn't feel like posting anything. But I have my peeps to please.

Where shall I start? After an extended period of sitting around and doing nothing, I decided to climb mountains. Specifically, the Alps. More specifically, the Dolomites. Happy?



The surrounding region, Trentino-Alto Adige, is inhabited by a German-speaking ethnic minority. Don't forget that large sections of Italy -- such as the Veneto, where I live -- were dominated by the Hapsburgs, rulers of Austria. This bilingual heritage is fully evident in street names such as "Luigi Heidelberg".

I got up to like, 10,000 feet. Then the air got thin and suddenly I wasn't sure which way was which. This resulted in me diving for the ground, in an attempt to not slide down the steep, gravelly glacial remains head-first. But it was pretty. Then I stumbled down the mountainside, a valley, and another mountainside, and after waiting an hour-and-a-half I found out that the bus doesn't actually come when the schedule says it does. So I found a cheap hotel in the dark and prayed that I wouldn't die.

Anyway, I showed up back home a day late and missed a family party. I apologized to Nonna, and she played Italian grandma and said things like, "It wasn't that great . . . Just the entire family . . . and big steaks. Wow, the countryside is such a beautiful place, up in the hills with such a panoramic view. You didn't miss much. I mean, it may have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but don't feel bad."

Upon hearing my account, Mom said she hoped I apologized to Nonna and that she must have been worried sick. Uh huh. She had my number and never called to find out if I was dead. Well, Nonna was busy having her revenge through nagging, which lasted a few days and included a new rule that I have to wear socks all the time because you get colds through your feet. Also, did she hear the part where I mentioned altitude sickness and being trapped, alone, in the mountains?

Next weekend I took no quarter and hit the Eurochocolate Festival in Perugia head-on. It is possible, my friends, to get sick off of chocolate liqueur samples. That stuff is thick. Also, you know a medieval city is way too high up on a hill when you reach downtown after riding three escalators.



This post is entirely uninteresting, my apologies.

Here is a picture of me holding a frozen octopus in September:



That should spruce things up a bit.

Sitting across from my friend Jesse in the mensa (caffeteria), I commented, "I always wondered what people were saying when they spoke in other languages."

"Well, now you know," he responded, pointing out the obvious.

"Yeah, either I'm busy saying something really nasty about the person standing next to me, or it's too private for everyone else's ears."

"But don't you think that's a bad idea? A lot of people here speak English," he reproved.

"Not at all. I'm careful. I know what I'm doing. I got lots of practice in Egypt."

5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1:

The girl sitting next to me turned and said in accented English, "So where are you guys from?"

I will never, ever learn my lesson.

New tactic: take over the blog with short posts.

One of the more aggravating features of Japanese is wasei-eigo, English used in a way that is completely foreign to us Anglophones. For example, the word "trainer" in Japanese means sweatshirt, and Japanese people inadvertently think that's how we use the word, too. My all-time favorite wasei-eigo is "secret boots" - thick-soled shoes worn by short men to make them appear few inches taller.

I have a new past-time, finding ways to tell jokes in Japanese. A recent success:

Host father: Jemuzu, MOCHI o taberu? (James, will you have some RICE CAKE?)
Me: MOCHIron. (Of COURSE.)

Allen, are you groaning?

自信

Possibly the most important thing study abroad teaches is the necessity of confidence. You need it to make friends, explore strange places, and talk to people in broken language on topics ranging from politics to how to use the toilet. Since you're continually outside your comfort zone, you have to act confidently or you're not going to get much from the experience, and will just spend all your time on the computer, or reading.

There are plenty of self-help books that tell you it's important to maintain the appearance of confidence to get what you want. But this is different, what I'm talking about is more like how children do things without worrying about getting hurt. To experience the fullness and goodness of life, you have to "make decisions out courage and hope, and not out of fear."

That's sometimes very hard.

I'm really not the Antiblogger! I think that title belongs to Dave.

Anyway, since I last posted, I have gone to Xi'an and again to Shanghai, and my host mom ripped a leg off of their pet cricket, and I have a passport again and have visited a church here.

Xi'an was fun; I saw the Terracotta Soldiers in all their unearthed and reconstructed glory, and I saw a Great Muslim Mosque from centuries past, and I saw the Big Goose Pagoda, and I saw some big tomb thingy, and assorted other goodies. I shall now indulge you with pictures, in no particular order.


This is the Big Goose Pagoda; in the bottom right corner you can see my fellow waiguoren (foreigners). We accidentally went to the Little Goose Pagoda first and felt very silly. It was not nearly so impressive, mainly because we couldn't see it behind the park walls. I didn't get to stay near the Big Goose Pagoda for very long, unfortunately, because I had to go back to the hostel to pick up my things and catch my train back to Nanjing.
This was at that tomb place (the Yangling Mausoleum of Emperor Jindi of the Western Han Dynasty, or so this little booklet I got there says). The actual mausoleum was under a big manmade hill, but that just looks like a big hill, so I decided to post a picture of this building, which is an exhibition hall for the outer storepits of the mausoleum. It was protecting some sort of large earthen structure which I suppose was the storepit; at any rate, I enjoyed the largeness and openness inside.

This is what the inside of the mausoleum looked like (actually, this may have been the inside of one of the storepits - it wasn't always clear what was what). These little guys were kind of like the Terracotta soldiers, except small, and without arms. And the were scattered around sort of like corpses. There were also numerous animals (livestock and such), along with weapons and vehicles and other exciting things that were buried here.


Intermission: The Chinese have a different conception of "take-out".


And now on to the Great Mosque! I took a lot of pictures here because the architecture was really cool, but I kept getting white people in all the pictures, like this one. Every time I saw a white person I felt like a tourist. Actually I felt like a tourist a lot of the time while I was in Xi'an, which made the whole experience considerably less enjoyable (Muslims continue to worship at this mosque, as well, which made me a little uncomfortable to be waltzing in taking pictures).


Last in my photos from Xi'an, the Terracotta Soldiers. Yep, there really are a lot of them. The Chinese have yet to finish excavating this site, but they estimate this pit (pit 1) to have about 6000 terracotta soldiers. They don't unearth them in such neat rows and standing and all put together; usually the soldiers have been broken into pieces and are all kind of mashed up, so it's very time consuming to put them together. But hey, when your country has 1.3 billion people, there's always someone with the time.

I liked the eerie green of this picture. I like to imagine that when there's no one around, everything gets an eerie green light, because that would be more interesting. However, I'm pretty sure there's always someone around.

I figure this has to be a long-forgotten relative of Joyce's (or rather, the cast of one).

The cricket story isn't interesting enough to warrant a full explanation, but suffice to say: the cricket got out of its cage. My host mom stuffed in back in, knocked off a leg in the process, and then commented "it doesn't need it anyway" and threw the leg out the window.

Church was interesting. I didn't understand most of what people were saying, but Esther gave me a brief runthrough of Chinese Christianese before I left, so I wasn't completely clueless. I did feel a little awkward when they seated me in the front pew, because I swear everyone there was extra short. I must have been at least a foot taller than everyone. Oh, and Dad - the Chinese sleep through sermons too.

Aliens

Tom says that I post too much, so I'm going to write something just to spite him. I firmly believe my weekly ramblings are required to contrast the profound cultural analysis of Herr Blogger. You see, his posts are so insightful that they each take a month to write.

I forgot to write about the second best* cheeseburger I've had in my life. It was day two of the Kanazawa trip and a group of us were looking for an arcade. We sort of got lost, and saw a sign for a fast food place called "Freshness Burger." With a title like that, we couldn't refuse, and were shocked, not just that the place was 50s-themed, but that the burgers were ... really really good. The beef was delicious, the buns and pickles were crisp, and savoring it was a nearly religious experience. Now, I'm sure that part of my reaction is due to the fact that I hadn't had a burger in over a month, but I think it's safe to say that it was much better than anything I've eaten at Steak 'n Shake or Culver's.

The following weekend, my host family took me to the Denmark theme park, wittily called "Denpark." It features ethnic food, Danish houses, an electric-powered windmill**, and a replica of the Hans Christian Anderson Little Mermaid statue. Now you may ask what Denmark is doing in the Chubu region of Japan - I don't really know, but I think there's some kind of sister-city relationship.

I am now a resident alien! It's still strange to think about that, but I have an ID card and everything. With all my fellow expatriates, we Americans make up a whopping 0.04% of the population. Something I didn't expect is the number of Iranians and Brazilians who live and work in the area. I'm under the impression that Westerners are something of the "model minority" - discrimination against us is rare, and usually limited to occasionally being barred from renting an apartment or entering an onsen - while Southeast Asians and South Asians are treated more like how Mexicans are treated in the States. I was told on one occasion to watch out for the Iranians, because "they sell drugs."

I wanted to write a long post about the different forms of discrimination in Japan, because it's pretty widespread and not very well-known. For example, did you know that there is actually an indigenous population in Japan (the Ainu) who have lived here many thousands of years longer than the ethnic Japanese, who are thought to have migrated from Korea or China at about 300 BC? The Ainu face conditions that are comparable to that of the Native Americans in the US, and the First Nations in Canada. Instead of going on and on, I would recommend those who are interested read the UN Commission on Human Rights report on Japan, or at the very least, look up "Ethnic issues in Japan" on Wikipedia.

And now for something completely different: a view of the area around my homestay.


* The best are the burgers at In-N-Out. Obviously.
** That made me laugh - usually windmills turn to generate electricity, not the other way around.

Inferno, Updated

How can one describe hell? I always assumed it was either filled with people running around on fire and screaming. Or maybe that Dante got it right and it would be even better.

From the window of the 20th-floor apartment in downtown Milan lent to us by our friend’s godfather, over all the thousands of city lights, the clearest landmark was the Duomo, the second largest Gothic cathedral in the world.



Of course, that was one of our first stops on our venture into the city the next morning. Not only is the outside breathtaking, with its more than 130 spires, the dimly-lit interior is surrounded by carvings and stained-glass depictions of angels battling demons, of saints and martyrs, the Blessed Virgin, and Jesus Himself.

A church so great is meant to inspire awe in the believer, and it worked, as I stood in the crowd of pilgrims and tourists mulling about the cavernous expanse. And I thought, maybe this is a place where I could find God. And I asked where He was. And I didn’t find Him.

Across the plaza rests the famous Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, containing many of Milan’s famous upscale shops. A short walk past that we found Via Montenapoleone, where are the most upscale boutiques of Prada, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, and Armani.





Few people were afraid to show their disgust for those considered poorly dressed (like me), looking us over and glaring at us. Trying to ask for directions often meant getting a hand in your face and a brisk excuse.

During our visit to another city called Mantova, we had toured the local Ducal Palace of the former ruling family and our art history professor explained the idea of Renaissance imagery and its effect on governance – that by reviving the ancient ideals, sculptures, and paintings of classical antiquity, a ruler could claim his place as a noble and rightful heir of political and cultural dominance.

Dominance, the conquest for power through appearance, the force with which we thrust others beneath our feet – that was the theme of the fashion capital of the world. The universe revolves around you because you have to care only for yourself, since nobody else does.

On one street, in the crush of the hundreds of people coursing through stores and markets, I saw a man with a disabled woman, and I envied him, because at that moment his life had purpose, and in that place, mine had none. He cared for someone, and I was there for myself, and I was then alone. He had love, and I had not.

Before my friends got to the train station, they saw a man collapse on the pavement. Since Italy is known for its thieves, they were afraid it was an act and moved away. And as they watched, people continued passing him, people who looked but did nothing, until one man yelled for someone to call an ambulance. Because it’s a world without love. A world where you can die but no one cares about you because they can only care for themselves.

And in the absence of love, there is the absence of God, and that is hell.

I just never expected it to be so glitzy.