Japan (2)

No sooner had I finished writing the previous entry when I ran into a newspaper story about Japan and, specifically, Hiroshima which reminded me of many things. Firstly, That Japan is the only country on which a nuclear weapon - in fact two - has been dropped, a fact which serves two different narratives (maybe three) that I am familiar with. There is the "they deserved it" narrative, less commonly heard now than in the 60's, but still audible in the background, and the related "only way to finish the war" narrative (this is the hypothetical third narrative, because it's not completely clear how different it is from the "just deserts" story). Opposing those is the questioning of the USA's geo-political morality, called into question by the fact that they are the only country to have actually used this horrendous weapon - a weapon so terrible that they claim no-one else should be allowed to use. This reminds me, not quite tangentially, of the curious Clint Eastwood double, "Iwo Jima" / "Flags of Our Fathers", films by an actor/director who simultaneously stands for moral certainty (Harry Callahan) and ambivalence (any of his westerns), offering some kind of even-handedness in their discussion of the US-Japan war.

Secondly - that took a long time coming - I was reminded of how much information comes from newspapers ( I read three every day, pretty much) and how hard it is to access information systematically which has been gathered unsystematically. IF I stop to think about newspapers as a source, then suddenly I realise that I "know" "lots" about Japanese domestic politics, media, banking & foreign policy, which receive probably more coverage in American newspapers than any individual European country - although less than Europe in toto - a statistic that reflects Japan's place as a superpower of the late 20th/early 21st century.

Thirdly I was reminded how hard it is to give a comprehensive account of something; how unreliable the brain is.This was immediately reinforced when I got down to mapping out the notional opening sentence of this blog - "My first impression of Japan was ..." - because my first idea of a first impression was the luxuriance of the rice paddies around Narita airport and I realised that I had omitted something else from my list of preconceptions about Japan, that being the repeated images of childhood geography featuring Asia as a rice-dependant world. Images of flooded paddies, bent or squatting farmers, straw hats, terraced mountains, images of Asia as a non-technological world. And this, irritatingly, is not even the final equivocation that I have to make before starting the story, because my real first impression - and I promise, no more distractions - was in the departure lounge at Sydney airport, where JAL had more staff than I have ever seen in an airport lounge, organising passengers, handing out information, managing the queue, providing a level of service that I don't really remember ever having seen before. This, too, was something I had heard about Japan - legendary customer service and attention to detail. It was in evidence everywhere - even foreign airports.

For all that, economy class, even on JAL, is pretty much cattle class. Nothing to report, except to say that the in-seat TV screens are a boon. Probably the games are more playable for a generation that grew up with Nintendo game controllers, but I certainly improved over the four legs. Particularly pleasing was the Shogi (Japanese Chess) program, which gave me a chance to get a feel for the game. My feeling is that I need a lot of practice! In particular, the sudden reappearance of what used to be your pieces, attacking your king, is disconcerting. Also, the knights are even less use than in Chinese chess (they appear to only move forward to two squares - in Chinese chess the knight can move to the same eight locations as in European, but may be blocked by a piece orthogonally adjacent). Plus, the gold & silver generals take a while to integrate. Anyway, it's certainly less humiliating to lose your first few games against a computer.