Left: Tokyo air-raids 1944-1945 Center: The genocide guidebook disguised as an anthropological work Right: Its author Ruth Benedict
I read this book in Japanese translation when I was 13 years of age. Our teacher at the social studies classes was a son of Kazuo Aoki, former minister in charge of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in Tojo's junta. He told us to peruse it because we would find our own selves exquisitely described in the reading assignment. As he had promised, I found a lot of stereotypical characterization of "Tanaka San, the Japanese 'anybody'," as Benedict put it, but didn't find myself or my father at all there. I concluded that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is an anthropological rubbish.
Sixty years later, however, I somehow felt an urge to revisit the same crap because these days things on both sides of the Pacific seem to be unfolding as if people are still suffering the aftereffects from overdose of a toxic agent administered by the author. In recent years it's increasingly evident that people of my generation, and our children and grandchildren alike, feel deep inside that something has remained unsettled and that it's long overdue by now.
As for the U.S., Obama's silver tongue is on a roll more than ever. On April 5 at the Hradcany
Square in Prague, Czech Republic, he announced a bold plan to negotiate a new
strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia by the end of this year. As
usual he tried to get around the most sticking points involved in the issue he was talking about.
With the
exception of START I signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, any arms reduction deal has not been effectively implemented to date for various reasons. And more importantly, the hypocritical and unrealistic anti-nuke frameworks such as the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and the multilateral talks over the nuclear programs
of Iran and North Korea have long proved dysfunctional.
To gloss over the real issue, Obama said: "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act." The empty incantation, of course, heartened equally empty-headed Japanese people, especially the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's appalling to know these learning-disabled people still think we can undo what we've done in the past. If we could, still we shouldn't - because it's looking away from the ever-changing reality.
In Japan, the approval rating of the coalition government between the Liberal Democratic Party and Komei-to (the party backed by the legitimized cult Soka-Gakkai) has inched up since March thanks to the revelation of the wrongdoing
of Ichiro Ozawa, head of the Democratic Party of Japan, although his collusive
relations with the construction company is nothing but a sideline business
for the crook who has milked Japan's Defense Ministry in the last four
decades.
On May 11 Ozawa finally announced to step down as DPJ head to take responsibility for the irregularities he would never admit to. You won't understand his queer logic, if there is any logic at all, until after you read Ruth Benedict's book. This is a typical way a bandit takes responsibility in this country. On Saturday,
Yukio Hatoyama, one of Ozawa's henchmen, was "elected" to succeed
him as the party head.
As a result, by this fall we will see a general election for the House
of Representatives fought between the LDP headed by the grandson of Shigeru
Yoshida and the DPJ now headed by the
grandson of Ichiro Hatoyama. Yoshida always bragged about his "friendship" with Douglas MacArthur, but in fact, he was one of those who gave the general an indelible impression that all Japanese adults were 12 years old. Ichiro Hatoyama was the first prime minister under the 1955 System. As you already know, the political system known by that name is a trap artfully set up by MacArthur against the Japanese people.
This is an unmistakable sign that this nation has been going around in circles for the last 64 years amid the sea change you've seen everywhere else.
All this indicates that the unviable Japan is really invincible now. This country can't even collapse on its own, let alone change. That's why I made up my mind to part ways with 1.3K yen to purchase The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in its 2005 paperback edition from Mariner Books. I just wanted to have a fresh look into the collusive relations between the two peoples. · read more (2,135 words)
Tuesday, April 14 2009 @ 06:47 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 807
This is to review, at a time, some books that I have read and some others
that I haven't - and will never.
Recently my friend John H. (Jack) Wiegman sent me a thick copy of The Obama Nation - Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality authored by Jerome R. Corsi (Threshold Editions, 2008.) Although Jack
had warned me not to expect too much from the book, I found it sickeningly entertaining as well as dizzyingly revealing.
The author devotes a good part of the book to revealing how deliberately
Obama falsified the stories about himself and his father, who was an alcohol-addicted
polygamist, in his autobiography titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Three Rivers Press, 2004.) To that end, Corsi cross-checked and double-checked every detail of Obama's accounts of his family background. Thanks to the thorough scrutiny Corsi carried out on our behalf, I could avoid a wasteful investment of time and money to buy the book Obama
wrote when he was seeking a Senate seat.
The Obama Nation also helped me save some extra bucks. No one with commonsense would assume that Obama had been reborn to be an honest man by the time he got started with The Audacity of Hope; Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Vintage, 2007) in the midst of the presidential campaign. So I deleted this book, too, from my Amazon shopping cart.
On the other hand I found Corsi's book really worth reading. Yet the fact remains that it only gives us a half-truth about the Obama nation. When you are through with the book scrupulously sourced with some 680 footnotes, you have been reassured that the 44th President of the United States is an outright swindler. Then this question might crop up in your mind:
But so what?
There are millions of bandits in this world. Obama is just one of them. So the real problem lies with the voters, almost 70 million of them, who thought this guy could be the savior no matter whether he had deliberately misidentified himself. There are even signs that an increasing number of people are favorably disposed of the President even after witnessing his spendthrift habits.
This is something Corsi tried to avoid discussing in his book with the all-too-familiar trick of shifting blame to an easier target. He must have thought if he dared to address this side of the issue, his book wouldn't sell or his publisher Threshold Editions wouldn't buy the copyright. Actually it's quite understandable that he had to settle for just questioning his eligibility for the presidency amid the sweeping Obama craze, knowing it's almost crying over spilt milk.
My memory is too poor to keep track of the extraordinarily messy
family history of the U.S. President and contradictory statements he has
made on various occasions. But that doesn't really matter because after
all he has succeeded in duping the American people into sending him to
the White House, and more importantly because Corsi has proved that today's "professional" writers can't do any more than what he could in The Obama Nation. · read more (1,134 words)
Friday, March 13 2009 @ 03:05 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 886
I tend to go personal even when working on a book review because I don't believe
there is such a thing as impersonal truth.
One year or so ago I was writing a book about the fate of my home country to have it
published in the U.S. It was out of the question to use a Japanese publisher
because the book to have been titled The Unviable Japan was going to delve into the very core of the absolute taboo issues such as illegitimacy of the imperial institution. At the beginning, the American literary agent I was talking to was saying
it would become a bestseller. But the moment I gave the agent a preview
of the first draft of the synopsis, he changed his mind and started talking me out of further writing on. Over the telephone he subtly turned down my proposal even though the final proposal package had not been submitted yet..
He implied that I would not be accepted in the U.S. before establishing myself in my home country. From the beginning he had
known that I would not be accepted on my home turf. So he must have thought it was unfair to decline my proposal on that ground.
He tried to reinforce his rationale by saying American publishers and
their customers were too preoccupied at the moment with the presidential election and
the Iraq quagmire to show interest in Japan's fate - which was also what
he had already known when he said my book would become a bestseller.
American people I used know were very direct and straightforward in responding to me, either in the affirmative or in the negative, and giving the reason for that.
Most of the time they were confident about what they were talking about. They had not yet developed the American disease symptomized
by cynicism and hypocrisy dominating today's America. The literary agent should have saved me a lot
of time and money I spent for exchanging nicely worded e-mails and for placing lengthy collect calls for roundabout conversation.
Earlier this month I came across Bernard Goldberg's most recent book titled A Slobbering Love Affair when I was up to my daily routine of video mining on YouTube. I was looking
for newest pieces of info about his take on the post-election climate of the United States. Some six years ago, I was quite impressed by the bestselling Bias (2002, Medium Cool) authored by the former star correspondent with CBS News soon after he was fired by Dan Rather
because of his op-eds in the Wall Street Journal (1996 and 2001.) In these op-ed pieces he accused the mainstream media of their liberal bias
A Slobbering Love Affair bears a lengthy subtitle that goes: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama
and the Mainstream Media. One of my American friends warned me that I would learn nothing new from
the book, but I went ahead and placed a rush order for my copy with Amazon.com
at a price of $17.13 plus $26.98 for shipping and handling. I knew my American
friend was right, but I thought I might want to resume working on the once
mothballed book if ever I could learn some secret from Goldberg to make my book truthful
and salable at the same time. While its subtitle promises the author is
telling the true story, the book made the NYT list of bestselling books,
albeit temporarily. · read more (1,125 words)
Sit down at your computer, write down on sheets of paper whatever crops
up in your mind and bind them together. And they call it a book. And if some
of the readers discover something distinctively new there, and yet, can empathically relate to your story, they call it an excellent book, no matter whether the prestigious
code called the International Standard Book Number is assigned to it. The
way of sharing thoughts and emotions through publication should be as simple as
that.
In reality, however, this is not the way things work in today's publishing industry. Unlike savvy and audacious venture capitalists,
publishers and literary agents almost always recoil from a genuinely new
idea - so I hear. The agent is so timid that the moment he finds a totally
unfamiliar thought in the manuscript at hand, he gets extremely nitpicky
over trifles such as a typo or a wrong hyphenation. That is the only way
he can turn down the submission and still look like a reputable agent.
This is really inevitable because in the days of desktop publishing and
e-books, his survival is at stake in driving a wedge between the sender
of the message and its intended receiver, instead of bringing them together.
I am not sure if this is the case with John H. (Jack) Wiegman's Tales of Our Germans. But certainly this has something to do with the fact that the brilliant
author does not seem to have attempted to obtain a 13-digit ISBN.
Tales of Our Germans consists of 30 anecdotes which are loosely connected to each other, and some 50 faded monochrome pictures from family albums are scattered throughout the book. The central figure in most of these episodes is a German immigrant by the name of Dutch Henry Wiegman, author's paternal grandfather, who settled down in what is now called the state of Washington in the Civil War era. In those days the prairie was inhabited only by coyotes and buffaloes, which made the life of the new comer to the New World extremely difficult. Over time Wiegman learned how to deal with the wildlife, how to mix with different ethnic groups, how to make a family, how to educate kids and how to minimize the fatal damage from frequent thunderbolts and deadly epidemic · read more (461 words)
Sunday, March 04 2007 @ 03:37 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 2,715
Chapter I, Article 1 of the Constitution defines the Emperor's role like this:
"The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people." In fact, though, it remains ambiguous what exactly the former living god has transformed itself into after the war defeat to perform the constitutional duty newly assigned to it. It also falls short of describing the role to be played by the symbol's spouse.
In his controversial book Princess Masako - Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne (Random House Australia, 2006), Ben
Hills looks to have felt an urge to fill the gap for the Japanese
who have remained uncomfortable with their fundamental law since its promulgation six decades ago. The author is one of Australia's leading
investigative journalists and a winner of the Walkley Award, Australia's
Pulitzer Prize, and was stationed here for three years in the 1990s as
a Tokyo correspondent.
Back in 2000, an equally intriguing book titled Closing the Shop was released from Princeton University Press. Its author, Laurie
Anne Freeman, mercilessly uncovered the dark secret about Japan's 117-year-old Kisha kurabu (press club) system which she calls
the information cartel. Even though not a single "independent"
publisher, to date, has dared to publish its Japanese version simply because putting the very foundation of the fourth estate in question is an absolute no-no in this country, that has
left the other one of the two ultimate taboos to be challenged by another insightful
and courageous author - the Imperial institution,
which Douglas MacArthur decided six decades ago to let go unpunished for its war responsibility just for practical reasons. That's where Ben Hills came in.
Under the circumstances it was only to be expected that on February 13, the Japanese Foreign Ministry called a press conference
in Tokyo to denounce the author and his publisher, Random House, quibbling
over "distortion of facts" and "false and insulting characterization"
of the royal family and the Japanese people it represents.
Then came the announcement by Kodansha,
one of the major publishers "independent" of the Big 4 media
empires. On February 16 the publishing company said that it wouldn't go ahead
with its original plan to publish the Japanese version of Princess Masako in deference to the tacit pressure from the government. Obviously the same old self-censorship mechanism, which they call jishu-kisei or voluntary restraint, was at work on the part of Kodansha. · read more (1,828 words)
Earlier this month TokyoFreePress took up for its book review Say
Good-bye to Zombies by Benjamin Fulford, former Asia Pacific Bureau chief at Forbes magazine. In that piece I wrote that there are two unignorable logical flaws, as summarized below, involved in the otherwise
truthful and revealing book:
1) Despite his repeated reference to the "Iron Square", Fulford
actually addresses issues with a rotten hexagon formed by politicians,
bureaucrats, businesses, yakuza, the mainstream media, and "ordinary
people" from Chapter 1 "The Last Year" through
Chapter 5 "A Guide to Hell". But in the last two chapters ("The Yokota Shogunate" and "A Road to Revitalization") the author conveniently acquits the
last two elements of the hexagon and calls on them to join forces with him
to fight the other four.
2) In the first six chapters, the author uses a train analogy to describe
the "Koizumi locomotive" giving his people a ride to hell. But
in the last chapter, the train all of a sudden turns to a bus so you can
drive it in any direction you will choose.
I thought the inconsistencies were understandable, or even forgivable. He has an old friend in Kobunsha, the
publisher of this book. And as he hints in the book, Say Good-bye to Zombies wouldn't have had its day had it not been for his longtime friendship
with the chief editor at the publisher. I suspect even this person, however
open-minded he might be, must have hesitated to publish the book if Fulford
hadn't used the rather transparent gimmicks.
Now that I've reread the book more carefully, though, I realized that he uses some other
tricks here and there which he borrowed from the mainstream media. Now I am sure his hocus-pocus is not really well-intended. I know if I liken him to Michael Moore, he will take it as a compliment. But you've got to be stupid yourself, white or not, and a con man at the same time to make a fortune by writing a book about stupid men to sell it to millions of the same folks. It seems that Fulford actually intended to write a book about zombies to reap a handsome amount of royalty from the same host of zombies who are traditionally all suckers to Westerners.
The
following are some of these fallacies he has deliberately implanted all over his book: · read more (2,052 words)
Friday, March 03 2006 @ 06:35 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 2,598
As I wrote in "Ryu Murakami's fictitious scenario is more realistic than media's
factual stories" (May 10, 2005, TokyoFreePress), I have made it a
rule not to read any book, magazine or newspaper, written in Japanese because my mother tongue is the world's most suitable language to conceal or gloss over the truth. Yet every once
in a while I come across a Japanese book, just by accident, whose title somehow makes me feel like giving it a try.
Say Good-bye to Zombies authored by Benjamin Fulford, former Asia-Pacific Bureau chief at Forbes,
is one of those books. Basically this is a Japanese book because Fulford wrote it in Japanese (so it seems), his target readers are Japanese and he is now thinking about becoming naturalized here. I think I made a good decision because the amount of undistorted facts
and truths presented in this 329-page book is equivalent to, or even exceeds, what little facts and truths you can expect throughout the year from the newspaper you subscribe to.
The first half of the Preface is devoted to an imaginary, but realistic, parting shot Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi delivers when leaving office in September. In the fictitious farewell address Koizumi tells the nation all the truths, for the first time, about his "reform" programs. In the last half of the Preface, Fulford
cites a passage from Luke 23-34 of the New Testament. It goes: "And
Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." He seems to think the ignorant people are forgivable. But he is not that sympathetic when he quotes Joseph Goebbels immediately following the citation from the Bible. Before he took a dose of cyanide in May 1945, Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister said: "I don't sympathize with the German people because they
entrusted [their destiny] with us. In other words, they deserved all this." It seems to me the two contradictory citations are already indicative of the characteristic of this book which starts with merciless revelations of the state crime and ends with a bland and banal appeal for the renovation of Japan out of some sentimental reasons on the part of the author. · read more (1,217 words)
Monday, February 27 2006 @ 06:37 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 1,789
"Nuclear Showdown" and its author
There is one thing I always have difficulty understanding. Some bookworms seem to be buying books only to nitpick on them. Obviously they don't care too much about maximizing their return on investment. But it's basically none of my business if they feel like sharing their single-star or 2-star assessment with others by posting their nasty
remarks on the Amazon website, because that doesn't do any harm to anyone.
Also beyond my comprehension are supposedly professional book editors in Japan's major media organizations
who sometimes take up books they don't like only to quibble with them. Unlike amateur reviewers whose pastime is fault-finding, these guys
are inexcusable because they make their living on reviewing someone else's
works, instead of writing their own. And it's these "professional"
book reviewers who, instead of
giving valid tips on whether to buy them or how to make the most of the
investment, constantly misrepresent the authors to those who cannot
afford the time, or money, to read these books by themselves, or are undecided on whether to buy them. James Hardy, the Daily Yomiuri's staff writer, falls on this category.
Wednesday, November 09 2005 @ 04:15 AM CST
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 5,094
The Preface of Closing the Shop (Princeton University Press, 2000) is already quite revealing of the truth about the Japanese
press. The author tells here how she could sneak into kisha (press) clubs attached to the Liberal Democratic Party, the Diet, the
Prime Minister's office and other ministries. Some journalists at the Asahi Shimbun, who understandably
wanted to remain anonymous throughout the book, helped Freeman get into
these exclusive clubs as a "participant observer."
In fact it wasn't that simple. But Freeman was smart enough to find the smallest
crevice through which to infiltrate these clubs. First, she took advantage
of the trait of her sponsors at the Asahi. Just like anyone else in this
nation, her Asahi friends showed her their utmost hospitality which is
strictly reserved for foreigners, especially Westerners. If she were a
Japanese writer, the Asahi would never have done her the same favor. Secondly, one of her conspirators could "cash in on a debt [the LDP
politician] owed him." As Freeman observes, cozy relationships between journalists and politicians have always been governed by the principle of reciprocity since the birth of the first kisha club in 1890.
That's how she finally obtained a special ID card. Freeman writes: "The solution the Asahi political journalists devised in order to get me past the guards and the reception areas ... was as ingenious as it was illuminating." Admittedly her revelation of the status quo with the Japanese press comes
as no surprise. But to the best of my knowledge this book is the first-ever
account given first-hand by an independent witness of the devils' abode from which
no one has ever come back alive, so to speak. · read more (2,367 words)
This is to follow up the TokyoFreePress's first book review which dealt with Gordon G. Chang's "The Coming Collapse of China."
This book has stirred up a lot of controversy in the sense that reviews by
readers and editors have been widely divided between the 5-star rating and the single-star grade, both at home and in the other part of the world. Very few people have rated it as an unimpressive 3-star reading.
Those who rated the book below 3-stars said the Gordon G. Chang's scenario
was just inconceivable, or totally unrealistic. · read more (646 words)
On May 23 visiting China's Deputy Prime Minister Wu Yi abruptly cut short
her itinerary here canceling the planned meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi. Afterward China's foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan cited, as the reason for the last-minute cancellation, unrepentant
Koizumi's remarks that had hinted he had no intention to refrain in the
future from his annual visit to Yasukuni Shrine where 2.5 million war dead
as well as 14 "Class A" war criminals are enshrined.
Back on May 16, the Prime Minister reportedly defended his pathological
obsession with the Shrine even by quoting Confucius. He said: "The
Chinese often criticize me of paying homage to the souls of the dead including
those of Class A war criminals. But isn't it Confucius who preached, 'Condemn
the offense, but pity the offender"? This could have rubbed Hu Jintao up the wrong way.
The China's uncompromising stance toward the Yasukuni "issue" has been paying off thus far. According to the May 30 issue of the Asahi Shimbun,
in the most recent poll conducted by the most pro-Beijing daily, 49% of
the respondents disapproved Koizumi's Shrine visit, while 39% of the pollees
still supported him on this "issue." Even Yasuhiro Nakasone,
former Prime Minister (1982 - 1987) known for his right-leaning ideological
stance, has started trying to dissuade his distant successor Koizumi from
revisiting the Shrine. The old one, himself, visited the Shrine in his
official capacity in 1985 but he went there never again in deference to
China. · read more (1,678 words)
Tuesday, May 10 2005 @ 06:44 AM CDT
Contributed by: Y.Yamamoto
Views: 4,377
What it takes to be a first-rate writer
When I was in my teens and early-20s, I was a book worm. And my reading
included Japanese literary works. Around the time the award-winning crap
by Shintaro Ishihara, "Season of the sun," came out, I realized
that it would be a sheer waste of time to read fictions authored by contemporary
Japanese writers, even including Kenzaburo Oe, although the Nobel laureate could have been a sole exception. Ever since
I haven't read a single novel made in Japan. Hence all I had known about
Ryu Murakami was his name, until I somehow came across his most recent
book, "Hanto wo ideyo", or "Leaving the Peninsula behind" in my tentative translation.
In my opinion every top-notch writer is gifted with two different qualities, i.e.:
1) Analytical/inductive ability which gives him a good insight into what we really are and where we are now, and
2) Imaginative/intuitive ability which gives him a good foresight of where we are heading.
Where there is a climate in which most professional writers opt to prohibit themselves from facing taboo issues head on, as is the case with this nation, a certain amount of imaginative or intuitive ability, alone, won't produce
anything but a predictable, boring and empty figment. This holds true with
both fiction writers and nonfiction writers, including journalists. This
is why I haven't read a single book authored by a contemporary Japanese, fiction or non-fiction, in the last four decades. And this is why I buy a newspaper or two at the newsstand
every morning only in anticipation of the faintest clues to what is really going
on. · read more (2,331 words)
When I read Gordon G. Chang's "The Coming Collapse of China",
one of the greatest books in this decade, I was struck by the resemblance
between Japan and China. At every page dealing with widespread corruption,
the way they are passing problems around between SOEs (state-owned enterprises)
and financial institutions, including AMCs (asset management companies),
pervasive self-deception and ubiquitous human rights abuse, I was under
the illusion that the author was addressing the issue with the possible collapse
of Japan, not China. At least I am certain I was looking at the mirror
reflection of Japan in China as scrutinized by Gordon G. Chang, minutely
and boldly.
· read more (568 words)
Sit down at your computer, write down on sheets of paper whatever crops
up in your mind and bind them together. And they call it a book. And if some
of the readers discover something distinctively new there, and yet, can empathically relate to your story, they call it an excellent book, no matter whether the prestigious
code called the International Standard Book Number is assigned to it. The
way of sharing thoughts and emotions through publication should be as simple as
that.
Chapter I, Article 1 of the Constitution defines the Emperor's role like this:
"The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people." In fact, though, it remains ambiguous what exactly the former living god has transformed itself into after the war defeat to perform the constitutional duty newly assigned to it. It also falls short of describing the role to be played by the symbol's spouse.
Earlier this month TokyoFreePress took up for its book review 
As I wrote in 
The Preface of 
