Monthly Archives: August 2004

by | 15 August 2004 · 2:11 pm

Early Baseball Addict, Sir Chentung Liang Cheng

Probably the most famous baseball-addicted member of the Chinese Educational Mission [to the U.S. in the 1870s] was Liang Pixu, also known as Liang Pe Yuk, Pi Yuk, and, later, as Sir Chentung Liang Cheng. A member of the final detachment of students, he was just twelve years old when he arrived in the United States in 1875. He was in his third year of college preparatory work at Phillips Andover Academy when the mission was scuttled in 1881. Liang Pixu would return to the United States years later as China’s top diplomatic representative, but not before he gained a measure of fame in New England as a clutch-hitting baseball star. His reputation was made in a game between Phillips Andover Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy in 1881, just weeks before the Chinese Educational Mission was called home.

Andover and Exeter were bitter rivals. The two schools were founded just five years apart–Andover in 1778 and Exeter in 1783–and were located just twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) from each other–Andover in the northeastern corner of Massachusetts and Exeter in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire. They attracted the elite of New England, who, like students everywhere, were prone to measure their pride as readily in athletics as in academics. The first time the two schools met on a baseball field was in 1878, the centenary of Andover’s founding, when Exeter crushed Andover 11-1. Three years later, though, Andover got its revenge with a 13-5 win at Exeter. The star of that sweet victory was outfielder Chentung Liang Cheng, who drove in three runs with a pair of key extra-base hits under ugly circumstances. Seeing a Chinese student wearing the flannel baseball uniform of their bitter rivals, the Exeter fans behaved predictably. They greeted Chentung Liang Cheng with derisive ethnic jeers that played on the racial stereotypes of the times, yelling: “Washee, washee; chinkee go back benchee.” Chentung Liang Cheng ignored the taunts and responded by hitting the first pitch he saw for a two-run triple. An inning later, he doubled home another run.

Judging from accounts of other baseball games of the times, the ethnic jeers that greeted Chentung Liang Cheng at Exeter were but a trivial annoyance. An Andover official recalled arriving at another baseball game on that campus and finding “the air blue from the smoke of exploding firecrackers hurled at the players by the respective opposition. In addition, a small cannon was installed near first base. Loaded with grass and dirt, from time to time it added to the hazards of trying to play on the diamond itself. Any base runner had to bury his face in his arms to protect his eyes, if not his life.” Baseball games in New England at the time were chaos–much as they would be in Korea a century later.

There was chaos of a different kind when Chentung Liang Cheng and his Andover teammates returned home from their win over Exeter. In a speech he delivered twenty-two years later to mark the 125th anniversary of the founding of Phillips Academy, Sir Chentung Liang Cheng described the scene. “When the train arrived with the victorious nine, the whole school turned out to welcome (us) with torchlights, a brass band and an omnibus drawn by enthusiastic students with long rope,” he recalled. “Even Rome could not have received Caesar with greater enthusiasm and pride when he returned from his famous campaigns in triumph.”

The joy of baseball and of that triumphant moment stayed with Chentung Liang Cheng the rest of his remarkable life. After returning to China, he spent years in service of the Qing Dynasty government, rising steadily through the diplomatic ranks. In 1897, while serving in London as secretary to the Special Chinese Embassy to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, Liang Cheng was named an Honorary Knight Commander of Michael and George. At that time, he placed his Western “courtesy name,” Chentung, before his family name to more readily conform to British custom. Had he failed to do so, his English-speaking friends inevitably would have called him Sir Liang, which would have been as wholly inappropriate as referring to Winston Churchill as Sir Churchill after his knighthood. Decorum decrees the nomenclature should be Sir Winston and Sir Chentung.

The crowning moment of Sir Chentung’s diplomatic career came on July 12, 1902, when he became China’s minister to the United States–the emperor’s ambassador to Meiguo–a post he held until July 3, 1907. He was a natural at the job, fostering good relations on every level, from the White House to the New England schoolrooms where he had gotten his education years earlier.

In 1905, three decades after he left China as a twelve-year-old student, Sir Chentung wrote an article for a youth magazine in the United States in which he used baseball, among other games, to explain the wonders of life in his adopted country. “In a Chinese school it is all work and no play,” he wrote. “There is no intermission from morning till night except for meals. There is no recess during school hours. There are no regular holidays, like Saturdays and Sundays, to break the monotony of daily routine. There is no summer vacation to look forward to as a season of relaxation and freedom.” Things were different in the United States. “Here work is seasoned with play. Baseball, football, and other athletic sports furnish the necessary outlets for the escape of the superfluous energy of youth. In fact, what is positively forbidden to a schoolboy in China may be freely enjoyed to the full in America.” The lengthy article was accompanied by a line drawing of a batter swinging at a ball and two photographs–one showing Liang Cheng in his Andover baseball uniform and one showing him as he appeared in 1903, dressed in elegant Chinese robes.

Liang Cheng was proud of his baseball experience and believed his proficiency at such an intrinsically American game helped his diplomatic career in Washington. Once, shortly after taking his post, Sir Chentung met U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who said an old friend recently told him he thought the new Chinese minister played baseball for Andover and helped win a championship with a key hit in the 1880s. Sir Chentung happily confirmed the story, and Roosevelt asked who had been the best player on that Andover team? The new minister temporarily abandoned his Chinese manners and diplomatic reserve and replied simply, he was. “From that moment the relations between President Roosevelt and myself became ten-fold stronger and closer,” Liang Cheng said.

SOURCE: Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia, by Joseph A. Reaves (U. Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 24-27

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by | 15 August 2004 · 1:41 am

Unknown Regional Baseball Rules

All baseball teams in the Olympics may play by the same set of international rules, but there are many, many variations at national, local, and league levels. Here are some of the hitherto unknown rules of the game in different parts of the world.

  • In Mongolia, baseball is played on horseback, but without saddles. The horses wear shinguards and shaffrons. If the pitcher beans either the batter or his horse, the batter is awarded first base–provided he manages to stay on the horse.

  • In the U.S. Beantown League, by contrast, any batter who is beaned is permitted to go directly to second base–by way of the pitcher’s mound, but without the bat.

  • In Philippines Peoplepowerball, the spectators in the stands are permitted to throw an umpire out of the game if they disagree with the call. The hometeam usually wins.

  • In U.S. Ownerball, the owners of the opposing teams are permitted to place bids with the homeplate umpire for as many as three strikes and four balls per game. The richer owner’s team often wins.

  • In the sparsely populated Australian Outback, where the outfield is the outback and a home run is a walkabout, Ockerball only requires three players (and 27 beers) per side. On the tiny islands of the Torres Straits, this is known as Beach Baseball.

  • China’s Iron Ricebowl League, by contrast, allows up to 18 players per side, two at each field position. In ideal cases, one is a better fielder and the other a better hitter, but in actual practice, one is usually an unambitious young person and the other an elder dependent.

  • In China, spitballs are permitted.

  • In Korea and the Philippines, hot dogs are served in bowls, not buns.

  • In Japan, tie games are permitted, but not counted as wins or losses. In Canada and New Zealand, a tie game is regarded as a win-win.

  • Japanese Pro Baseball allows foreign players, but with restrictions: only two foreign players are permitted in the field at any one time, and only one foreign player is allowed to be on base at any one time. If a foreign player comes up to bat when another is already on base, the former must either bring the latter home, sacrifice to move him forward, or strike out. (A walk, whether intentional or not, will advance the lead runner unless the manager of the team at bat elects to replace the batter with a native-born pinch runner. This is an example of how protectionism breeds regulatory excess.)

  • In China, first base is down the left foul line and base runners run clockwise around the diamond. In Taiwan, first base is down the right foul line and base runners run counter-clockwise around the diamond.

  • North Korea requires all players to bat, throw, and pitch left-handed. South Korea used to require all players to play right-handed, but its new Sunshine Policy now requires all players to be ambidextrous. The home team must play right-handed and the visitors left-handed.

  • In the Micronesian Lagoon League, the ball field is underwater and the infield must be at least 1 meter deep. A hit that lands in the ocean outside the atoll is a home run, and one that touches the land qualifies as a ground-rule double, even if it rolls into the ocean.

  • In the old Siberian League, the bases were 90 meters apart, the outfield barbed wire was at least 500 meters distant, the 50-meter warning track was mined, umpires were armed, and guard towers were placed at the end of each foul line. Home runs were extremely rare, but ground balls could go a long way on the ice if they got past the outfielders, and mine-rule doubles were fairly common.

SOURCES: Herodotus, Confuseus, Marco Polo, Reuters, Katie Couric, faroutliars

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by | 14 August 2004 · 12:04 pm

McGrath: A special Olympic guide

I can sympathize more than a bit with columnist Jon McGrath as he opines on Olympic coverage.

The Olympics start today, and NBC is planning 24-hour-a-day coverage on its various networks….

But with so much coverage, no one can see it all. Here’s one suggestion to narrow your viewing: weed out the events that aren’t real sports.

My first rule of thumb is a simple one: if the results of a contest are solely decided by a judge or panel of judges, it is not a sport.

It is a skill. It is an event. It is a spectacle. It is something I could never do well if you gave me my whole life to train, but it is not a sport.

In addition to the “no judge rule,” there are a few rules I have to further define a sport.

First, the term “Degree of Difficulty” can never, ever be used to help determine the outcome.

Can you imagine if baseball had such a rule? Let’s say Manny doubles in Johnny Damon with a tying run in the bottom of the ninth. The umpire could then decide that, because Manny hit a nasty slider, low and away, on an 0-2 count, that he really deserves a home run because the pitch was much more difficult to hit than a fastball down the middle. Manny trots home, game over. It’s ridiculous to even suggest.

You could argue that baseball has umpires and football has referees, etc. It is not the same. Those officials are there to enforce the rules, not decide who is best. Sure, they make mistakes that affect games, but they are not the sole arbitrators of who wins and loses.

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by | 14 August 2004 · 11:20 am

Black Ships, Bêsubôru, and Big Macs

Baseball reached Japan the way it reached most of the rest of Asia, courtesy of missionaries and the military during the heady days of U.S. expansion. Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his Black Ships in 1853 and forced the Japanese to end nearly three hundred years of feudal isolation and open their ports to the West. Little more than a decade later, the Japanese embarked on a national revolution, the Meiji Restoration, designed to unite the country under a strong central leadership and avoid foreign domination by embracing those areas such as education, technology, and military tactics where the West seemed superior.

During the early years of the Meiji Era (1867-1912), Horace Wilson, a young American brought in to teach history and English at Tokyo’s Kaisei Gakkô (now Tokyo University), introduced his students to the fundamentals of baseball. The exact date, even the year, seems lost in history. But it was some time between 1867 and 1873 because by the latter year, another American teacher, Albert Bates, is credited with organizing the first formal baseball game in Japan. That game was played at Kaitaku University in Tokyo and is widely accepted as the birth of baseball in Japan.

Few historians, and even fewer fans, realize that baseball was being played in China more than a decade before Bates organized the first game in Japan. Baseball can trace its roots in China back to at least 1863, when the Shanghai Baseball Club was formed, two generations before the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. But while baseball was confined mainly to the expatriate community and a scant few Western schools in China, the game was almost immediately popular in Japan–first among elite university students and later among the population at large.

By 1878, Japan had its first organized team, the Shinbashi Athletic Club Athletics, founded by railway engineer Hiroshi Hiraoka, who had become a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan while studying in the United States. By the 1890s, baseball was hailed as “the fastest-growing college sport” in Japan. And by 1922, University of Chicago coach and educator Nels Norgren declared baseball already had become “more the national sport of Japan than it is of America.”

A world war that pitted the baseball-loving lands of Japan and the United States against one another did little to slow the progress of the sport in Asia. If anything, the war quickened and legitimized devotion to baseball in Japan–and thence the rest of Asia. True, the dream of U.S. Army Major Roger B. Doulens still is a long way from reality. Doulens wrote to The Sporting News in March 1946 and painted a picture of the happy day–perhaps, he said, as early as 1955–when a shortstop for the Shanghai Spartans of the Yellow River League might be sold to the New York Giants for 500,000 Chinese dollars.

By 1955, Chinese dollars had fled the mainland to Taiwan. There were no Shanghai Spartans, no Yellow River League. And there certainly wasn’t a shortstop within a thousand miles of Shanghai who could displace Alvin Dark of the Giants. But nearly half a century later, amateur baseball is gaining a measure of popularity in China. A baseball stadium recently was built in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. Professional baseball leagues–highly competitive leagues–flourish in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Australia. And nearly every country in Asia and Oceania competes in both the amateur International Baseball Association and the worldwide Little League baseball program.

Just as in the Americas, where the United States is baseball’s foremost power, so, too, in Asia one nation dominates the sport. Japan is the keeper and guiding light of Asian baseball. The style of play and strategy, the reaction of fans and players–even the way games are officiated and reported–all mirror Japanese values, not American. That is why scoreboards in Japan, and across Asia, have an extra column labeled “B” for bases on ball. A walk may not count as an official at bat, but it helps the team and therefore deserves a place of prominence on the scoreboard.

In 1981, Masaru Ikei, professor of Japanese diplomatic history at Keio University, wrote: “Baseball, in Japan, though an imported sport, has been assimilated into the natural culture. Japanese values have suffused the sport.” Ikei, of course, was correct. But he could have gone further. Confucian values have become rooted in baseball and have helped define the game in Asia. The Great American Game has become the Great Japanese Game in Asia largely because the Japanese suffused it with social and cultural priorities that more closely mirror their society–and those of their neighbors–than they do in North, and even South, America, where all too often money means everything and “me” is more important than “we.”

To many baseball fans in North and South America, that might sound like heresy. But to most Japanese it is reality. The Japanese have done to baseball what they did to McDonald’s hamburgers. They have taken something once thought to be “uniquely American” and turned it into something that is, without question, “intensely Japanese.”

When McDonald’s decided to expand to Japan, the company chose as its partner a Japanese businessperson who was at once both rebel and conservative. Den Fujita broke the Japanese stereotype of the team player who owed his loya!ty and identity to one of Japan’s prestigious giant corporations. He was an aggressive entrepreneur who struck it rich at age twenty-five by starting his own business importing U.S.-made golf shoes and clubs. Yet Fujita was inherently conservative enough to understand and exploit the paradox of the Japanese, who envied the success of the West but cherished their own culture to the point of exclusion. “All Japanese have an inferiority complex about anything that is foreign because everything in our culture has come from the outside,” Fujita once said. “Our writing comes from China, our Buddhism from Korea, and after the war, everything new, from Coca-Cola to IBM, came from America. Japanese people are basically anti-foreigner. We don’t like the Chinese, we don’t like the Koreans, and we especially don’t like the Americans because we lost the war to them.”

Fujita knew those feelings, and he knew how to use them to make a success of McDonald’s. He created and carefully nurtured the impression that McDonald’s was for all intents and purposes a Japanese invention. A survey done in the 1970s confirmed that the vast majority of young people in Japan believed McDonald’s was a Japanese company. A similar survey done in late 1997 by Harvard University scholar James L. Watson revealed Hong Kong University students were unaware that McDonald’s was a U.S. company. And in an article written for Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000, Watson cited other examples of the “localizations” of McDonald’s, including a story about the children of colleagues from Taiwan and South Korea who were overjoyed to see the Golden Arches in the United States. “Look! They have our kind of food here,” an eight-year-old South Korean shouted.

Much the same kind of localization, acculturation, and assimilation has occurred with baseball. The Japanese took a foreign product and made it their own–then became a driving force, and comforting example, in helping the same thing happen in other areas of Asia.

SOURCE: Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia, by Joseph A. Reaves (U. Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 14-16

“Special books don’t come along too often – if you are capable of looking past MLB then this book is a must read; it will change your whole take on America’s game.

Only twice before have I given a book a perfect 4-ball rating – but this one gets it with no reservations at all. Run – don’t walk to your local store to get a copy of this one, or better yet order it [here].” –Jonathan Leshanksi, athomeplate.com

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by | 13 August 2004 · 4:42 pm

UH Regents Discuss Evan S. Dobelle

Both major Honolulu dailies, the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser, published their reports from what the latter describes as “hundreds of pages of documents released yesterday by the University of Hawai’i, including personal e-mails, UH Foundation documents, travel itineraries and draft minutes from two key meetings of the UH Board of Regents.”

The Star-Bulletin focuses on the Regents’ loss of trust and ends with a list of key issues.

Minutes of meetings and documents that led to the firing of University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle show regents believed Dobelle misused a UH Foundation fund and lost the trust of the board because of his “lies.”

In a discussion in executive session before the vote to fire Dobelle on June 15, regents expressed their reasons why the then-president should be terminated, including allegedly using UH Foundation money for personal benefit, and a lack of leadership, follow-up and credibility.

Regent Walter Nunokawa said the board should have taken action last year, but “the Lingle appointees wanted to have a chance to work with the president and see if they could do better than we did with him.”

Board Vice Chairwoman Kitty Lagareta, who was appointed to the board last year by Gov. Linda Lingle, said she wanted to give Dobelle a chance. But, according to the minutes’ summary of her comments, “the bottom line for her is that the president is a liar — a habitual liar, and unfortunately a very credible liar.” …

According to the minutes, Deloitte & Touche auditor Gary Nishikawa told the regents that there was a “reimbursement frenzy” when the fund was audited. But he said it was not within the auditor’s scope of services to render an opinion or determine whether there was an intent to defraud the university.

Dobelle has said there was sloppy bookkeeping with the fund but no intent to take money….

KEY ISSUES IN THE FIRING OF UH PRESIDENT EVAN DOBELLE

Problem areas related to the Board of Regents’ June 15 firing of University of Hawaii President Evan Dobelle, according to documents released yesterday and cited by UH sources:

>> An audit report that shows $72,000 in undocumented expenses from Dobelle’s protocol fund managed by the UH Foundation.

>> Use of about $7,000 from a restricted donation for a video showing Dobelle receiving a Salesman of the Year award from Sales and Marketing Executives of Hawaii.

>> Use of university funds for flights to the mainland to interview for positions at other institutions.

>> Dobelle, a former mayor of Pittsfield, Mass., flew the sheriff of Pittsfield to Hawaii and put him up in a Waikiki hotel [not just any old Waikiki hotel, but the Halekulani, “the premier luxury hotel”!] at university expense. Dobelle told the regents he was recruiting the sheriff to work on an educational program, but administrators of the program said they never heard of him.

>> Dobelle also used university funds for air fare and hotel expenses for the men’s squash coach at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where Dobelle formerly was president, saying he was recruiting the coach, even though UH does not have a squash program.

>> Cost overruns for renovation of College Hill, the university president’s residence.

>> A $4,000 trip taken by Dobelle’s wife, Kit, to a conference in Massachusetts at her college alma mater.

Source: Associated Press [probably AP reporter Bruce Dunford; see this blog’s initial post on Dobelle].

The Advertiser leads off with alleged misuse of funds and ends with assessments from each member of the Board of Regents.

During some fund-raising trips on behalf of the University of Hawai’i in the past nine months, Evan Dobelle was job-hunting and undergoing personal job interviews, according to documents released by the university yesterday….

BOARD OF REGENTS ASSESSES DOBELLE

Highlights from the minutes of June 15, when regents fired Dobelle “for cause.” They later rescinded that decision:

Regent Myron A. Yamasato • “Regent Yamasato stated that since Dobelle has no solid support from any stakeholder group … his appointment should be terminated.”

Regent Walter Nunokawa • “Regent Nunokawa noted that after three years there is still no operational plan for the university, just a bunch of big ideas without priority or commitment attached to them. He noted it is particularly troubling, since he is one of the few regents who were on board when Dobelle was hired, to find that many side contracts were negotiated without the knowledge or oversight of the Board. Regent Nunokawa concluded that since there is no trust, and the feeling is unanimous that he has no integrity, there is no reason to continue his appointment.”

Chairwoman Patricia Lee • “In the areas of scholarship and academics, it is questionable whether he is fit to lead a Research 1 (One) University and whether he would have earned tenure on his own given his academic credentials. If the public knew what the board knows and if these things could be brought (to) light, the public would be outraged.”

Regent Charles Kawakami • “He stated that the president simply has no integrity and you cannot trust him so it is really impossible to work with him.”

Regent Kitty Lagareta • “Regent Lagareta also noted that she had been deeply troubled by President Dobelle’s inability to work effectively with women. She said that it was unbelievable when he told some male regents that things would be easier if he didn’t have to work with two women as chair and vice chair.”

Regent James J.C. Haynes II • “He said it is time to move on past Evan Dobelle because he is simply not good for the university.”

Regent Alvin A. Tanaka • “Given all the lies, threats, and problems with money, Regent Tanaka said that personally he would not stay on the board if President Dobelle continued.”

Regent Trent K. Kakuda • “Regent Kakuda said that he simply could not take another year of the president’s lies and deceptions to the board and to the public.”

Regent Byron W. Bender • “President Dobelle has demonstrated no leadership in dealing with problems, choosing rather to allow them to ‘fester’ and eventually land at the board’s doorstep. He has a problem with money and the board cannot allow it to continue.”

Regent Jane B. Tatibouet • “There is too much money being mismanaged and misused for his personal benefit rather than for the entire university.”

A related story is headlined How regents reached decision.

The meeting at which University of Hawai’i regents decided to fire President Evan Dobelle — a decision they later rescinded in a settlement agreement — began with advice from the board’s attorney and discussion of an audit of Dobelle’s spending, draft minutes of the session released yesterday show….

According to the draft minutes, “Lee said that she favors a graceful termination or resignation, but President Dobelle already stated publicly that we ‘can’t fire him’ and that the board will have to ‘buy him out.’

“She added that this may be the president’s final position, but that she has done some analysis and … the university could save about $1,386,000 even if the board did buy him out of his main contract and probably much more once the board does an assessment of all of his side agreements.”

She also said the university could save money with the departures of “his high-priced people, some of whom have already left,” the minutes show.

Finally, the Star-Bulletin includes a sad sidebar story by investigative reporter Rick Daysog headlined, Dobelle siphoned off donation for Jewish studies at UH: The donor asks that the money be restored to its original purpose.

Well, I guess I’ve finally figured out what Evan S. Dobelle’s middle initial stands for.

UPDATE: In the 18 August edition of Honolulu MidWeek, columnist Bob Jones reports on “What the Dobelle Report Left Out.” His sources say that after the Regents decided to fire Dobelle for cause on the advice of their special-hire attorney, Barry Marr, UH attorney [and the Democratic Party’s in-house watchdog] Walter Kirimitsu suggested that [long-time Democratic Party insider] Dobelle might sue the Regents individually, in which case it would be better to try mediation first.

The public also deserves some answers from former regent, chairwoman Lily Yao. The others gave her authority to work out and sign the Dobelle contract.

Why did she give Dobelle everything he wanted, including expedited (immediate) tenure? That’s not uncommon if a university is trying to hire someone who’s a world-class scholar, professor or researcher. Dobelle was a politician with no professorial background and a record of administration only at three very small colleges–never at a Carnegie I research institution such as the UH. Why did Yao toss in a private letter giving Dobelle extra insurance and a year’s paid sabbatical without telling all the other regents?

When the regents went into session on June 15, Evan Dobelle was going to be fired. There was no question of talking to him and trying to work things out. Too many were infuriated by a previous session in which they tell me he leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and I gave them his you-can’t-fire-me smile as they went on about what they saw as misuse of money, bad evaluations, bad management and missed meetings.

And he almost couldn’t be fired. Not one word in the contract allowed him to be fired for insubordination, failure to carry out the regents’ mandates or poor evaluations. He had been made virtually fire-proof by Lily Yao’s solo signature. The only question on June 15 as the regents talked with Marr over several hours was if they could stretch to a for-cause firing. Just plain firing, they agreed, didn’t cut it–mainly because of that tenure business. Marr said yes.

Good riddance. Dobelle was the last straw. I’ve lost whatever residual faith I once had in Hawai‘i’s Democratic Party.

UPDATE: In the 20 August 2004 edition of Pacific Business News, Howard Dicus explains “How Hawaii Works”:

To a journalist, Dobelle’s failure to deliver was the story. Something that isn’t surprising, isn’t news. “Family of Six Survives as Boiler Fails to Explode!” But the gap between Dobelle’s crackerjack billing and slacker performance? That was surprising. [Well, he did work for the State after all.] How could a former White House protocol officer be so bad at politics? [Well, it was the Carter White House.] How could a veteran of New England winters not learn to love slippas? [Well, he apparently didn’t spend all that much time in the Islands.]

By contrast, if the regents mishandled his firing, where’s the news in that? The regents are a committee. We all know how committees are.

Lewis Thomas once described the collective intellect of ants by saying that one ant is an idiot, two ants are the glimmering of an idea, but an entire anthill is a marvelous brain, “with little bits for its wits.”

Humans work the opposite way. One human can be an Einstein. Two humans thinking together are a compromise. Put five or six perfectly intelligent humans around a table and a camel begins to appear in the paddock. And so on, all the way up to the Board of Regents.

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by | 12 August 2004 · 7:54 pm

Republicans in Dallas, 1984

IT WAS in Dallas in 1984, at the Republican convention, that the idea of traveling in the American South, or Southeast, came to me. I had never been in the South before; and though Dallas was not part of the Southeast I later chose to travel in, I had a sufficiently strong sense there of a region quite distinct from New York and New England, which were essentially all that I knew of the United States….

It was mid-August, and hot. I liked the contrast on the downtown streets of bright light and the deep shadows of tall buildings, and the strange feel of another, more temperate climate that those shadows gave. One constantly played with contrasts like that. The tinted glass of the hotel room softened the glare of the hot sky: the true color of the sky, outside, was always a surprise. Air conditioning in hotels, cars, and the convention center made the heat, in one’s passages through it, stimulating.

The heat was a revelation. It made one think of the old days. Together with the great distances, it gave another idea of the lives of the early settlers. But now the very weather of the South had been made to work the other way. The heat that should have debilitated had been turned into a source of pleasure, a sensual excitement, an attraction: a political convention could be held in Dallas in the middle of August.

On the wall at the back of the podium in the convention center the flags of the states were laid flat, in alphabetical order. The flags of the older states were distinctive; they made me think of the British-colonial flag (and the British-given colonial motto, in Latin, from Virgil) I had known as a child in Trinidad. And for the first time it occurred to me that Trinidad, a former British colony (from 1797), and an agricultural slave colony (until 1833, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire), would have had more in common with the old slave states of the Southeast than with New England or the newer European-immigrant states of the North. That should have occurred to me a long time before, but it hadn’t. What I had heard as a child about the racial demeanor of the South had been too shocking. It had tainted the United States, and had made me close my mind to the South.

The convention center was very big. The eye could not take it all in at once. In that vast space the figures on the podium looked small. They could have been lost; but a big screen above them magnified their image, and scores of smaller screens all over the center repeated this living, filmed picture. It was hypnotic, that same face or gesture in close-up coming at one from so many angles. The aim might only have been communication and clarity; but no more grandiose statement could have been made about the primacy of men; nothing could have so attempted to stretch out the glory of the passing moment. And yet, almost as part of its political virtue, this convention dealt in piety and humility and heaven, and daily abased itself before God.

A famous local Baptist pastor spoke the final benediction. His church organization was prodigious; its property in downtown Dallas was said by the newspapers to be worth very many millions. His service, on the Sunday after the convention, was to a packed congregation. It was also being carried on television; and it was a full, costumed production, with music and singing. But the hellfire sermon might have come from a simpler, rougher time, when perhaps for five or six months of the year people had no escape from the heat, when travel was hard, when people lived narrowly in the communities into which they had been born, and life was given meaning only by absolute religious certainties.

I began to think of writing about the South. My first travel book–undertaken at the suggestion of Eric Williams, the first black prime minister of Trinidad–had been about some of the former slave colonies of the Caribbean and South America. I was twenty-eight then. It seemed to me fitting that my last [or, fortunately, latest] travel book–travel on a theme–should be about the old slave states of the American Southeast.

My thoughts–in Dallas, and then in New York, when I was planning the journey–were about the race issue. I didn’t know then that that issue would quickly work itself out during the journey, and that my subject would become that other South–of order and faith, and music and melancholy–which I didn’t know about, but of which I had been given an intimation in Dallas.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 23-25

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by | 11 August 2004 · 9:55 pm

"Everything happens in the church."

The church inside was as plain and neat as it was outside. It had newish blond hardwood pews and a fawn-colored carpet. At the end of the hall, on a dais, was the choir, with a pianist on either side. The men of the choir, in the back row, were in suits; the women and girls, in the three front rows, were in gold gowns. So that it was like a local and smaller version of what we had been seeing on the television in Hetty’s sitting room.

At the back of the choir, at the back of the girls in gold and the men in dark suits, was a large, oddly transparent-looking painting of the baptism of Christ: the water blue, the riverbanks green. The whiteness of Christ and the Baptist was a surprise. (As much a surprise as, the previous night, in the house of the old retired black teacher, the picture of Jesus Christ had been: a bearded figure, looking like General Custer in Little Big Man.) But perhaps the surprise or incongruity lay only in my eyes, the whiteness of Jesus being as much an iconographical element as the blueness of the gods in the Hindu pantheon, or the Indianness of the first Buddhist missionary, Daruma, in Japanese art.

The singing ended. It was time for “Reports, Announcements, and Recognition of Visitors.” The short black man in a dark suit who announced this–not the pastor–spoke the last word in an extraordinary way, breaking the word up into syllables and then, as though to extract the last bit of flavor from the word, giving a mighty stress to the final syllable, saying something like “vee-zee-TORRS.”

He spoke, and waited for declarations. One man got up and said he had come from Philadelphia; he had come back to see some of his family. Then Hetty stood up, in her flat blue hat and pink dress. She looked at us and then addressed the man in the dark suit. We were friends of her son, she said. He was outside somewhere. She explained Jimmy’s tieless and jacketless appearance, and asked forgiveness for it.

We got up then, I first, Jimmy after me, and announced ourselves as the man from Philadelphia had done. A pale woman in one of the front rows turned around and said to us that she too was from New York; she welcomed us as people from New York. It was like a binding together, I thought. And when, afterwards, the man in the dark suit spoke of brothers and sisters, the words seemed to have a more than formal meaning.

The brass basin for the collection was passed up and down the pews. (The figure for the previous week’s collection, a little over $350, was given in the order of service.) The pastor, a young man with a clear, educated voice, asked us to meditate on the miracle of Easter. To help us, he called on the choir.

The leader of the choir, a big woman, adjusted the microphone. And after this small, delicate gesture, there was passion. The hymn was “What About Me?” There was hand-clapping from the choir, and swaying. One man stood up in the congregation–he was in a brown suit–and he clapped and sang. A woman in white, with a white hat, got up and sang. So I began to feel the pleasures of the religious meeting: the pleasures of brotherhood, union, formality, ritual, clothes, music, all combining to create a possibility of ecstasy.

It was the formality–derived by these black people from so many sources–that was the surprise; and the idea of community.

Someone else in a suit got up and spoke to the congregation after the black man in the dark suit had spoken. “This is a great day,” the new speaker said. “This is the day the Lord rose. He rose for everybody.” There were constant subdued cries of “Amen!” from the congregation. The speaker said, “A lot of people better off than we are didn’t have this privilege.”

Finally the educated young pastor in his elegant gown with two red crosses spoke. “Jesus had to pray. We have to pray. Jesus had to cry. We have to cry…. God has been so good to us. He has given us a second chance.”

Torture and tears, luck and grief: these were the motifs of this religion, this binding, this consoling union–union the unexpected, moving idea to me. And, as in Muslim countries, I understood the power a preacher might have.

As Howard said afterwards, as he and Jimmy and I were walking back to the house, “Everything happens in the church.”

Amen.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 14-15

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by | 11 August 2004 · 5:31 pm

Football/Soccer Hooliganism in East Asia

The new, multilingual East Asian International Affairs group blog has a long post by Muninn‘s KMLawson on Reading the Asian Cup in greater historical and geographical context. It’s a long post, worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll just quote the last three paragraphs.

Survey results from an annual study done by Mitsubishi’s Research Institute’s China Handbook show that Japanese feelings of “intimacy” towards the Chinese people has been dropping almost every year since the 1978 signing of the Peace and Friendship Treaty, with a small boost around 1997 (the latest results I saw were from 2000, let me know if you have newer results). It is difficult to gauge exactly how important such data is, but it casts some doubt on the idea that Japan is the warm and fuzzy partner in the relationship. In the aftermath of the Asia Cup, when the Japanese media pointed to the anti-Japanese postings on the many online bulletin boards, the Japanese graduate student Iida Takeshi (飯田健) studying political science at the University of Texas wrote on his blog’s 8/9 entry, “Japan is just the same. If you go to Japanese bulletin boards, you’ll find plenty of postings that are discriminatory towards Koreans and Chinese.” Sean Curtin in an Asia Times article on the final game quotes a Yomiuri article as saying that “Chinese society condones insulting Japan.” This is again not much different in Japan, where those who insult China [or the U.S.] seem to have little difficulty in getting elected governor of Tokyo.

If we accept the idea that fans the world over generally believe that a soccer stadium is, as one Japanese graduate student I spoke to put it, “A place for us to make a ruckus” (我々が騒ぐ場所) and we don’t assume that Chinese soccer fans and hooligans represent the “character of the Chinese people,” then there is plenty of reason to believe that the future of Sino-Japanese relations is bright. In addition to a growing trade relationship and growing interaction between Japanese and Chinese as tourists, students, etc., there are two other developments. The Chinese government has significantly shifted its approach in diplomacy with Japan, and while this is still in a period of adjustment, it has already caught the attention of many scholars in China and Japan. Secondly, fewer Chinese believe it worth storming the Japanese embassy every time its Prime Minister decides to pay homage to war criminals, and the crowds have shrunk in size during recent visits. China’s foreign minister lodges a protest, as he did today in response to Koizumi’s pledge to continue his visits to Yasukuni. This is not to say that Chinese people or government have suddenly come to accept Japan’s misbehavior and the continued strength of nationalist right wing narratives of Japan’s last century. Instead, it is an indication that many Chinese believe there are more effective ways to address these issues.

The official responses to the Asia Cup crisis have wrapped up quietly. The Japanese government protested, and the Chinese ambassador responded with an expression of regret that some Chinese fans behaved irresponsibly. As many articles have pointed out, however, there are a number of issues that remain. Unfortunately, I suspect that the dominant trend in the Japanese media will be to continue highlighting Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment and any domestic crime committed by Chinese migrants, even as the Chinese media will continue to suggest that the Japanese government has never apologized for wartime atrocities, that Japanese textbooks all deny the country’s past aggression, and dangerously portray the outlandish historical claims of some Japanese as representative of the opinions of the people in Japan as a whole. Much of the tension in Sino-Japanese relations traces to the question of history, that is, how the past is portrayed. We should also note, however, that the gap in perceptions are not limited to the understanding of a war long past–but also for soccer games still only a hangover away.

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by | 10 August 2004 · 6:00 pm

Down Home: A Landscape of Small Ruins

Regular readers know I’m an avid fan of V.S. Naipaul, from whose book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples I’ve excerpted many passages on this blog. I thought it only fair to accompany Naipaul as he encounters some of the Christian peoples of a part of the world with which I’m more intimately familiar. So I’ve begun reading A Turn in the South (Vintage, 1989). And it does not disappoint.

The epigraph quotes the first two lines of the following reply by Warwick to his king in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part 2:

There is a history in all men’s lives,

Figuring the natures of the times deceased;

The which observed, a man may prophesy,

With a near aim, of the main chance of things

As yet not come to life, who in their seeds

And weak beginning lie intreasured.

That is certainly the goal of most of my reading these days. And the following passage rings true to me, an expatriate son of generations buried in family plots scattered over the landscape of Virginia. Naipaul’s opening chapter is entitled, “Down Home: A Landscape of Small Ruins.”

JIMMY WORKED in New York as a designer and lettering artist. Howard was his assistant. Jimmy, who could become depressed at times, said to Howard one day, “Howard, if I had to give up, and you couldn’t get another job, what would you do?” Howard, who was from the South, said, “I would go home to my mama.”

Jimmy was as struck by this as I was when Jimmy told me: that Howard had something neither Jimmy nor I had, a patch of the earth he thought of as home, absolutely his. And that was where–many months after I had heard this story–I thought I should begin this book about the South: with the home that Howard had….

Later [after arriving in Bowen/Peters, North Carolina], we went out for a drive. Hetty [Howard’s mama] knew the land well; she knew who owned what. It was like a chant from her, as we drove.

“Black people there, black people there, white people there. Black people, black people, white people, black people. All this side black people, all this side white people. White people, white people, black people, white people.”

Sometimes she said, “Black people used to own this land.” She didn’t like that–that black people had lost land because they had been slack or because of family disputes. But blacks and whites appeared here to live quite close to one another, and Hetty herself had no racial complaints. White people had been good to her, she said. But then she said that that might have been only because she liked people.

It was a landscape of small ruins. Houses and farmhouses and tobacco barns had simply been abandoned. The decay of each was individual, and they were all beautiful in the afternoon light. Some farmhouses had very wide eaves, going down low, the corrugated iron that once provided shelter now like a too-heavy weight, the corrugated-iron sheets sagging, fanning out in places.

We went to see the house, now abandoned, where Hetty’s father had lived when he had sharecropped for Mr. Smith. Bush grew right up against the open house. The pecan trees, still almost bare, just a few leaves now, were tall above the house and the tobacco barns. The colors were gray (tree trunks and weathered timber) and red (rusted corrugated iron) and green and the straw-gold of reeds. As we stood there Hetty told us of the death of her father in that house; the event was still vivid to her.

Another house, even more beautiful, was where Hetty and her husband had lived for ten years. It was a farmhouse with a big green field, with forest trees bounding the distance on every side.

Home was not for Howard just his mother’s house, the little green house that was now closed up, or the new concrete-block house she had moved to. Home was what we had seen. And we had seen only apart: all about these country roads, within a few miles, were houses and fields connected with various members of Howard’s family. It was a richer and more complicated past than I had imagined; and physically much more beautiful. The houses I was taken to were bigger than the houses many people in Trinidad or England might have lived in.

But, still, in the past there was that point where darkness fell, the historical darkness, even here, which was home….

TWO DAYS later, in New York (and just before I began my true Southern journey), I talked again with Howard, to make sure I had got certain things right. About the presence of Asians and Cubans and Mexicans he said, “I get very pro-American when I think about that.” And that pro-American attitude extended to foreign affairs, which were his special interest. So, starting from the small Southern black community of Bowen, Howard had become a conservative. He said, “I think that when you come out of a Southern Baptist background that is the groundwork of being a conservative.”

UPDATE: The Tanuki Ramble adds more on Naipaul, including the following passage from A Turn in the South, which the Tanuki read about a year ago.

That had been the great discovery so far in my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.

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by | 9 August 2004 · 6:44 pm

Nagasaki, Atomic Radiation, and Godzilla

Today, on the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan experienced yet another accident in a nuclear power plant, and I received academic junk mail about an exhibit in Lawrence, Kansas, entitled In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage.

Here’s an excerpt from an obituary of Godzilla creator Tanaka Tomoyuki (1910-1997).

Wakened from his deep-sea slumber by a series of careless H-bomb tests, Godzilla first took his Tokyo-destroying act to the big screen in an eponymously titled 1954 debut. Curiously, Tanaka’s original aim was not to glorify the wanton squishing of human beings and their abodes, but rather to illuminate the dangers of the atomic age. Godzilla, King of the Monsters was all about getting on a moral high horse and condemning the United States for its silly pummeling of helpless Pacific atolls with multimegaton packages. Funny thing was, audiences didn’t care one whit for the preaching. As we all discovered at around age 4 or 5, mind-numbing cinematic violence is a whole heck of a lot more entertaining than … well, than just about anything else. Tanaka, super genius that he was, picked up on this vibe like a pterodactyl stealing a stegosaurus egg. If the public–especially those American kiddie-matinee patrons eating their Red Vines and digging on the amateur dubbing jobs wanted mass destruction, then by golly! — that’s what they were going to get.

Meanwhile, Godzilla: The Uncut Japanese Original is making its U.S. debut.

You may think you’ve seen “Godzilla,” the monster flick that launched hundreds of campy sequels. But chances are, you saw “Godzilla: King of the Monsters!”

This American bowdlerization of the original 1954 Japanese version included reshot scenes with Raymond Burr, just so the movie could have an American character. It cut out some 40 minutes of material, completely changed the tone of the ending and dubbed the whole thing in English. It even superimposed Burr into existing scenes, so he would seem to interact with the Japanese characters. Reconstituted as a cheese-ball monster flick, it was a far cry from the initial vision: a sobering cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

To mark the movie’s 50th anniversary, a beautifully restruck print (with the unwieldy title: “Godzilla: The Uncut Japanese Original”) has been released for the first time in the United States. Here’s an opportunity to see the first — and a radically different — film (known as “Gojira” [like Gorilla–get it?]) in all its glory. It’s in Japanese with English subtitles. The images are crisp. The story is restored. And there’s no sign of Raymond Burr….

There are some campy elements left in the original. Some of the acting is ham-handed. Many of the big crowd scenes seem amusingly quaint…. But despite these moments, there’s a surprisingly powerful thrust to this film. And it’s instructive to recall the political era in which the movie was made. The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still recent memories. And in 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler had been fatally radiated by the fallout of a nuclear H-bomb test.

Thus, the notion of a sea monster that has been irradiated from atomic tests and is threatening to emerge from the sea is more than a cartoonish cheap thrill. It’s a very real metaphor for doomsday. Which is why, when a character in the restored “Godzilla” almost casually mentions that she’s a survivor of Nagasaki, it’s chilling.

The political messages in Godzilla sequels changed over time.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Japan was still suffering through its post-war comeuppance. In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan had been transformed into a technological and economic powerhouse. The new series of Godzilla movies, released through the 1990s, had to come up with a whole new series of rationales about why Japan deserved to be punished.

In the most overtly political film of the new series [in 1991], “Godzilla vs. King Gidorah,” White Guys from the future come back through time to “help” Japan by getting rid of Godzilla. However, the White Guys have a hidden agenda. You see, in the future, Japan’s economic might has grown so great that all the other nations of the world pale in comparison, and Japan dominates the Earth. The disgruntled White Guys get rid of Godzilla and replace him with King Gidorah (the three-headed dragon) whose purpose is to destroy Japan so that White Guys can take their place as the rightful owners of everything.

Oh, but wait, there’s more! We also learn the secret origin of Godzilla, who was once a surviving dinosaur on a Pacific Island, where he saved a garrison of Japanese soldiers from bloodthirsty American troops during World War II, then was subsequently exposed to the radiation which transformed him into Godzilla proper. So Godzilla is not only pro-Japan, he’s also anti-American.

Thank goodness Godzilla Matsui is now protecting New York–or at least the Bronx, while Little Matsui protects Queens.

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